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u/Smart-Ocelot-5759

Eth

u/elixir_knight

er

u/Spacesider

eum

u/FrenktheTank

3

u/_tchekov

3

u/TimbukNine

6

u/hanniabu

k

u/epic_trader

Future dollars

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Christmas is merry,

Blockchain goes well with cherry,

Speculate fairy.

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

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

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u/ProfStrangelove:

So yesterday I had some questions regarding Microstrategy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/Dreth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#Daily DevCon #23:

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

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

##Summary:

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

##Discussion Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Be wary of your choice in Crypto Exchanges.

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

Here’s some of the big ones:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/johnnydappeth

Ethereum

u/jaskidd05

$3333

u/FrenktheTank

0.0346

u/usesbinkvideo

93,062 hodlers subscribed (+4)

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You better watch out,

Another cycle will sprout,

You better not pout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

96% approval is really something special.

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

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

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

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u/hanniabu:

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

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

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

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u/Itur_ad_Astra:

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

And it’s a big fear of mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/NextLevelFantasy:

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

• Web 3 Public Goods Funding In 2025 W/ Vitalik

• DeepFunding.Org W/ Vitalik Buterin Pt.2

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

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u/doublyrobustlydouble:

Awesome stuff.

One thing that jumped out at me:

56:20 paraphrasing Vitalik:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/Adankairo:

#Daily DevCon #14:

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

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

##Summary:

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

##Discussion Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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u/haurog:

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

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

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

1. Permissionlessness

2. Distributed

3. Geo-economically decentralized

4. Neutral-builder efficient

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

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

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

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u/OyuruKemono:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/TimbukNine

$3917

u/UgotTrisomy21

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

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In it together,

Staking in any weather,

Birds of a feather.

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

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4k strikes back

Revenge of the 4k

4k reloaded

4k - the reckoning

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

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

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

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

TLDR: You are not bullish enough

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

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

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

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

2 - Enshrine the snarkification of ethereum within itself.

WTF is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preconfirmations

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

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

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

Regarding slot times:

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

Which trade-off?

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

With attester proposer separation, we can:

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

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

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

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

1. reorder transactions
2. insert transaction here and there to front run and back run

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

Bonus is that DA has network effects instead of becoming commoditized:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/haurog:

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

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

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

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

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

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u/austonst:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/Bergmannskase:

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

20% bump to 36M is considered safe.

Devs are actively working on a fix for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/lops21:

Nethermind and Erigon increasing default gas limit to 36M

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

Besu will be doing so soon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Daily DevCon #8:

Keynote: [title redacted]

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

Summary:

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

Discussion Questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s his main points from his article:

Ethereum is under increasing competition from all sides:

BTC is better money than ETH.

No it’s not.

Solana is a more performant smart contract platform.

No it’s not.

Celestia is a more performant rollup platform.

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

We need to acknowledge the following trends:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/_tchekov

$3895.99

u/FrenktheTank

0.0398

u/5quat

ETF flow ratio 0.56

u/usesbinkvideo

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

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Crypto forbidden,

Best cycle you have ridden,

Keep wallets hidden.

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

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

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

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

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

The catch…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we need to tell our story.

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

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

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

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Lighthouse v6.0.0 released today

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

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

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

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

Happy staking!

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

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

Here’s the grand idea.

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

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

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

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u/mj102500:

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

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

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

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u/Luukiemans:

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

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

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

Shoot the Bear You and embrace the Bull You!

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

You are all going to make it.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3069.78

u/TimbukNine

0.03478

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Looking for the stage,

The big news on the front page,

Consensus wastage.

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

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

The wait is over! 🙌

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

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

Thread by L2beat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one: 0x08f4ac69d791bbcb0cb9a88372da43dc11a4a26ea5fe49551e347b9a4428b400

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

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

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

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Things are now in motion that cannot be undone

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

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

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

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

But here’s where it gets even more interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Path dependence and balance of power matters

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

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

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

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

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Devcon & Friends Update 3 (Previous)

Devcon Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back at it tomorrow!

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

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

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

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

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

https://grapheneos.org/features

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

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

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

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

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Lodestar v1.23.0 released today

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

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

There are also some performance upgrades and fixes

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

Why am I telling you this? 2 reasons:

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

2) We REALLY need help with reporting trolls.

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

thanks all and big hugs

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2918.54

u/TimbukNine

0.03820

u/ridgerunners

The ticker is ETH

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Popularisers,

Eigen layer advisors,

Turn to despisers.

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

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

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

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

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

In the end, we must imagine ETH happy

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Get to know EVMavericks #9 - YieldDaddy aka EVM 833

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

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

When and how did you get into crypto?

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

How did you make your way into EVMavericks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Devcon & Friends Update 1 (Previous)

Edge City Lanna Week 1

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

First, the broad strokes.

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

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

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

Programming

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

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

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

My Experience

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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I wanna kickstart a fun discussion!

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

I’ll start:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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u/cryptOwOcurrency:

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

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

https://defillama.com/fees

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

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

Q’s:

1. Is this data accurate?

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

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

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

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u/growthepie_eth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

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

More info on surge.wtf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it… will? Or could?

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

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

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GG22 stats, end of round

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

https://gitcoin.co/grants-data

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u/johnnydappeth

Ethereum

u/benido2030

2501 USD

u/FrenktheTank

0.0361

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Blockchain underneath,

The best asset to bequeath,

The ticker is ETH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fairly significant US crypto tax rule change:

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

So each wallet is treated as a separate tax bucket

Also discussed here

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ticker is ETH.

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Top Achievements of EVMavericks in 2023

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

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

   Example

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

   We had a 3-way tie so all winners:

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Have grown DAO’s treasury:

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

Other notable events:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended First Steps

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

Curate Your Feed

Generally speaking my feed consists of three things:

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

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

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

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

Hands On Learning

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

Defi

1) Money markets such as Aave and Compound

2) Dexs such as Uniswap and Curve

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

4) Leverage such as Gearbox, Defisaver, or GMX

5) Options such as Lyra, Hegic

6) Real world asset protocols such as Centrifuge and Maker

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

Digital Identity

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

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

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

4) Achievements such as Rabbit Hole or Layer3

NFTs

1) Communities such as Bored Apes or EVMavericks

2) RWAs such as Get Protocol

3) Corporate NFTs such as Nike and Starbucks

Gaming

1) Auto battlers such as Axie Infinity and Illuvium Arena

2) Strategy games such as InfluenceETH and Illuvium Zero

Memecoins

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

Depin

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

2) Oracles such as Chainlink, UMA, and EOracle

3) Keepers such as Keeper Network and Gelato

4) Data availability such as EigenDA and Celestia

5) Compute sharing systems such as Golem and Spheron

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

Enterprise

1) Logistics systems such as Nightfall

2) Proof of Authority chains

Foundational Tech

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

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

3) Privacy Technology such as TEE, FHE, MPC

Review Prior Scams

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Devcon & Friends Intro and Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on iO, according to Vitalik:

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

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

Further reading on Wikipedia.

Math is crazy!

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

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum!

u/FrenktheTank

$2497.87

u/TimbukNine

0.03688

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Think before you act,

Onchain you are always tracked,

Government got hacked.

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I thought SOL was the ETH killer. Shouldn’t Kraken be building on Solana?

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Shout out to u/epic_trader for pushing back on the misinformation and false narratives on r/cc.

And a reminder for anyone with an interest in this space to take a look over there and in /ethereum periodically to provide some insights and sanity to discussions if you have any to spare.

There’s a lot of nonsense spread by Bitcoin maxis; /buttcoin moderators; and alt-L1 bagholders, and if you don’t want them controlling the narrative on Ethereum then you can be the change you want to see.

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u/OurNumber4:

Chinese researchers break RSA encryption with a quantum computer:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3562701/chinese-researchers-break-rsa-encryption-with-a-quantum-computer.html

And here’s why is not a problem:

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2612/difficulty-of-breaking-rsa-for-a-given-key-size

Credit: r/cc (sometimes there is decent info in the comments)

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u/haurog:

To give a bit of context.

They used D-Waves quantum annealer which normally are not called quantum computers as they use a different principle. Generally these quantum annealers can only solve a very narrow set of optimization problems. When people talk about cracking cryptography they always refer to proper quantum computers for which for example Shor’s algorithm has been developed. And to the best of my knowledge no one has a quantum computer to run Shor’s algorithm even for the smallest of RSA key lengths.

The Chinese group found a way to use such a quantum annealer optimization to help to factorize a 50 bit RSA integer. Nowadays RSA key length should be at least 2048 bits long and normally should be 4096 bits long. To the best of my knowledge, the longest RSA key that has been cracked a few years ago was 829 bits long. Classical computer are still far ahead.

As far as I see the paper itself has been published in a very niche journal which not really solidifies the credibility of their approach as the review process in many of these journals is severely lacking. Even more so than in established journals.

As far as I see the results are viewed negatively. See here for example for a more in depth discussion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2024/10/16/department-of-anti-hype-no-china-hasnt-broken-military-encryption-with-quantum-computers/

Do not get me wrong. Quantum computers are an important thing to keep in mind and follow. This result published by this group is just not very meaningful but it might be a small step in the direction we expect the quantum computing space to go. Not today, not tomorrow, but in a few years. Overall, the progress is slower than I expected it a few years ago, but we are definitely in the direction of quantum computers becoming a problem for encryption in our lifetime.

Source: I think a few years ago the majority of large quantum computing labs ran an qubit stabilization algorithm I helped develop in the company I was working at. Not sure how many actually used it, but most of them bought it. I left the company many years ago now, but still meet former colleagues and we chat about the development in this space.

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Do you guys think that there would be value in some sort of FUD busting Ethereum platform a bit like what EthHub used to be in 2018 - 2020 which we could use to combat things like the misinformation and link to in response to all of the blatant lies which gets spread on places like r/ethereum and Twitter?

I’m still unemployed after finishing my masters and I love learning more about Ethereum and helping to bust all of the FUD in other subreddits but I don’t know anything about making websites and then also finding a way to integrate the easy answers and information into places where it is needed like r/ethereum and Twitter. Maybe this could be a good project to spin out of EVMavericks. Anyway, I’d happily create content for such a place, a bit like more permanent posts like many dooters here make from time to time. A bit of an Ethereum FUD fighting handbook. I actually just did a grant ecosystem outline for EthStaker and I can tell you that there’s plenty of grant money up for grabs for legitimate projects.

So what do you guys think? Is such a thing needed? Does it already exist? And if it is needed and doesn’t already exist, could we spin something up out of this community?

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u/18boro:

I’m sorta following the discussions around the proposal on a minimum cost for blobs. Since this is currently not production ready, this will be implemented in pectra 2 at the earliest right?

Also, thoughts on this? It makes sense to me, but my technical understanding is very superficial. We really can’t afford blobs to enter a potentially high fee market, that will erode their purpose as a low fee environment on ethereum. That means we need to continue increasing blobs capacity, but with no minimum cost the L2s will continue to live free on ethereum.

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u/pa7x1:

One way to think about it. The current min blob fee is 1 Wei, this figure is as arbitrary as any other. It just happens to be the minimal denomination of ETH in the protocol. So it was a lazy choice, or maybe better put, a lack of explicit choice that happened to set the minimal blob price there. If the minimal denomination of ETH would have been higher, that same lazy choice would have resulted in a different minimal base fee.

A more sensible choice is to place it somewhere where blobs are still very cheap when used under capacity, so that the network incentivizes adoption. But when the network observes actual demand blob price discovery can happen in a reasonably short time frame. The EIP makes an attempt to do exactly this. And to be honest, the precise figure you set it at does not matter that much up to a few orders of magnitude up or down, because the exponential update of the blob fee can act relatively quickly.

So I’m in favor of the change. There is perhaps smarter things that can be done with the fee markets of blob and gas. There are some interesting proposals for using AMMs, PIDs, etc… I think those deserve to be explored too, but they are more complex and need to be very well understood economically. This EIP is just a very quick and risk-free fix to an obvious problem with the current blob pricing.

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Believe it or not, the blobs upgrade might be one of the bigger reasons why ETH isn’t doing much better price wise. I’m not sure if traders generally consider this a factor, though I would imagine they do given that ETH performed much better relative to BTC (as it had historically) between The Merge and the last upgrade.

Blobs have given the apparent impression that Ethereum is empty and with no activity. The L2 scaling roadmap allows for absolutely explosive activity on L2s, but it makes L1 seem deserted when that L2 activity isn’t saturating L1.

Is this bad? No, it’s fantastic, it is just a consequence of the upgrade and activity not exploding just yet, but this is an illusion. If you take a look at L2Beat in mid 2023 and today, the amount of new L2s is absolutely ridiculous. It seems like there’s more new L2s than new apps and it is insanely easy to underestimate the potential effects of this.

While everyone is looking at useless ratios like ETH/BTC or ETH/SOL, plenty of new projects are appearing to develop their own L2s. Ethereum is no longer just an ‘app chain’ it is a chain of chains. Pretty much what Polkadot or Cosmos set out to be, but in a more ‘open’ way so to speak. I don’t understand in full depth the implementation of app chains in these two other projects, but in Ethereum I know projects can have plenty of different configurations regarding where data is stored, where execution happens, etc etc. The appearance of macro-protocols like Eigenlayer is a clear telling that there’s money to be made in scaling Ethereum, and this is where I presume most of the investor liquidity coming to fund projects on Ethereum is going. I’d be worried when this stops, but not right now.

In some way, what has been built on Ethereum is the ability to have external anchored applications, chains or other products of this kind which benefit from inheriting some level of security from the base layer blockchain.

So who’s using this? Users I guess? Right now there may not be enough activity to justify the price increasing, as Ethereum being saturated in some way equates to ‘cash flows’. Right now, given that the future of Ethereum’s L2 and base layer explosive activity is ‘on pause’ as the upgrade just kicked in earlier this year, it is hard for investors estimate the value of those cash flows.

For BTC, the expectation that Bitcoin (the blockchain) will make any changes to itself in order to accomodate new featuresets is pretty much non-existent. On Ethereum, the fact that the base layer can be upgraded and changed allows for new concepts to emerge, for current concepts to be improved, etc. So Ethereum is inherently dependent on the combination of upgrades and activity improving its future cash flows (fees from on-chain activity). Right now, this is lackluster or inconsistent, so once this activity starts kicking in, which might depend or not on price, the consistency of those cash flows will be more visible.

Basically, It’s hard to justify investing large amounts of capital in a peer-to-peer network native currency when there’s not enough certainty about its future cash flows. Before the upgrade such a comparatively meaningless amount of activity would saturate the chain that future cash flows were ‘easier to expect’.

I think there’s several reasons why BTC is outperforming ETH this year:

1. Historically this is the pattern in bullish periods (BTC outperforms, then it doesn’t)
2. The BTC ETFs started trading earlier in the year, when the war in the middle east wasn’t at its absolute height of explosiveness, when the economy had a better outlook because the high interest rates hadn’t affected the US job market, the profitability of the carry trade etc, etc. There’s many macroeconomic reasons we can point out, but back in early 2024, things looked WAY better than now even when plenty of banks had collapsed the year prior due to high interest rates. They don’t look that bad now, but the outlook was very bleak during the summer.
3. The ETH ETFs were a complete uncertainty, now they’re a reality, but they started trading in quite literally the weakest moment in the market of this year.
4. Network activity on Ethereum has apparently subsided significantly (not really, but this is what it would seem like to the untrained eye, this is related to what I explained in the post)
5. BTC is simply more popular not only due to its brand name, that too, but very importantly because it is a very static, unchanging asset with very little medium-term uncertainty, akin to gold. Which is something investors like. ETH is more uncertain.
6. BTC seems to have no competition, ETH seems to have competition, even if it really doesn’t.

You’d really have to be really deep into the rabbit hole to understand the value of ETH and the Ethereum blockchain beyond the surface-level perspective an investor trading many many assets in a traditional sense would have. Many traders trade based on cash flows and certainty of cash flows, and Ethereum carries some uncertainty with it and is having a ‘weak’ year in terms of cash flows.

I won’t get into why SOL is outperforming ETH in any meaningful level of detail, but in short, from my perspective:

• the hype around memecoins (expectation of cash flows drives liquidity seeking returns in large numbers)
• the fact that it’s a smaller marketcap asset
• the price is lower and you can buy ‘a whole unit of it’
• there’s apparent activity on it
• it’s boosted by entities that want to pump the shit out of it to seek exit liquidity
• it has a lot of marketing due to the previous point
• it has provided extraordinary returns this year, so there’s expectation that this will keep on happening
• most of the supply is held by entities that don’t sell it (large stakers and node operators which additionally receive most of the inflation)
• etc etc

If anyone reads this wall of text pls correct me if you find any flaws in my reasoning. I hope it helps some have some perspective as to why I believe ETH’s performance this year has been lackluster comparatively to other assets.

Edit: small tweaks, typo fixes and corrected some term precision (I try not to use ETH and Ethereum interchangeably, as ETH is the asset and Ethereum is the network)

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Layer 2 Update - growthepie

Sorry I haven’t been as active lately IRL sometimes gets in the way but I’m back with a longer L2 update to try and cover everything I have missed.

• Layer 2s are growing so fast they have normalized All Time Highs
• Layer 2s have more value locked in ETH than Stablecoins
• Layer 2 Stablecoins have grown the equivalent of a small country’s GDP this year:
• Base Fees spiked to 20 cents largely due to PRIME
• Base Throughput continues to be raised weekly
• Layer 2 DeFi Transaction Count is on the rise
• Metis Active Addresses reach All Time High
• Optimism Transaction count on the rise
• Arbitrum seeing Gas Fee spikes for NFT usage
• Taiko Transaction Count makes a strong recovery putting them back in 2nd place
• Base multi-chain activity is trending downwards while others are increasing
• You can now compare onchain Economics on our Economics page
• Scroll hits a new all-time high on Transaction counts and Throughput (airdrop season)
• Layer 2 token transfers (the simplest of transactions) approaching a new all time high
• Weekly Active Addresses continue to remain strong
• Blobs have burned over 1,000 ETH - with Base having the highest ratio of blob costs for the year
• New report by Coinbase “Guide to Crypto Markets: Q4 2024” featuring Ethereum and Layer 2s favorably
• Mantle and Scroll TVL are both on the rise and battling to beat each other
• We continue to track more Layer 2s, adding Derive and Oderly with more to come
• Reminder if you need to find an address use our labels page search feature (we are adding Ethereum L1 soon too)
• Base on track to double the Throughput of the whole layer 2 ecosystem in less than a year
• We had some great Gitcoin rounds thanks to all that donated - small donations make a big difference
• growthepie is now active in onchain governance - currently for ZKsync, Arbitrum and Optimisum (more on the way) please consider delegating to us
• We have improved our zoom feature
• Layer 2 TVL measured in ETH is up only
• Blobs have seen spikes in the past but not so much in the past 90 days with us approaching the target is this going to change?
• Ethereum doesn’t have problems - Ethereum has improvements waiting to be implemented… Layer 2s are part of the solution
• Reminder to compare Layer 2s use our single chain pages and use the compare feature
• Over half of the Layer 2s we cover are “General Purpose” and they account for 97.9% of weekly active addresses
• Vitalik highlights Optimism in working on chain neutral Crosschain interfaces
• Layer 2s have used ~280 GB of blobs this year- Low L2 fees are less than a year old the space is young

Hit me up with any Layer 2 questions or observations and I will do my best to get back to you!

Side note we also released new Octant Funding Tracker metrics so be sure to check them out and get involved in the latest round (we are not participating as we missed out on getting selected but we are tracking all the amazing projects that got through)

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gm!

Scroll snapshot was on Saturday and I think the airdrop happens tomorrow. For the last two weeks we have been searching for a community delegate and u/defewit is willing to represent the us in the Scroll ecosystem, thank you for that! I think it’s been possible to set up a delegate profile since a few days, have you done that alreaady? If so, would you share it here, so we can link it tomorrow?

Also if there is a second delegate that would be beautiful. I think it’s always easier and better if there are two people that know each other (at least a little bit) to discuss things in private first, then post either on the governance forum or ask for feedback here. So any second member willing to do this, happy to share your profile tomorrow as well!

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Depending on how long you’ve been around, you may or may not know that I got popular in Ethereum by creating early video guides showing how to spin up validators on testnets.

Well, the ephemery testnet is very exciting to me, and on Thursday, 10/24, I’m planning to release a video guide showing how to create a validator on it.

Ephemery is a re-generating short-lived testnet designed for testing, especially for people who want to stake. The testnet resets every 28 days, and all of the unused Ether is recycled. (My current understanding is that if you’re running an active validator you can keep that 32 Ether in the new instance.)

EthStaker recently hosted a call with Ephemery developers and now I’m excited about sharing a video guide to help people get a validator running on it. it IS getting polished, but right now there’s still a fair barrier of experience to getting on it.

I think the most exciting thing for me is the opportunity to play slashing games without any fear of consequences. I hope you’ll join me :)

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EVMavericks Weekly Recap (October 14-20)

Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph

Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!

1. Octant’s Epoch 5 allocation window has started and runs till October 27th. If you have GLM staked, please support Doots and Aestus

2. Weekly Doots produces another episode of Doots - #83 - featuring James from Octant

3. Get to know our next EVMavericks - eleusys

4. Creators share: Ben Meadow’s first Gamma Print was displayed in Bali. Cyber Sea’s Deus Ex Machina was exhibited in museum in Amsterdam!

5. Luuk starts a discussion about biggest 2025 Ethereum related events in USA or nearby. So far we have:

   ETH Denver, from Feb 27 - Mar 2 (with Buidl Week Feb 23-26)

   Permissionless Probably October 2025

   Consensus (may 14- 16 2025) Toronto CANADA

6. Degen chat this week: animal pictures from Luuk’s trip, mentions of Vitalik and how he deals with memecoins, some charts & TA, new discord like site - townsxyz (yielddady created a server for EVMavericks), EFP and poaps, memes, food pictures and discussions, some memecoin alpha too & more!

7. Farmers are a little bit over the place but main focus has been on scroll.

8. Our memecoins warriors keep going. This is where we have the most money making alpha right now. Some of the top calls of the week

9. More bullish chatter from people in the #daily-discussion. Some TA & long form posts. Shoutout to Erowind for bringing top quality content there!

10. Also if anyone knows Spanish and wants to speak on our behalf and represent our community with NacionBankless then please ping 696!

Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here are a few guides!

• EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.

• Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord that’s open to public and there’s a decent amount of activity there!

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It is fascinating to me how many people, here and elsewhere, still haven’t realized that price and value are two separate concepts, only extremely loosely bound by the collective (un)intelligence of the market.

On the one hand, this means that poor price performance does not, and should not, imply anything about the fundamental value of something. Many r/ethwhinance posters make that mistake: they see Eth the asset performing badly compared to other (cherry-picked) assets on certain (cherry-picked) timelines, and feel the need to build a (counterfactual) narrative about how Ethereum the platform must therefore be falling behind on most fundamental metrics.

On the other hand, it means that even outstanding fundamental value does not guarantee anything about price performance on any particular timeline. Many bull posters here, myself included, have fallen into this trap: assuming that Ethereum’s stellar fundamentals mean we will see good price performance in the near/medium-term future. This is equally a logical misstep; the most innately valuable asset in the world can be sold for precisely $0 if nobody understands why it should be valued.

Arguments will be made about how the “markets are efficient” and that price and value should be tightly coupled, but I will emphatically suggest that at least in the realm of crypto, the markets and their participants have been and remain to this day, in overwhelming majority, catastrophically ignorant. This will change in time, but I’m increasingly realizing that this time will be measured in decades, not in months or years.

If you can avoid the trap of assuming a timely or intelligent linkage between price and value in either direction, you will save yourself needless hand-wringing, avoid getting your hopes up prematurely, and perhaps (if you are still in a position to be patient and stay informed) realize the opportunity this massive informational asymmetry still presents, years and years after we first started noticing it.

Probably the most fundamental assumption of investing (as opposed to gambling) is the proposition that eventually, over some arbitrarily long timeframe, markets do finally realize what’s up, and price does synchronize with value. And when that happens, those of us who didn’t give up on Ethereum because the ignorant markets were ignoring Ether, and yet who also didn’t let all the bull posts convince us to take unwise risks and were therefore able to stay in the game long-term - when that happens, we will be very, very happy.

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GG22 is live and the donation window is open for 2 weeks. Over $1.4M in matching funds so make sure your Passport.xyz score is updated. Enjoy the perpetual vibes in the 24/7 Let’s GROW Live twitter space and Gitcoin is hosting spaces as well.

Gitcoin Open Source Software Rounds

• Dev Tooling
• Web3 Infrastructure
• dApps and Apps
• Hackathon Alumni

Community Rounds

• Land Regenerators: Ma Earth Grants Round 2
• ENS Ecosystem
• BioFi Pathfinders
• Growing the Public Gardens
• Allo Builders Advancement
• Regen Citizens Genesis
• Youth in Need

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2619.12

u/hanniabu

0.03861

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Until next price hike,

Community stays dreamlike,

All around hitchhike.

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What happened, did the ETF get approved?

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u/benido2030:

Some thoughts about the unichain announcement. Now if that means fees go down, that’s obviously good. If that means that more value goes to L2s that probably also good, even if it fragments stuff in the beginning. In the end, that’s one more step towards onchain price discovery.

What I think is interesting is what this means for Max Resnicks thesis. Uniswap is like 40% of defi (and the other 40% being AAVE, 20% long tail) and if that moves to an L2, the whole “L1 is for defi” argument is kind of obsolete. I don’t think this is just a L1 fee decision, this is more control of the product (e.g. block times) and value capture. “Defi” just moved off L1. If I understand things correctly, AAVE v4 is also building towards that, they are just not building their own chain, but bridges between all L2 markets to create one bug liquidity pool.

There’s 2 more things we need, abstracting chains away for the user and fix fragmentation of liquidity. And then this whole discussion is hopefully over.

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u/hereimalive:

If Unichain is an Ethereum L2 why is it so bad that can tank the price of it?

You guys are making me afraid.

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I’m real tired of hearing that ETH is fucked because free blobs are temporarily affecting the burn, as though the burn is the only thing that drives the value of ETH.

Do any other cryptos even have a burn mechanism? Lmao. Guess everyone is fucked.

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u/cryptOwOcurrency started a great discussion yesterday around Bitcoin security budget with the question: When will it break? Let’s try to do some napkin maths:

Bitcoin paid $27m to miners yesterday. 97% of this was issuance. The marketcap secured by this is around $1.2T. On a relative basis that is 27/1.2= $22m of security per day for every Trillion USD Mcap.

In less than four years that will be $11m of security per day for every Trillion USD Mcap. $6m in 8 years.

At $6m per day that’s around $2.2b of economic security per year per Trillion. Industrial miners are generally looking to ROI in less than a year on their hardware investment, so let’s assume the cost of the hardware deployed to earn this $2.2b is around $2.2b. This 1 year ROI is also close to what is observed on the network today using the numbers estimated by Justin Drake in this tweet ($17.5 per TH/s): https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1763632918994260481

This gives an attacker a price of around $2.2b in hardware spent per Trillion USD in Bitcoin marketcap to achieve 51% of network power in 8 years time. Not taking into consideration the large economies of scale advantage an attacker would get. Coinglass currently shows a 24h BTC Puts options volume of around $1b at a current mcap of $1.2T so getting a short position that could capitalize on the attack seems very doable.

Even if Bitcoin’s price 10x’s within the next 8 years ($12T mcap) that would put the total price of attack at $26b. Around 80 individuals on the forbes list currently has this amount on their own. For nation states this is still peanuts. And could most likely be made profitable by any group amassing this amount of capital. At this mcap MicroStrategy’s holdings alone would be worth around 6x this amount.

Bitcoin in it’s current state will not be secure in 8 years. Markets are forward looking, I believe we’ll see serious infighting in 4 years.

The iceberg is straight ahead and the captain has left the ship.

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Let’s assume that ETH continues to crab indefinitely, while other crypto, bitcoin, stocks, and real estate keep climbing, and inflation means that everything not going up is losing value.

How many months/years/decades would you keep holding? Would you still be holding In December 2026 if the price is $2600? Would you still be holding in May 2029 if the price is $2400? What if it’s 2031 and ETH is ranked #4 or #5 on marketcap with Solana or Tron or Sui or Cardano (lol) being higher?

Staking has enough APY to keep me satisfied for now, and I still think there’s gonna be a bull eventually, but it’s been years since a proper bull run and it’s making me sad. Everything else in my (extremely ETH heavy) portfolio is outperforming. The price is low enough that I should be DCAing, since I’ve said before that this is what I do sub $2500, but for this month, I’ll just consider not selling my monthly staking proceeds as my “DCA”.

I do think election week and January are going to be very telling on crypto and Ethereum’s medium term price action, and I am going to have to reassess my long term plan after that. But I suspect I’m gonna be doing this holding thing for another couple of years.

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It would pretty bizarre for ETH to be in this range into 2030. It will either break up or down by then and considering the competition doesn’t stack up in a variety of ways I’m still betting on it breaking up. In TA terms we’ve really only been crabbing since March of this year. I know when we look at last cycles PA it’s like, “why haven’t we broken our ATH yet…” but it’s just ETHs beta being higher relative to BTC. We’re catching the downside volatility right now but later in this cycle I suspect it we’ll catch that beta with positive price action and vastly outperform by this time next year.

Last cycle ETH put in roughly 6,000% gains from cycle bottom to top. 1/10th of that price performance gets ETH to ~6k, 1/5th gets it to ~12k. I think even with diminishing returns things look bright for us. 1/5th isn’t even the limit, 1/3rd is even possible imo which would take ETH to ~20k.

Expecting 5 figure ETH is realistic this cycle.

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Im so fatigued of crypto stuff, that the last “farming” i did was to diversify my eth into different lrst.
Now that im only waiting for swell and diva/nectar im feeling glad its over so to speak.
I missed the OP #5 airdrop and will miss scroll and linea etc, just because i couldnt get myself to keep getting farmed.

After years in crypto and defi, there is currently built 2 things im using often as a non whale LP´er and ponzi yield farmer.

1.Sportsbetting has become competitive with the best bookies, and betting without middlemen from your wallet is amazing, shoutout to all teams working on this, in my experience SXbet ,Thales/Overtimemarkets.xyz, Azuro/bookmaker.xyz has everything i need as a casual bettor.

2.Gnosispay Visa card is next level awesome imo. Getting 4% cashback on my spending, and be able to just put € into my gnosissafe adress and spend is amazing.

(3,4) honorable *biased *mentions should be my heavy bags of SNX and WINR, SNX because they have started a work on renewing to hopefully be relevant in defi again after getting left behind in innovation and token price at all time low.
WINR because they seemingly try to take gambling completely onchain+ give users option to single side LP in the pools that are +EV for the house

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My wife, who is doing an online course on crypto (yes!), just asked my help in understanding the “Value-blindness” part of the following part of her studying material:

The 2014 Ethereum whitepaper by Vitalik Buterin, the founder, identified key limitations in Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities:

• Lack of Turing-completeness: Bitcoin’s scripting language is not Turing-complete, it can’t perform all possible computational operations.
• Value-blindness: Bitcoin scripts cannot natively assess the value of transactions.
• Lack of state: Bitcoin lacks a mechanism to track and store the state of complex applications.
• Blockchain-blindness: Bitcoin scripts have limited ability to interact with or understand blockchain data beyond simple transaction details.

Ethereum was designed to overcome these limitations and to address the need for creating new blockchains for different functionalities.

I told her I know some super-friendly people who’ll def help!

u/AL_FruFru

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Italy is increasing capital gains tax on crypto in particular from 26% to 42%.

https://www.theblock.co/post/321407/italy-capital-gains-tax-bitcoin

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https://x.com/0xShual/status/1846607303136423938

rip a lot of money

revoke all radiant contract addresses as a safety measure, ASAP

0xF4B1486DD74D07706052A33d31d7c0AAFD0659E1 arb
0xd50Cf00b6e600Dd036Ba8eF475677d816d6c4281 bsc
0x30798cFe2CCa822321ceed7e6085e633aAbC492F base

Radiant capital exploited a couple hours ago. Revoke your approvals on Arbitrum/Base/BSC if you are still in time.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2400.01

u/TimbukNine

0.03972

View on Reddit →

SEC turns cold,

Another story gets told,

The issuer won’t fold.

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You know what the ETH graph reminds me of? Definitely not a crab.

A Crab Market would be a stable unmoving price, progressing the graph in a flat line to the left. Maybe with equal up/down slow waves. But the current action is much more annoying.

Have you noticed snails exploring their surroundings using their eye tentacles? They slowly extend them, touch something, and then rapidly retract them back.

That’s what ETH does. Every time it slowly probes a few USD above its price, it rapidly withdraws back in fear. As if hit by electricity. Slow candle up, instant withdrawal back down. Especially funny in the one-minute chart, but it can be seen in all time-frames.

So I officially propose that we are in a Snail Market. 🐌

I might need sleep.

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For those who missed it or could not understand anything in the shaky videos that were available until just a few days ago, Vitaliks famous talk from Token2049 is now on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpOSqLjYb0o&list=PLvSllGeSAEeeFUUcy7kKk0VIs4YNDhspY

He is asking himself if we are still early and what he is excited about in the next 10 years. He thinks we are not early anymore, but we are still early for crypto being useful. He ties this into his experiences paying with crypto for daily necessities and why it failed originally. Hint, it was the fees and the overall user experience (UX). In the last years to UX improved massively due to EIP1559 and the the switch to POS. The recent dencun upgrade introduced blobs which dropped the fees to close to zero. Before all these improvements, the underlying technology was limiting what could be built on top and how successful it could become. These limitations are not the bottleneck anymore, but we still need a reason to actually use the applications built on crypto. He argues that the resilience and robustness of the underlying blockchain is what matters the most, but the UX on top needs to be good as well. Preserving the underlying advantages of the Ethereum network and being able to improve the UX for mainstream users should be the key goal. He sees a few places where there will be the most improvements in the next years.

• Wallet tradeoffs and how multisigs, guardians and the combination with zkproofs have or will improve that space. This allows web2 UX with web3 robustness.

• Social media where you actually own the account (warpcast).

• Payment wallets which are getting close to venmo experience.

• Privacy pools were you can proof to not be the bad guy without revealing who you are. This exists in an early version at least.

• Zk proofs in social media will make it possible to proof that you fullfill certain criterias without revealing who you are.

• L1 improvements: Single slot finality, verkle trees (statelessness), handling MEV on the protocol level, ZK snarkifying the L1 and light clients

These improvements will allow Ethereum to thread the needle and become mainstream user friendly while staying true to the underlying cypherpunk values which built the network.

But enough beating around the bush. The only reason this talk has become famous is Vitaliks singing session in the middle of it. Here they are together with the original songs. Especially the second song took my some time to find a source.

Laputa ending song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdpEnkcT7Io Vitaliks interpretation: https://youtu.be/JpOSqLjYb0o?feature=shared&t=678

Kryp Tina song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrSP0V-KLg Vitaliks rendition: https://youtu.be/JpOSqLjYb0o?feature=shared&t=829

I am happy that Vitalik did not become a singer, but I am even more happy he is as quirky as he is.

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I’m confident the Scroll airdrop snapshot was already taken.

Why, you ask? Simple: for the past few months, I’ve been toying with a small dapp idea. A collaborative story where everyone writes together and mints NFTs by writing. I’m enthralled by the concept, and I figure I could lure some of you fine gentlemen into my lair by alluding, not so subtly, that any sort of activity on Scroll could help qualify for a big fat airdrop.

But then, something terrible happened. You see, I started using AI. Claude Sonnet 3.5 specifically.

As someone who’s not a coder, the whole process of building anything with code usually goes like:

• have a good time writing actual code for a couple hours

• then hit a roadblock on something arcane related to programming

• then be forced into the most tedious websearch adventure for a solution to this problem

And those roadblocks happen dozens of times.

None of that anymore. Claude is always there to give an answer, always available to suggest something. We talk it out and eventually figure out the thing. The good lad never gets tired of my walls of text.

This is the terrible part. I started Having Fun.

And when you enjoy the process, you start spending more time refining everything to your liking.

It went on and on and what do you know, now we’re in October. Rumors abound TGE is soon. Scroll 1 year anniversary is coming up in mid October. Hints everywhere the eye can see.

Instead of coming to you all with a cheeky smile and an airdrop nudge nudge wink wink, I am here hat in hand, on my knees, humbly begging for scraps of your attention.

Please, kind sir, may you take a look at my dapp?

It’s a good dapp. I promise. Maybe.

I wrote some about what it actually is here: Blog Link

Frontend Link

In all seriousness, I find it incredible just how far you can get with AI. I didn’t write any code here. All it takes is a bit of persistence. We’re moving fast into a world where everyone can make their own toys exactly to their liking by chatting up a virtual assistant. If you have ideas you want to see happen and time to spend, there’s very little to stop you.

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Financially for node operators it is a great product. Lido tries everything to get people on board. If you are on their early adoption whitelist they even allow for a lower bond for the first share, increasing the rewards even further. As far as I see pretty much anyone running a node anywhere is on the list (20k-30k) addresses. They also are present pretty much everywhere to advertise the start of the CSM. As far as I see they limit the shares to 12 for each node operator, which means even under the most optimistic assumptions the amount of ETH the solo node operators will handle will be at most be in the single digit percentage of the whole validators Lido has. It is a good development, but will not change the validator distribution setup within Lido to any meaningful degree.

On a more personal opinion I try to stay as far away as possible from Lido as they have a massive war chest and a lot of influential people on their pay roll. They can undercut the competition for very long to make sure none other staking solution survives. Their initial plan of cross-subsidicing the CSM with revenue from their more centralized staking business was a pretty direct attack on the current solo staker landscape. Not sure of they changed this though. Their history of gaslighting the solo staker community and claiming them to be ‘irrational actors’ massively soured my opinion. They way they plan to centralize the Ethereum staking under their umbrella and even calling it decentralized, does not help in making me more sympathetic towards them. In the long run I think they are a massive problem for the Ethereum network and I really hope we can keep them from taking over the staking layer.

The sad reality is that there is very little decentralized competition. Rocketpool still is the only properly decentralized solution. They are much smaller, they are in the middle of a year long change in how much bond their stakers need. In a few weeks we might see the first rocketpool minipool without the need to stake RPL. They just have the first one running on testnet (as of 3 hours ago). I have great hopes that this will be competitive in the long run, but as always with rocketpool it will take some time. An interesting project is Nodeset which is planned to launch soon will be interesting to watch, it is built atop of rocketpool and adds a very soft kyc layer for node operators. Bonds are lower than with rocketpool and no RPL is needed. Another project called Diva which was all the rage last summer (2023) still does not have a fully functioning prototype. Their testnet stopped accepting new node operators after they found some bugs. We will see what will come out of it in months to come. Puffer might be interesting as well, but to be honest I have no idea about the details.

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October is my crypto anniversary month, I thought I would mark it by sharing my ETH journey story with fellow ethfinanciers. At least it is something to read in the low comment weekend.

In October 2013, I bought my first Bitcoin, on the advice of my millennial son, who explained blockchain basics and suggested that BTC’s value–about $170 at the time–could go up. After a mini- DCA spree for a year, I got busy with work and stopped paying attention until October 2016 when I read somewhere about ethereum and smart contracts. I thought that was pretty cool. I went on to get my first ETH in 2016, first ledger in 2017, and as prices rose, I cashed out my original fiat investment.

Unfortunately in 2017-2018 a slower work period gave me too much free time so I started trading a bunch with the remaining house money. For a while I got into Vechain and LINK, though fortunately I kept a majority of my portfolio in ETH and BTC. After painful IRS interactions and a desire for simplicity, I decided to abandon all frills and reduced down to just BTC and ETH by 2021.

I went on to launch my first RP minipool (through Allnodes) in late 2021 but sold my RPL and further simplified to vanilla staking last year. I periodically toy with the idea of home staking (and even got an early Proteus to do so), but my frequent travels and lack of confidence have kept me from it so far.

I am in the minority of ethfinanciers who have already achieved retirement the old-fashioned way. My stage in life gives me a different perspective on holding and exiting, and my ETH goal is not to get life-changing money, but rather to be a supporter of this important new technology, to keep my brain active by following its evolution, to use staking income to upgrade my retirement life, and to safely pass a valuable asset on to my grandkids as a hedge against the uncertain world they are growing into.

I discovered r/ethfinance in late 2021 and have truly enjoyed learning from all of you. I am pretty sure I have read and upvoted >95% of the dailies. I mostly lurk but I am proud of my EVM lion and few doots (though no one IRL knows about any of that!). I greatly appreciate the effective moderation and community spirit of volunteerism. For me, this sub also is where I got introduced to the linguistics of social media. So I thank all of you for what you have contributed to my education! I was really hoping to go to Hodlercon this year but I have a hard schedule conflict, so maybe 2026…

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My normie-friendly TikTok influencer account is getting lots of traction recently, as my subscribers count breached 2200 (I am catering to 8 millions French Canadians, so it’s a decent following in my niche market). It’s an education, not monetized, no-shilling-allowed account.

I have learned a few lessons since January, when I launched it.

First : simplicity is king. If your narrative can’t be explained in a single, easy to understand sentence, it won’t catch up. This is why I am skeptical of things like “triple points asset”, “programmable money” and “digital bond”.

What is sticking is : “Ethereum is a decentralized AppStore that anybody can use or deploy on, and you need to pay in ether to use it.”

Maybe it’s not technicaly accurate, but this is what people understand.

Second : most people see crypto as a way to get rich, not as a technology. This explains the bottoming ratio : in their eyes, Ethereum is the second cryptocurrency. People like to bet on champions, not on runner-ups. The Flippening is a nice meme, and I would love to see it happen, but realisticaly, it won’t ever happen.

Third : a lot of people are still interested in this space. It will take time, probably a few years, but we will have another mania phase.

That being said, I am trying very hard to teach people about the non-speculative parts of crypto, namely decentralized social media and digital artworks. They don’t care, but I am still trying.

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u/eth2353:

There’s been some discussion about the hardware and network requirements for Ethereum validators. Obviously maximum decentralization is the goal, but at the same time Ethereum can’t scale if we want to let everyone with a Raspberry Pi and a 1Mbps internet connection (exaggerating here) participate. I believe the discussion was initially triggered by someone who missed their block proposal, likely due to not having enough upload bandwidth.

The issue is, noone has defined where the line is - what are the minimum requirements that still allow you to fully participate in validation of the chain as well as proposing blocks, and what should they be into the future.

The current outcomes of this discussion:

• a survey in r/ethstaker among home stakers to get a better picture of what hardware and network current stakers have available to them.

• Toni from the EF put together some numbers on local block building and the effects that blobs have had on it.

• https://github.com/ethereum/execution-apis/pull/559 - a new API endpoint engine_getBlobsV1 that will help local block building since the proposer won’t necessarily have to publish the blobs too. Attesters to the block can simply get the blobs from their own EL client’s blob pool if the proposer doesn’t manage to publish them quickly enough.

All of this discussion is pretty relevant right now since there’s been talks of increasing the blob count in the upcoming Pectra fork(s). It’s important to note this would be in combination with EIP-7623 which greatly decreases the worst-case size of a block.

I personally feel that a slight increase (as suggested in the linked comment) would be okay provided the teams also manage to ship the new engine_getBlobsV1 API endpoint. Good news is, Reth and Besu already support it, Geth has a PR open and Nethermind has a PR merged and I believe it should not be hard for other EL clients to add.

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u/supephiz:

If this were just about building the robust and decentralized smart contract platform we’d be sailing, but the inclusion of a financial reward means that other projects want a piece of the pie. Other projects aren’t able to match Ethereum on technical grounds, so they chip away at our social infrastructure, planting seeds of doubt and conflict with the knowledge that a small percent of Ethereum participants will shed away looking for other projects that might be a “more lucrative investment”.

I think the best route here is for us to continue decentralizing by onboarding people who are looking for investments in smart contract platforms, I imagine that over time it’ll continue to look like “if you can’t beat them, join them” with Ethereum being the victor.

People who have been around a long time might realize that, while the attacks are changing in nature, they seem to be less of an existential threat and more of an annoyance every day.

If I were to characterize these threats, I’d say that threat actors used to attack head on, but now they feel like they’re working for clout inside the ecosystem and likely even working within Ethereum while getting funded by adversarial enterprise.

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Looking for feedback

Since my app Boasty didn’t see any usage or traction, I decided to stop building features and leave it as is. It remains fully functional and you can still schedule posts on Ethereum. It was a great learning experience.

I thought about the “Pay 1 USDC to do X” hook and came up with a game concept: A prize pool (smart contract) is seeded every day with say 10 or 100 USDC, you play a browser 2D shooter game, and you can submit your high score for a chance to win the whole thing. High scores would be hidden until reveal, then whoever has the highest score gets the payout automatically via smart contract.

So i built etherglide.net, a PoC of a futuristic 2D space shooter with cyberpunk styling and lore. Game features:

• Use WASD to move Zephyr to avoid obstacles and collect powerups
• Left mouse click to shoot projectiles and destroy enemy crafts for extra points
• Collect ETH to recharge your ammo
• Collect a speed powerup for a 10 second speed boost
• The game increases difficulty by increasing the maximum speed and number of obstacles
• Connect your wallet and sign a message to submit a high score to the leaderboard
• Game music and cool pew pew pew sounds!

I am looking for feedback for the concept and game itself. Currently working on the smart contract and more game features (boss fights and gravity mechanics), but wanted to test the waters before sinking too much time into it. Please try it and let me know what you think!

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####Why not Full Reserve Banking?

I was thinking about what would happen if countries switched over to full reserve banking. What would the effects be?

Currently, there isn’t a single country that does full-reserve banking. It would greatly contract the economy, and most global companies, VC funding, and innovation would move elsewhere where they can get cheaper loans. It’s self-sacrificing idea.

Historically, every country has been on a fractional reserve system since banks and loans existed. Banks can lend out a portion of their customer’s deposits to use towards other people’s loans. If too many loans defaulted or there were a bank run, the bank would close. Centralized reserves were then invented to handle mass bank runs during times of panic. And overall, strong central banks, when combined with the power to expand money supply, have been extremely successful in preventing mass bank runs. Keep in mind that strong central banks did not exist in the US before the 1940s.

While depressions were extremely common and occurred about every 30 years post-feudalism and before central banks could expand money supply, there hasn’t been one since central banks gained that power after the 1930s.

The Silver Standard, Gold Standard, Brent-Wood system, and Fiat systems all used fractional reserve banking. Of those systems, only fiat system could handle nation-wide full reserve banking. The other systems would all fail if the economy grew or contracted because it would not be possible to expand and contract money supply under both a full reserve system and a commodity standard.

What would happen to banks under full reserve?

• Banks would stop loaning because they can no longer use customer deposits like checkings/savings/CDs for loans
• Banks would would charge small fees for checkings/savings accounts.
• Many bank locations would close down, and banks would go online
• The central bank reserve would no longer be needed and can safely close. Or maybe it’s still needed to bail out the separate loan industry …

Where would loans go?

• Loans would simply move from banks to peer-to-peer lending industries like Prosper and Funding Circle
• Loan intererest rates would shoot up another 5-10%, and mortgages would become even less affordable
• Homes would be less of an investment and more of an ongoing cost (like they are in Japan)
• There would be a lot more buying expensive things without loans
• Overall, the economy would shrink maybe 50-90%, and domestic investments in general would plummet
• Many companies would move abroad to other countries where they can get cheap loans
• VC and innovation would move abroad to other countries.
• Many loans would move abroad to other countries that are still under partial-reserve systems
• Any country that goes full reserve would fall behind other countries.

What happens during a financial crisis when people aren’t able to pay back loans?

• Banks would be perfectly fine since they’re no longer involved
• The loan industry would collapse or fall back to their insurers. Many lenders would default.
• The government may decide to create a central reserve to insure loan agencies
• The government may bail out loan agencies and insurers that are too big to fail. Or maybe they won’t and just be ok with letting a section of the economy collapse.
• Anyone who doesn’t lend or get loans would be mostly fine and unaffected.
• The financial crisis would be smaller than under partial-reserve

Overall, switching from partial-reserve to full-reserve just migrates failures from banks to the loan industry and causes interest rates to shoot up because customer deposits can’t be used. It doesn’t prevent systemic failures, but it does make them much smaller. The overall economy will also be much smaller.

Consider China’s Evergrande and housing collapse, which is a lot closer to a full-reserve collapse since many Chinese homeowners buy houses in cash. China just let those companies fail and those homeowners lose their deposits. The economy contracted greatly. Some municipals were to close to unrest and insurrection, but because China has a strong government, local governments were able to suppress protests. Overall, the damage was limited.

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The next section of my Rabbit Hole Explorer’s Guide is all about crypto etiquette.

Your Crypto is Private

If you go to stock trading forums you’ll frequently find people posting pictures of their brokerage account positions showing they either made or lost incredible amounts of money. Reputable crypto forums prohibit that for your safety. The blockchain is public unencrypted information. When you post precise positions and trade times you reveal your address to anyone looking. If I know your address I know not only your current net worth but everything you do in the future. You probably aren’t intending to forfeit your financial privacy forever; it makes you a target. It enables more credible spear-phishing and tells the attacker whether you have enough funds to be worth their time. Generally speaking, just keep your crypto dealings private or at least relatively anonymous, especially online.

This is true among friends and family for different reasons. There will come a point in your learning where you discover something exciting in this rabbit hole, the whole thing clicks for you, and you become enthusiastic and want to share this with everyone around you. People around you then think you’ve joined a cult. It’s more than a stereotype; I’ve seen it many times. Even outside of crypto it’s usually recommended to avoid mixing business and pleasure. If someone listens to you and makes money they are rarely going to be grateful to you personally. If they listen and lose money you can easily damage relationships. So don’t go shilling your favorite memecoin at your next holiday party with friends and family. As an investment of your energy it just doesn’t provide a very good risk adjusted return.

In general, while I encourage everyone to talk about what blockchains can do and the benefits they bring, don’t talk your bags. It’s one thing to have an conversation about money being a social construct or the outrageous quicks of the banking system. It’s quite another to go around making grandiose claims you don’t have the means to back up in the moment while telling everyone to buy whatever coin/token you’re currently obsessed with. Don’t be that annoying guy. If you absolutely can’t resist or are obligated to answer because someone directly asks you I recommend you approach the topic like this guy. Your first objective is to dispel misconceptions and ask confounding questions that lead to thought experiments that the person might actually benefit from. Be Socratic. In my experience, the moment a listener perceives even an inkling of self-interest in the topic you will just be another scammer to them. Don’t talk your bags, your crypto is private.

Real Help Will Be Public

Given how overwhelmed you might feel at times when exploring something new it’s natural that you want to reach out and ask for help. If you do this in web3 on Discord, Twitter, or Reddit in most places the people who will respond to you, especially in DMs, are scammers. Your transaction failed trying to claim funds on whatever.finance? The scammers just see this guy. They can just smell the fresh blood. It’s literally their job hunt people like you. Legit people never DM you first. They’d rather answer your question in public so the response is indexed for the next people who search.

If a DM is necessary they will tell you to DM them. Scammers can easily impersonate legit people on social media. If you’re on Discord, they can DM you despite not even being on the server you’re asking for help from and therefore they are out of reach of the moderators of that protocol. They can use the same image and public alias as the legit person you are talking to. If you’re on Twitter they can use a subtly different name but have the same profile picture and pay $10 to have a blue checkmark next to their name. You’ll sometimes get two or three different accounts messaging you telling you similar things to make the answer look more credible. The differences are easy to miss, you are frustrated even before they reach you and are willing to try something new to fix the problem, and they’ll be readily available and eager to “help” you.

Nothing good will come from their help. They’ll try to send you to their help server to file a ticket. They’ll try to get you to install some custom wallet into your browser. They’ll send you to a website that asks for your private key. They’ll tell you there’s some manual workaround they will do for you if you just send your ERC-20 to their treasury address. These are all obvious red flags but before you even get there the first red flag is you are using DMs at all. Whenever someone reaches out to you first with any type of directions, it’s a red flag. Real help will be public.

Be Careful Who You Trust

Learning in this ecosystem can be frustrating at times. Everywhere you go everyone seems to know more than you about everything from macro economics, to how to read a chart and tell the future, an entire sailors dictionary of jargon from tradfi, to technical specifications of networks that you need a computer science degree to understand. It can all feel frustratingly out of reach but I’ll let you in on a secret: most people worth listening to are capable of explaining things in simple enough terms that you can understand it. If you are on their platform and they have all the space and time they need to explain something well yet they aren’t making the effort to explain it so you can understand it it could be their goal isn’t to be understood by you but rather to sound credible and confident so that you buy whatever they are selling. If you stumble into a conversation between two names that have a lot of followers and they are talking way above your head, you are not yet at a place where it’s worth reading whatever that is. If you’re outmatched to the degree that you aren’t prepared to sus out bullshit you shouldn’t be considering buying whatever anyone there is selling.

Generally speaking, your favorite crypto influencer is using you as exit liquidity. If you aren’t paying for a product, you are the product. If you can’t figure out how they are monetizing your attention, you can still be certain they are. They are monetizing your attention in every way they can. They are getting paid for ad space. They are executing trades before you can so you’re always buying at a higher price and selling at a lower price than them if you follow their moves. They need engagement numbers to raise more money from VCs and they need to sustain their token price to keep attention on their project. For all of the above, they need to retain your attention and they will use every cognitive bias at their disposal to do so. People often mistake confidence for aptitude. The loudest voices are those with the strongest incentives not those with the truth. But I will tell you this lesson from cycles past: the most boisterous sounding voices in the crowd have a storied history of imploding a year after you’ll first discover them. Be careful who you trust.

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A common framework I like to use to think about my investments [rightly, or wrongly, please feel free to critque].

Cash: cash is cash. The dollar is continuously being weakened, but it’s important to have cash as a buffer/layer of safety or to buy large dips. [3-5% Yield]

Stocks: The stock market has been absolutely ripping over the last decade. Important to DCA into stocks on a regular basis, but it’s never going to give you insane upside unless you pick a winner like Nvidia or Tesla and average in over a long period. [8-12% Yield]

Real Estate: Very manual, illiquid, challenging, costly, & time consuming investment [I have 9 rental properties]. Very difficult to scale and each house project takes at least 3 months min. [5-10% Yield annually]

ETH: Extremely volatile, nascent technology that has the potential to be the internet of value. Has loads of headwinds [regulatory, challengers, technological, financial] against it. Also has some of the smartest developers in the world working on it, and is at the bleeding edge of software.

Asking this to you all seriously, but if you have your bases covered with Cash, Retirement or Stocks-401K/Roth/IRA, Brokerage etc.., Real Estate, where else do you have the same amount of upside potential as ETH beyond an individual Tech stock like whatever the next Nvidia will be?

I don’t see anywhere else I can allocate my dollars that has the upside potential of ETH? Am I missing something?

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Relevant to lots of crypto (and tech) websites and generally for safety around them, given that this political event will probably force a change on a lot of domain names. In short, the .io TLD will disappear.

Relevant excerpt from this article explaining it:

Since 1968, the UK and U.S have operated a major military base on the Chagos Islands (officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory) , but the neighboring nation of Mauritius has always disputed British sovereignty over them. The Mauritian government has long argued that the British illegally retained control when Mauritius gained independence. It has taken over 50 years, but that dispute has finally been resolved. In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once IO is removed, the IANA will refuse to allow any new registrations with a .io domain. It will also automatically begin the process of retiring existing ones. (There is no official count of the number of extant .io domains.)

Officially, .io—and countless websites—will disappear. At a time when domains can go for millions of dollars, it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

However, note that some exceptions to the rules have been made for other commercially successful TLDs (source):

With the United Kingdom giving up sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius[17] (but maintaining the military base on Diego Garcia via an initial 99 year lease), it is possible under IANA rules, the .io domain will eventually have to be phased out within the following several years,[18][19] although historically, some exceptions been granted, as was the case for .su.

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u/alexiskef

✨E✨t✨h✨e✨r✨e✨u✨m✨

u/FrenktheTank

$2380.07

u/ridgerunners

0.03893

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Walking in the dark,

Absence of knowledge was stark,

Computing proof benchmark.

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A little market lingo for noobs, when a pump falls back a little bit after sustained upward movement, it’s called a “correction”

When it falls back completely then dumps even further from where it started, it’s called “ethereum”

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Just wanted to share this cool dashboard showing the onchain activities of Optimism citizens/badge holders (of which there are quite a few in here):

https://dune.com/lamora/optimism-citizens

It shows a comparison with a control group of normal Optimism users, with metrics such as participation in other DAOs, usage of OP stack chains and web3 social media.

The biggest difference seems to be in adoption of Farcaster, with 59% of badgeholders using it compared to about 12% of regular users. It also really shows how much more popular Farcaster is than Lens, which is only used by about 11.4% of badgeholders (and less than 8% of regular users).

I’d be interested to see crossover metrics with those used for the EVMaverick Resume (https://dune.com/mtitus6/EVMavericks-Resume) such as the number of stakers, wallet age etc, and vis versa, showing EVM participation in other DAOs etc.

In fact, I wonder how many OP Citizens also hold an EVMav? It feels pretty stupid that I’ve been in crypto so long and never bothered to learn to use Dune, maybe that will be my project for the weekend…

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Ethereum mainnet gas at 23 Gwei right now.

Not in a bullrun, not in a mania phase. During a truly boring period.

While L2s scale us 23x. While active addresses are at an ATH of 10 million a week.

The market clearly doesn’t see it yet but here’s what will happen within a few months:

After years of underperformance, ether sees a sudden correction. Narratives immediately follow price action. Enthusiasm returns. Euphoria follows. Influencers on all sides start to pretend they all saw it coming. It was obvious. Activity skyrockets. L1 burn brings deflation back. L2 activity keeps growing, faster and faster. Millions of new users join the L2s. Blob usage reach max value. More users. Price discovery begins. Blobs start contributing to the burn. New L2s appear faster than you can follow. More institutional L2s. Blackrock L2. Stock market on L2. More users. Soon, L2 activity is higher than we can accommodate.

Ether price explodes.

Getting into eth action is 100x easier than last bullrun. People buy using paypal. People buy using debit card on Metamask. Coinbase sends their flux of new users to Base. More users. Ethereum starts to become a staple of reliability brands use in commercials. Institutions start to notice Ethereum. Mentioning Ethereum in business plans becomes as popular as AI currently is. Institutions want exposure, this time they can. More users. The ETF gains crazy popularity. Money inflows look like they’ll keep coming forever. Negative regulatory efforts don’t matter anymore, you can’t stop the infinity machine.

Ethereum made it. We made it.

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Max Resnick is back with some more bad takes.

For those that missed it, in yesterday’s Execution Layer meeting (discussion goes for about 30min) there was a discussion on whether to increase blobs from 4 to 5 and increase the blob target from 3 to 4 in Pectra A. The reason for this is to maintain adoption of blobs by L2s to help tide us over until we have PeerDAS.

Before continuing it’s important to note that the blobs we have now were always meant to be a stopgap until PeerDAS and network upgrades, which makes it more efficient to scale. We were never meant to scale blobs under current conditions.

There were mentions that some are already struggling with bandwidth, but was brushed off as anecdotal. Thankfully Potuz spoke up for home stakers and said we should treat data from both sides the same since those that are having no issues is anecdotal too. So there was agreement to get more data on this first before deciding whether to include these changes or not. Ryan Berckmans also made a post on the research forum for this data.

Today Ben Edgington, who is a major contributor to getting Ethereum to where it is today, wrote in a Twitter thread that he was seeing he was having signs of issues too.

In comes Max Resnick quote tweeting Ben’s post and the following conversation insued:

Max: Bandwidth capacity grows at 50% a year. Asking the entire global network to slow down while we are actively battling for market share with an extremely competent opponent because you live in a swamp with 12mb/s bandwidth is extremely selfish.

Ben: Where did I ask for the entire global network to slow down?

Max: You are literally saying your node can not keep up, so you want to propose fewer blobs in your blocks. Why don’t you shut your node down and unstake? You are slowing down the network by doing this.

Ben: I dislike your dystopian future.

Max: We can no longer afford to eat the cost of these luxury beliefs. Solo staking in a place where you do not have appropriate bandwidth imposes an externality on the network. If Ethereum doesn’t win, the world looks much more dystopian than a world where Ethereum sacrifices a few rural solo stakers in exchange for vastly increased performance.

end

Nixo put it perfectly with how it feels reading that:

That feeling when arrogant young blood opining on the future of Ethereum comes in hot and tells the one of the most OG cypherpunks I know, who literally wrote the book on Ethereum, to shut down his node and unstake [image of sad pepe looking out a rainy window]

And Max replies to nixo’s tweet with a gif saying to shut it down. What a disgrace.

To better understand how home stakers are doing bandwidth wise, please take this EthStaker survey (it’s POAP gated):

https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1839763102952501613

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Calling all home stakers! We’re looking to investigate if stakers would be concerned about increasing network bandwidth

Please help by filling out a quick survey: https://poap-feedback.deform.cc/Solo-Staker-Bandwidth-Survey/

You need one of the staking community POAPs to fill out the survey. Let me know if there are any we should add so you can fill this out.

Share on the everything app: https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1839763102952501613

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🥧 This Week - In the Ethereum Pie - Layer 2 update:
(I have a version with links but they are all to X posts…. Would that be allowed and more importantly would that be wanted?)

• Op Mainnet Transactions ~2x in the past 90 days
• Base begins its weekly Throughput hikes
• Starknet eyeing up to be the next L2 with +$100M Stablecoins
• L2s continue to increase the adoption rate of Stablecoins in the Ethereum Ecosystem
• 2 successful Gitcoin rounds – Thanks to all who donated
• Base is supporting builders around the world to fix local problems – 100ETH in Prizes
• Reminder to all builders to tag their contract addresses
• Metis having a new wave of active addresses
• Taiko reclaims 3rd place in Transaction Count
• Rent Paid to L1 up 400% - past 30 days
• Layer 2 Utility rising thanks to Account Abstraction
• Muti chain activity is up 12% this week
• Base however has seen a fall in Cross-Chain Activity
• Reminder we have had low fees for less than a year – Builders are building
• Team member Ahoura writes on “Is Ethereum experiencing an existential crisis?”

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After a decade in the crypto space, I finally became a victim of a scam. Fortunately, it was only for about $20 worth of useless Hamster Kombat tokens, and I was already fullly prepared for it to be a scam.

This was entirely expected. At least I got front-row tickets to see this shitshow, and it’s been the most fun I’ve had from the utterly-boring Hamster Kombat game.

Around this August, the HamsterKomat team promoted a non-KYC, no-gas method for the token airdrop that used the Ebi.xyz DEX. All the other airdrop methods uses CEXs that weren’t available in the US, so that was my only choice. I figured the airdrop would be tiny, and I couldn’t care less about it, so I picked it because it the easiest method.

I already knew Ebi.xyz was an unknown DEX that was created around the time that Hamster Kombat launched, possibly by the same Hamster Kombat team. Pretty much nothing is known about the real members of either team.

• 3 days before the airdrop, Ebi team said they had airdropped tokens to their users. We told them they were wrong.
• Around this time, the HamsterKombat sub shut down and disabled all new posts. The mods left and the remaining mod has since disappeared.
• On the day of the airdrop (Sept 26), Ebi congratulated everyone for receiving their airdrop
• Not a single person who used Ebi actually received their airdrop
• After a few hours, they said they were encountering technical difficulties, and their website became unavailable
• A few hours later, the website came back up, and Ebi said they were working through technical difficulties due to high volume
• By now, their Twitter account and Discord channel was full of thousands of people calling them scammers
• On Sept 27, they made an announcement that the Airdrop claims were live. We immediately checked, saw nothing, and told them they were full of shit.
• On Sept 28, the Ebi.xyz website went down for maintenance again and came back up 2 hours later. And none of us have received our tokens.
• The token price has been dropping about 15-30% every day, and we have no idea what they’re doing with our tokens.

And that wraps up what I know so far.

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Some pontification… I feel like I’ve been able to predict all the major tech trends from the last 25 years, whether it was operating systems, search engines, cloud computing, weed stocks, EVs, crypto, or AI. Right now, for the first time in a long time, I just don’t know.

AI, at least at the startup stage, is clearly in a bubble. I strongly believe in the transformative power of AI but it’s already had its 10x recently and random VC investments I’m reviewing are raising $100M just for mentioning AI. Do you honestly expect NVDA to do another 10x from here? You can buy MSFT and just sit on it or something broad spectrum like VTI and probably make your 8% a year but that’s not a play for risk-seeking capital like all these other bets have been. Gold’s been having a great run with nation states trying to de-dollarize and basically rotating US bond reserves into precious metal reserves but even if I’m up like 40% there it’s just boring and I don’t see a future in it outside of the current run. Maybe I need to look into emerging markets? Maybe there just is no 1000% tech investment to be found right now and I just need to stay informed, preserve capital, and wait? In the meantime I’m just parked barbell style in liquidity farming and working the fiat mines but it increasingly feels like if I’m not making 10% a year on my whole portfolio I’ll be falling behind to inflation let alone able to live off my assets.

I feel like I have enough most people would consider me wealthy but increasingly capital is the only thing that will make money in the world while the supply and demand of human labor will be increasingly out of balance as AI accelerates. Child care costs over $2k a month while the employees watch 8 kids each and make like $10-15/hr. Universities put students hundreds of thousands into student debt yet lecturers are working multiple jobs to get by. The medical industry and end of life care is going to systemically drain all the boomers wealth before it passes down but the caretakers of those facilities are overworked and couldn’t afford a room at the facilities they work at. All of our services seem to cost astronomical amounts compared to pre-covid but the people doing the work aren’t making that. So who is? Capital.

You can see what’s happening to the 98% of people already left behind. Now add in AI displacing tens of millions of jobs over the next decade. As is the nature of automation, it will replace labor with profits to AI companies but a 10/1 ratio. I once led a team of AI engineers that was automating the jobs of 200 workers at $15 an hour per engineer per year. The software was considered a depreciating asset with a three year shelf life so we were considered to be making $18M in savings per engineer per year. That was 6 years ago; the technology is much more powerful now.

I feel like there’s this metaphorical wave I need to catch and I’m just behind the crest of it working hard to get on top of it so I can let the water do the work instead of me padding the whole way. The fear of being left behind keeps me motivated but it’s not a happy mindset. The way out of it is to combine let the fiat mines pay the bills while I find the next 5x tech innovation to ride up but again I feel stumped there for the first time in a long time.

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Regarding eth-usd Google data: You may have noticed Google removed the nice chart in search results. This data used to be powered by CoinMarketCap.

Earlier in the month, the data just stopped and was stuck.

Myself and other members of this community called attention to Google (and I tried getting in touch with CoinMarketCap, but, no surprise, no one responded). Last week, a Google search for “eth-usd” started working again, but without a chart. It’s actually returning data from Yahoo! Finance.

I also noticed that my Google Sheets function (=GOOGLEFINANCE("ETHUSD")) was still stuck on the wrong price, so I clicked the “Disclaimer” in the footer of Google Sheets around stock/currency prices, which led me to this familiar page: https://www.google.com/googlefinance/disclaimer/

HOWEVER, the provider of cryptocurrency data has changed from CoinMarketCap to Morningstar (I assume this Morningstar).

I can’t find the price of regular old ETH (or BTC or anything else crypto-related that’s not a fund) on their public site, but maybe it’s behind a login/paywall.

Anyway, the point is, Google must be aware shit’s not working, but they didn’t really fix anything yet. I encourage you to click those little “Help” buttons/links in Sheets or in Search or in your Admin Console and complain! Squeaky wheel and all that!

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Something’s brewing in Chinese markets. I’m sure you guys remember the Chinese housing market was going through a bubble pop and property prices had come down significantly from their peak over there. With lots of property in horrendous conditions, lots of property being liquidated at low prices but nobody purchasing them, etc.

Recently the People’s Bank of China announced several measures that in isolation might seem appropriate to stimulate the economy, but when combined all together generate a crazy amount of stimulus. This is with the intend of pushing economic growth up, increasing stock market prices and increasing property prices.

The measures are:

• Interest rates paid to savings in banks were pushed down from 1.7% to 1.5% - The lowest interest rate in its history. This is intended to push banks to seek to lend more and the movement of savings into the market for investment.

• The % of deposits that must be covered by liquid reserves in banks (only for the largest banks). It used to be 10% but it’s been reduced to 9.5%. Its lowest level since 2007. This is expected to come down even more in the future. This allows them to use this additional liquidity to provide more credit. Approximately an additional injection of about 140 billion USD equivalent of liquidity.

• Cut of interest rates for business debt and mortgages, reduced from 3.35% to 3.15%. Incentivising more lending for families and businesses.

Additionally, they want to create a new monetary policy tool to refloat the stock market, a swap program for securities, insurance companies and funds to obtain liquidity through asset collateralization, essentially collateralized lending.

This essentially opens up 500 billion yan (~70 billion USD) of liquidity with possible expansions in the future.

They’re also intending to create a fund to ‘stabilize the stock market’. Essentially a centrally planned monetary policy plan to artificially push the stock market up and property.

Lastly, for property purchases, they want to reduce the barrier of entry for 2nd home purchases, which used to be limited for banks to lend about 75% of the value of the property, but now banks can lend about 85% of the value of the property. For smaller local government entities, banks will be allowed to lend 100% of the value of properties if those local government entities want to buy those ‘unpurchaseable’ properties. Up until now banks were allowed to lend 60% of the value of those properties to those local government entities.

The People’s Bank of China also said that this ‘won’t be enough’ and that they will have to resort to fiscal stimulus as well.

Since September 13th, the CSI 300 (capitalization-weighted stock market index designed to replicate the performance of the top 300 stocks traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange) has since risen in price about 27%.

Generally if you’re invested in this market, congratulations. For everyone else, this is generally very risky. Every time megastimulus plans like these are launched, enormous amounts of liquidity flow into perhaps not the most productive places in the economy, but instead often times those targeted sectors affected by the stimulus, regardless of the productivity of these markets or if they can even recover.

The fear and greed index of the CSI 300 and the ETF call volume have both risen to their highest level since 2015.

TL;DR: The People’s Bank of China is applying a megastimulus to the economy to refloat the stock and property markets to a concerning extent.

Some articles in case anyone wants to do more reading:

• https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-unveils-broad-stimulus-measures-revive-economy-2024-09-24/

• https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/chinas-central-bank-buys-200-bln-yuan-sovereign-bonds-september-2024-09-30/

• https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/chinas-central-bank-cuts-banks-reserve-requirement-ratio-by-50-bps-2024-09-27/

• https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/09/27/at-last-china-pulls-the-trigger-on-a-bold-stimulus-package

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Eigenlayer is a restaking protocol, which means it provides security/ trust for new protocols/ products that don’t have the time/ money/ community to build it from scratch. People stake ETH to secure Ethereum and the same collateral can be reused (“restaked”) to secure new L1s, L2s, oracles etc.

Usually when you stake, you can be slashed when you misbehave. When you try to misbehave (e.g. double spend) on ETH mainnet this can (and will) be slashed and you will lose ETH as a consequence because this happens onchain and is easy to judge.

But there are things that the blockchain/ nodes can’t detect or that aren’t easy to judge. These decisions are “intersubjective”. Slashing isn’t possible. One famous example is a data availability layer where a node withholds information. This doesn’t happen onchain, because the submission of the data happens offchain.

For these “intersubjective” cases $EIGEN comes into play. If people believe that nodes misbehaved they challenge the nodes, fork $EIGEN and hope that others follow their arguments and make their $EIGEN fork the new central token within Eigenlayer. Eigenlayer obviously can’t and shouldn’t even try to fork ETH, so they created their own token to take this task.

tl;dr

ETH is used for objective misbehaviour

EIGEN is used of intersubjective misbehaviour

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u/austonst:

Also posted in r/ethstaker, but I don’t think people will mind seeing it here too:

I’d like to share an article I’ve written about what u/KuDeTa and I are doing with respect to block proposal timing games for the Aestus relay. We’ve been experimenting with timing games for a while and in the interest of transparency would like to share our motivation, proposer-configurable parameters, and a bit of data.

The full article is here: https://hackmd.io/@austonst-aestus/BJsvEoia6

It’s a little long to copy directly onto Reddit, but I can provide and elaborate on the main points:

• Block proposal timing games are unavoidable; at this point the best outcome is ensuring democratized access to high-quality timing management tools.
• Aestus will apply a safe delay to all getHeader requests coming from validators identified by user agent.
• Aestus’s default timing games implementation results in a median delay of 735 ms.
• Validators looking to be more conservative or more aggressive may customize parameters by appending ?headerDelay={ms}&headerCutoff={ms} to the Aestus listing in their mev-boost relay list.
• We encourage staking pools and relays to be transparent about timing games.

If you need some background on timing games, I provide a few links at the start. Timing games aren’t a good thing in general: they’re zero-sum for proposers and basically negative-sum when you consider the impact on network health. You can draw reasonable comparisons to an iterated n-player prisoner’s dilemma, where once you know a handful of actors are always going to defect, it’s in your best interest to defect as well, if only to mitigate your losses.

But this isn’t too different from mev-boost: if we can’t solve the problem (without protocol changes) we can at least reduce the advantage sophisticated actors have over everyone else. And when it comes to timing games, implementing them on the relay side with a careful eye towards consensus health should accomplish this. The article should cover the rest.

To quickly address the current hot topic, the blob-shaped elephant in the room whose ISP strangles their upload bandwidth: yeah, relay-side timing games will delay block publication (that’s the point), giving less time for blobs to propagate around the network. But when you accept a bid over mev-boost, the relay–with its well-connected clients and prime data center location–will be the one responsible for initial block propagation.

If you use mev-boost with relay-side timing games, the block may be delayed but you can trust the relay to propagate it fast. If you don’t use mev-boost at all, your client will produce a block ASAP but you need to trust your own network to propagate it. The middle ground may be more interesting: mev-boost with timing games AND a --min-bid means you delay block production but may end up responsible for your own block propagation.

If you’re a validator concerned about local propagation after delays, you could specify ?headerDelay=0 in your Aestus mev-boost entry to disable timing games at the cost of lowering bid value, though if you’re doing that, make sure to also remove Ultrasound and BloXroute relays from your list, as they also run timing games (BloXroute does allow for timing configuration, but I think you need to pay for their validator gateway service separately). There’s no point in making Aestus return a bid early if your mev-boost client is just going to sit there waiting 900 ms for the other relays’ responses.

I’m always happy to discuss. Feel free to reply or reach out directly.

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u/haurog:

I dislike every part of this, but unfortunately timing games are a reality. Thank you for the transparency, making a reasonable compromise and especially the possibility to change the defaults. I think currently there is very little incentive for solo stakers to actively optimize for timing games as the execution layer income is just a small part of the overall income. As far as I see this year execution income is slightly above 10% of the overall staking income, at least for the 20 random validators I checked, and increasing that by timing games by another 1-2 percentage points is not really a lot. At least for me it is not worth it to compromise the network integrity over it. Obviously there are different opinions about it. If the MEV opportunity increases again it might become a more substantial part of the revenue. I think overall it shows for how little reward some actors are ready to compromise the Network. Not really surprising, but just interesting to keep in mind.

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2645.30

u/M4gelock

0.04053 grandpas

u/usesbinkvideo

90,891 hodlers subscribed! (+8)

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Caroline got two,

Crypto market bumps into,

Sam is a crook too.

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Even Google realizes the price is never going to change.

Context: When you google “eth price” it was stuck on September 14th’s price, this feature has since been removed all together while remaining for BTC 😔

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Oh my god you guys. Who’s cutting onions in here? 🥹

Yes I’m coming to Hodlercon now!!! I am at a loss for words with your generosity! I am so grateful to be a part of this wonderful community and the doots won’t die until this subreddit dies or I do… (unless Reddit nukes my account or something, but I’m sure I’d find a way around it though). Anyway, through the incredibly kind funding, raising 1.2 ETH from from u/superphiz, u/allinat40, u/haurog, u/alexiskef, u/shiftli, u/KuDeTa, u/Gumpa-Bucky, u/austonst and u/da3vr, I will absolutely be seeing you all in Phuket!

As a token of my appreciation I will be sending out a POAP soon (please DM me if you donated from a CEX or not your POAP wallet with your preferred wallet). I also have some ideas for a special something to give each of you in person (please let me know if any of you won’t be at Hodlercon). Nothing big, but hopefully something meaningful, think of it like a physical POAP. No promises just yet but I’ve got an idea of something I may be able to do.

I have already checked and I can definitely change my flight for minimal extra cost. I still need to figure out the logistics, ie can I fly out of Phuket to Aus/NZ or do I need to go back to Bangkok but it seems I can change my flight and get credit for another flight for no extra cost! This just leaves any extra cost for getting to Phuket, the Hodlercon ticket, accommodation, food and airport parking for an extra week. All of which I have no reason to believe will go over my newly increased budget.

I also just want to say it was impressive/bold of you all to remember/have faith that tricky.eth was indeed my address. I have rarely mentioned that and it could’ve gone very wrong if you had the wrong address haha.

Finally, I just want to say that this community never disappoints and all of the work being done around the doots now with the podcast is incredibly motivating for me. I love to see the awesome things coming to fruition out from this community and I hope this is just the beginning.

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Just watched the documentary about Ethereum and Vitalik. I thought it was pretty good overall. There’s a great scene with a recording of Charles crying about how he won’t become a CEO because Ethereum is going to be a public good (I’m paraphrasing). Gave me a good chuckle. The movie is here https://ethereumfilm.xyz/. Costs $20 in ETH for a streaming ticket, but this is stuff I like to see onchain, so props.

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In the all Core Devs Consensus call last Thursday they discussed the size of the upcoming Pectra Fork. They pretty much decided to make the Pectra fork much smaller again and split it into two hard forks. In essence all the EIPs that are currently being live on devnets (i.e. internal testnets) will be bundled into the first upgrade, whereas anything not part of these devnets will get its own hard fork later on. The reasoning is that the EIPs that are currently tested will soon be ready for public testnets and then mainnet. Waiting for the other EIPs to be ready would delay these upgrades by several months. More details about the reasoning can be found here: https://hackmd.io/@ralexstokes/rJVuKtlpR

As it currently stands it is planned to have the the following EIPS in Pectra 1

• EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 curve operations

• EIP-2935: Save historical block hashes in state

• EIP-6110: Supply validator deposits on chain

• EIP-7002: Execution layer triggerable exits

• EIP-7251: Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE

• EIP-7549: Move committee index outside Attestation

• EIP-7685: General purpose execution layer requests

• EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for one transaction

Most important for stakers are the maxEB (EIP 7251) and EL triggerable exits (EIP 7002) changes. These two allow a single validator to have up to 2048 ETH in balance and the advantage that one can trigger a validator exit by signing a message from the withdrawal address. The account abstraction EIP (7702) is interesting as it allows and EOA account to behave like a smart contract account. There is also the discussion to include a smaller change which would increase the Blob target and max from the current 3/6 to either 4/6 or higher numbers. But there is no consensus about this yet.

Notably absent from this list are the bigger EIPs (PeerDAS and EOF). This means we are pretty much at the size of Pectra as it was initially planned (until May 2024), right before the size blew up massively by including PeerDAS and EOF. The plan is to have the first upgrade at the beginning of next year (q1/q2) whereas the second upgrade with PeerDAS and EOF would be at the end of next year. Obviously this still is in discussion so details might change. No idea what this means for the already scoped Verkle tree upgrade which is a large execution layer change which was planned to come afterwards. I guess the next few weeks will give more clarity.

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The bankless episode with Mike Neuder was pretty interesting. I am not yet done, but one thing caught my attention: I think we discussed centralized sequencers here probably years ago and pointed out that these aren’t perfect, but that we expect some L2s to have only one sequencer that will do all the work and that there will be some decentralized L2s. My mental model from these discussions was “there will be a bit of everything”.

Mike yesterday basically said that he expects “all” (most) L2s to have a decentralized sequencer and that it is the best strategy for them, because they won’t be more decentralized than L1, inherit all the necessary properties from l1 and shouldn’t even try emphasize that dimension. His conclusion is more or less that real-time censorship resistance is cool (which is the result of decentralized sequencing), but it’s probably not as important with the possibility of forced inclusion via L1.

Is a decentralized sequencer only important in our bubble? The more I think about, the more I believe it is - and we are a niche, so developing for us and similar users might be good enough for one or two L2s, but that’s it. So will we see 99.9% of the sequencers running on one machine?

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https://warpcast.com/growthepie/0xd8c82434

It’s gonna keep happening. Excess supply of blockspace will eventually be gobbled up. Even if it’s to do the same stuff but leaner, easier, more user friendly.

https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/14l05iz/daily_general_discussion_june_28_2023/jptzgx4/

Even without new use cases that are brought forward with cheaper blockspace, which I think there are, there is a lot of pent-up blockspace demand in the form of better UX and easier to write code.

We saw something similar with our computers and the internet. As the resources available were scaled up, the computers didn’t get much faster to do the same things we were doing. And web pages didn’t load up faster. Instead, a lot of those extra new resources went into nicer UX and cheaper/easier to deliver code. We are in the era of smart contract programmers thinking long and hard about how they implement the functionality to minimize gas costs, looking at OPCODES and trying find microoptimizations to squeeze those extra gas savings. There was a time when programmers thought long and hard about the performance of their applications and would often go to assembly to optimize them. For most use cases programmers don’t do that anymore because CPU cycles have become so cheap that it’s silly to optimize for that. The same will happen with blockspace, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper we will start to use it less efficiently in exchange for improved UX or easier code.

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As a casual hobbyist developer, I keep hitting a wall at the block explorer verification step.

You can write just about any smart contract idea you have by messing around in Remix IDE. You can deploy it to the blockchain. It will run on its own forever on a permissionless network for everyone to interact with. Thirdparties can even build more stuff on top of your contracts. Amazing!

But the moment you want to make your code easy to check on a centralized block explorer? There’s this huge skill bump, where you need to use the command line, install git/nodejs/npm/truffle/hardhat/scoop/foundry and a million of other things, and none of it works anyway.

Well, I say “you”, it is of course “me”, dumb old me who never gets this stuff.

But, still, isn’t this wild? Intuitively it feels like the hard part would be, you know, building the actual thing? Rather than proving the thing you built is what you say it is.

Imports used to be my main grievance. Now I’m discovering the fresh hell that is –via-ir verification. At least now I have AI… To help me fail faster.

– edit: finally found a way! Nothing like a good rant in public to have a breakthrough.

For any other tortured soul who might end up in the same situation, the working path was

1) “generate contract metadata” ticked on in Remix IDE

2) get the giganormous hexadecimal .json in artifacts/build-info folder

3) crop its contents to keep just the “language”, “settings” and “sources” bits

4) on the block explorer verification page, use Solidity Standard-Json-Input in the compiler type dropdown panel

5) It Just Works.

The world is saved. Praise Vitalik. Praise all of you. I love you all. Good night.

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“It’s different this time”

Just sharing some ramblings to help me solidify my theory on where we go from here.

I was a bit worried for a while, when the hype of the Bitcoin ETFs was going on it all got a bit too excited, too quick for me for a while, I was slightly concerned the 4 year cycle wasn’t gonna happen as usual.

We seem to be back on course. Bitcoin still rules the jungle (for now) so what is happening with it still matters deeply for Ethereum.

Rate cuts have started in the US, the rest of the world has largely yet to follow course but they will as the cycle turns. Gold is rising and Peter Schiff is getting all excited about it but what usually follows after this is Bitcoin making him eat his words. Pretty sure this will happen again.

In my gut, I think there is one more big drop still to come, there is usually some event that scares people witless before we go to Valhalla. Would love to be wrong on this and we go straight there from this but it fits the usual pattern. From there we start marching on with Bitcoin leading the charge.

Next what happens is money starts to look elsewhere and the fabled Altcoin season has its time to shine. I think Ethereum will start attracting attention sooner rather than later and considering the hate it seems to be getting lately, it will be a glorious, hated rally by those who miss out.

I’m sure others will pump but I’m not worried by the likes of Solana etc. It’s still a centralised shitcoin that’s good for meme coins but anything else? Pretty sure it will go the way of EoS, Cardano and all the other so called Eth killers in the long term.

I’ve been staying well way from buying any crypto other than BTC/ETH since the 2017 cycle and sure I’ve missed out on shit but I’m in it for the long haul.

We have ETH ETFs and we’ve moved to PoS so all those ESG/green funds can take part that can’t in Bitcoin.

We have scale this time, L2s are growing and growing.

Crypto is getting easier and easier to use.

Still waiting to see what the next narrative will be, we had ICOs, DEFI, NFTs all started on Ethereum to kick things off before, what will be next? Is it time for the long talked about real-world assets to enter the party this time?

Ignore all the noise, am pretty sure that we see a great bull market starting as per the usual 4 year cycle. I might even sell some of my precious ETH for the first time this time around :)

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I have finished the recent bankless episode with Max Resnick called “Is the Ethereum Roadmap Off Track?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLUJ0uLye0U

I knew it will be difficult to listen to for me and I ranted about the guest a bit here before. It is mostly due to the guest being unable to contribute in any meaningful way to the discussion and making false statements everywhere. Now that I have finished it, my conclusion is: should we really listen to someone on their opinions about rollups who seems to have such a gross misunderstanding how this stuff works. He might have very good opinions about the MEV part of the roadmap or about auctions, I cannot judge that but he seems unable to understand how the rollup part really works.

I keep it to the largest issues I have heard and leave out many smaller wrong statements the guest made. To be very clear, my understanding of rollups has a lot of gaps, so please correct me if I am stating something wrong here I am eager to be corrected and learn.

After the 55 minute mark he states

ZK technology inherently compresses the state whereas the optimistic rollups have to put the transactions on chain and maybe they can run a little bit of compression but it’s not nearly the amount of compression you can get with uh ZK roll up

Wrong. There is no compression in ZK technology used today in rollups. The zk part just gives a relatively short string of numbers and characters which prove that the calculation state transitions has been done right. There is no extractable information about the state in this proof. Both rollup types have to put all transactions on chain via blobs. Many people use the simplified term ‘compression’ to get the meaning across, but this is not an accurate description of what is happening in the case of ZK rollups. It really seems like Max took the marketing term of ZK is compression and went with it without understanding what is happening and to draw his conclusions based on this flawed understanding. To make matters worse optimistic rollups do have less overhead in the calldata as they do not have to publish a fraud proof. So it is actually the exact inverse from what he says. Don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of zk rollups and really hope they will dominate in the coming years. Max is just wrong here from a technical point.

let let me just be very precise that optimistic rollup does not actually substantially reduce the amount of bandwidth required

This is very wrong the bandwidth requirement can get reduced by the same amount in zk rollups and optimistic rollups. They both publish all transactions in the same way into blobs. They can employ the same optimization techniques to reduce the size of this blob data. Zk rollups have a slight overhead so use a bit more bandwidth. If he would have read/understood vitaliks post about rollups he would know that: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

like we can start to build uh ZK compression into the L1 as well and that would reduce the bandwidth requirements

Again the ‘compression’ which does not really exist. But on the L1 ZK technology can be used to massively reduce the bandwidth and still validate that the state transition has been applied correctly. The node would not know the actual state but it could validate that it is correct. Like the Mina L1 does zk proofs of their state transitions. So, the statement is only half wrong.

from a bandwidth perspective you have almost the same usage from a optimistic L2 as you would if it was happening on the layer one and the only thing you’re saving is on execution

Bandwidth argument is wrong, as explained above. One massively saves on execution in both cases of rollups though.

I think his misunderstanding of the ZK part in zk rollups works fits into his initial rant at the beginning of the episode where he accused the EF and companies behind optimistic rollups to have pushed a roadmap which is against zk rollups. If one does not understand what zk rollups really need it is a bit bold to accuse someone of pushing a wrong roadmap which actually massively benefits zk rollups as well.

we do need to take some tools from the newer blockchains one of them in particular is this kind of parallel execution

Parallel exection is already part of Besu: https://besu.hyperledger.org/development/public-networks/concepts/parallel-transaction-execution

if optimism is not arbitrum then by the transitive property cannot also be the case that optimism is ethereum and arbitrum is ethereum because then arbitrum would be optimism this is like a fundamental contradiction

I am just weirded out by this statement as the transitive relation in mathematics is not really something I would apply here to try to prove something. It is pretty normal to have a subgroup being part of a bigger group but two subgroups not being the same. I am thinking about the taxonomy hierarchy in biology. A lion and a tiger are not the same species, but they still belong to the same genus called ‘panthera’. That is how I think about the Ethereum ecosystem and the rollups. This is not really an important statement by him it just shows that he is using vocabulary to sound more important but applying things in a way which does not really make too much sense.

Rant finished. I now definitely have a worse opinion about him because he does hold strong opinions about things which he apparently does not really understand. This makes it very hard to judge if his opinions are worth considering as one cannot really say from his statements where the limit of his knowledge is. Everything has the same strong absolute language there is no nuance, nothing. And only if one perfectly understands the underlying technology one can judge if his statement makes sense. That is not very helpful for most people at all.

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Yesterday I announced the “Goodbye Danny” POAP, it’s a POAP to appreciate the contributions of Danny Ryan, the person who is most responsible for the Ethereum beacon chain as we know it.

It’s launching with a new POAP platform, called “Airship”. Airship lets you send funds to an address to receive a POAP without the need to connect to any web3 browser wallet. Effectively, if you send 0.001 Ether (exactly $5.00 at today’s prices) to theprotocolguild.eth on mainnet, you will receive the POAP in about a minute. This is kind of a cool evolution and I’m excited to see where it will go.

https://airship.poap.xyz/danny

* Also, I definitely encourage gaming this to get the POAP with a minimal gas cost. How low can you go? The worst that could happen is a dropped tx and you can just try again later.

** depending on how well you know this stuff, setting a very low gas price can effectively get your wallet stuck since all transactions are processed in order. There are ways around this, but i didn’t want to surprise anyone.

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Some thoughts on EigenLayer’s Operator Set security model.

AVSs assign operators to operating sets. I don’t know if this means that by default all AVSs are whitelist only but it certainly reads that way. It’s not the epitome of permissionless if true.

Stakers delegate stake to operators. How do stakers find an operator to delegate to? At the moment there’s a list on the EigenLayer website which basically means EigenLayer can exclude an operator from participating just by censoring them here. At the protocol level though I don’t believe they have any power so it’s just like Uniswap with their front end which I guess is good enough. The bigger problem though is why does a staker trust an operator to delegate to them. At the moment the only answer here is trust. You are either trusting someone you know like Aestus or you are trusting an LRT to underwrite for you, KYC your operators, etc. We need a better answer here.

Operators then assign unique stake to operator sets. The goal here seems to be to prevent restaked ETH from being restaked multiple times which is confusing to me. It’s already the case that the underlying stake securing a task can become unbacked, why is it suddenly different if it becomes unbacked within EigenLayer rather than at the LST level? The proper answer here is that capital should be reusable to the extent that the cost of dishonesty still outweighs the profit from dishonesty. The cost of dishonesty is the stake being slashed. The profit from dishonesty scales with the amount of promises you’re allowed to make with that stake. I don’t see how this security model is even attempting to discover a rational answer to that equation.

Within an operator set, operators are expected to vote on whether the answers of other operators are correct. Their vote is weighted by the stake they assigned to that operator set. The thing that feels wrong about this design is we are using restaked ETH as a Sybil resistance source when the nature of being an operator on an AVS consists of doing provable work. Why not just use the proof of work as the Sybil resistance source for this? I have the same feedback for subnets on BitTensor. Why do we need validators for that at all when the miners have the hardware to validate and the miners have to do work so the system can’t be Sybiled?

They state that if a malicious operator takes over the operator set the system can slash him. I assume this refers to the EIGEN governance system above the AVS but they aren’t explicit about this. All they say is that the only stake at risk within an operator set is the stake assigned to the operator set. I refer to stake voting schemes as subjective consensus. Ultimately, even with objective proof systems it still comes down to who runs what software e.g. Ethereum layer 0, but why involve local operator set at all at that point since the EIGEN governance system participants will apparently be required to host all the proof-validators for all AVSs since operators in every AVS will be allowed to appeal to them? If the goal is to reduce the computational load on the EIGEN governance system participants then I’d say you should first vote using PoW within an operator set then appeal to a contest amongst all the operator sets on the matter and every appeal should require slashable stake to initiate. That looks a lot more like the Colony governance design than what I just read. It’s also worth noting that an operator only needs to be slashed in an eventually consistent way so zk-proofs that rely on repeated games are perfectly valid here. There’s a long unlock period for validators to unstake from AVSs.

I also don’t know what happens in this model if a staker undelegates to an operator. Which operator sets is the unique stake removed from? Is it proportionate, LIFO, etc? And how does stake affect rewards? Can an operator just forfeit their operator set consensus power but do honest work without any unique stake and still be rewarded? There’s just a lot of undefined aspects to this system at the moment.

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u/spupul6

Ethereum

u/UgotTrisomy21

$2539

u/TimbukNine

0.03987

u/usesbinkvideo

90,873 HODLERS SUBSCRIBED (+6)

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Know where you belong,

Interest rates bang a gong,

Ether sings along.

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

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GM EthFam, I’ve got an idea, feel free to veto it, but hear me out first…

Premise 1: We are pretty well represented in many of the biggest DAOs: https://dailydoots.com/#delegates;

Premise 2: Those DAO’s control treasuries worth over $20 billion: https://deepdao.io/organizations;

Premise 3: To successfully take over 50% of Bitcoin’s hashrate (either by buying ASICs or setting up facilities to manufacture them yourself) would cost ~ $20 billion: https://blockchainbeat.co/how-much-to-hack-bitcoin-and-ethereum-study-reveals-price/;

Conclusion: EthFinance should orchestrate the take down of Bitcoin, then the annoying trolls that have been showing up here the last few days would be less obnoxious, mods would have less work to do, and the daily threads would be less cluttered.

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zksync governance went live yesterday. There are no proposals yet, but at least everything seems to be set up technically. Since I am one of the ETHFinance delegates, I had been visiting the page regularly to check for updates. That’s why I noticed some interesting changes in voting power, some examples:

• Stani (from AAVE): 9M in August, 45M in September

• Baki Er: 12M in August, 61M in September

• polynya: 8M in August, 38M in September

2 of the top 3 delegates (syncswap, l2beat and olimpio) are more or less unchanged with the exception of L2beat. They have more than doubled in voting power (from 47M to 106M)

For Stani and Baki Er the changes are perfectly visible in the chart on the right hand side here. For polynya I checked the “Received Delegations” tab in their delegate profile. All three profiles show basically the same, huge delegations on both the September 9th and September 12th.

So where do all these delegated tokens come from? The biggest delegation to polynya is from this account which is basically non-existent onchain according to the zksync explorer. It received the zk tokens 3 months ago from a wallet that received 6999999300 zk tokens and has been transfering the tokens to a lot of new addresses. I did a quick check and most of these accounts don’t show any activity. The top delegations to both Stani and Baki Er from the past couple of days show basicalyl the exact same patterns…

With some basic maths we can see that 6.9B is basically 33% of the total supply - which makes me think, this is likely the wallet that distributes to team and investors, because according to this blog post that’s the only receiving party that makes sense?

So are these changes in voting power just team members and investors delegating their (locked) tokens just before governance goes live? Did zksync just tell everyone to delegate? I don’t see any other explanation, but maybe I am completely off? Any other ideas?

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The US SEC backpeddled and finally admitted that cryptocurrencies are not “securities” but simply “crypto assets”.

There were multiple articles that covered this yesterday:

• Be In Crypto: SEC Clarifies What Crypto Asset Securities Means
• Cointelegraph: SEC ‘regrets any confusion’ from dubbing tokens as securities: filing
• Decrypt: Kraken Pushes for Jury Trial in SEC Lawsuit, Rails Against ‘Crypto Asset Securities’ Claims
• U Today: SEC Just “Conceded” That ETH Is Not Security, Coinbase’s Top Lawyer Says
• Crypto News: SEC backtracks on ‘crypto asset securities’ claim in Binance suit

In summary, the SEC admitted that they didn’t consider cryptocurrencies as “securities” but as “crypto assets”. (Note that this only applies within the US, and many other countries never classified crypto as securities in the first place but as “digital assets”.)

“With its use of the term ‘crypto asset securities,’ the SEC is not referring to the crypto asset itself as the security,” the agency said. Instead, a token’s status as a security “consists of the full set of contracts, expectations, and understandings centered on the sales and distribution of the [crypto asset],” it said, citing language from an earlier filing.

Thus cryptocurrencies are not securities, but how they’re offered along with contracts and expectations can be considered securities.

That’s what Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and the entire crypto community have been saying all along, and it took the SEC this long to finally admit it in court.

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Things are starting to (finally) take shape for HodlerCon 2024 Thailand Edition. If you’re planning on going to DevCon in Thailand this could be the perfect opportunity for you to spend some time with your EthFinance Fam.

We’ll be in Phuket from Nov 16th - 23rd at the Pullman Panwa Beach. Cost of the hotel is $800 and I have 30 rooms currently on hold. If your interested in coming to HodlerCon, fill out the hotel interest form.

Here’s some of the events from the itinerary:

• Pool party at the hotel
• Phuket Food tour
• See the Big Buddha
• All day boat trip to Phi Phi Island
• Visit an Elephant sanctuary

We’re still working on the final price for the event ticket. Want to stay up to date on what’s happening Join the Discord.

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beautiful writeup on an alternate reality where we went all in on L1 scaling (it did not end well) https://x.com/domothy/status/1835188625950101590

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Upcoming EthStaker community calls:

- Lido CSM: Run a validator with 2 ETH - 19 Sep, 4pm UTC
- NodeSet: Become part of a curated operator set - 25 Sep, 4pm UTC
- Puffer: Run a validator with 1 ETH - 2 Oct, 3pm UTC
- Stereum: Run a validator on easy mode - 9 Oct, 4pm UTC
- Ephemery testnet: Help test upgrades by running testnet validators - 14 Oct, 4pm UTC

https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1835768317015101472

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Google is coming further and further into the web3 game. They started supporting ENS addresses some time ago and directly show a summary of the address in the search results. Today they announced that they provide Ethereum RPC endpoints for developers for mainnet and testnets: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/introducing-blockchain-rpc-service-for-web3-builders

I guess this is a continuation of what started a year ago when they becam part of the holesky genesis validators and they run 10k holesky validators: <https:// explorer.rated.network/o/Google%20Cloud%20Web3?network=holesky&timeWindow=1d&idType=nodeOperator>

This new announcement is in direct competition to Alchemy, Infura and all the other commercial RPC providers. Pretty impressive how these large companies enter the Ethereum ecosystem bit by bit. And this time it is definitely not because of a hype they have to sell to their shareholders but probably rather strategically to get a foot into the door of the Ethereum space.

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The next section of my Rabbit Hole Explorer’s Guide is all about managing risk.

Don’t Invest More Than You Can Afford to Lose

Crypto is full of amazing heights and soul-crushing lows. The fact that there have been multiple 90% drops and it is still the best performing asset class in the last decade is incredible. However, you can’t always afford to ride it out. The crypto highs and lows tend to follow the macro highs and lows. So when crypto is low you’re also jobless, economic opportunities are scarce, and you’re scared. If you invest more than you can afford to lose when times are good, you could very well be one of the millions who find themselves selling while the market is down only to watch it do some crazy 30x the next cycle. People not following this advice is the source of the bitterness every time crypto comes up on your Facebook feed or technology subreddit. The problem was never crypto, the problem was they invested more than they could afford to lose.

Pay Taxes As You Go

This is actually just a specific case of the above point but I think it bears special mention. It’s one thing to be penniless. It’s another to be in debt. It’s another still to be in debt to the government. The first case is miserable but you can still live on credit. The second case is bankruptcy and homelessness. The third case is debtor’s prison. You cannot afford to invest money you owe for taxes into speculative assets. Therefore, whenever you rotate positions you should take whatever sum you need to to cover the taxes out to safer havens.

The specific case that wrecks people has to do with a crash just after the start of a new year like happened in… well 2018 and 2022. Just before the crash everyone rotates their capital back into the blue chip coins. When this happens even though they are reducing risk they are now selling something and buying something else at near all-time-high valuations. Then the crash hits, they tell themselves it’s just a bear trap and don’t sell, and by the time the tax bill is due they can’t even liquidate their entire portfolio to pay the tax bill. Seriously, it’s just less stressful to pay taxes as you go.

No One Is Giving Away Free Crypto

Whenever anything of significance happens in crypto some scammer always replies to the announcement to say “To celebrate X event we’re giving away free crypto. Send scamAddress some coins and get twice that back!”. This is a ridiculously stupid scam that has gotten a ridiculously stupid amount of money. I seriously can’t fathom how this bullshit has managed to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto. Sometimes I feel like people who lose money to this type of thing deserve to do so. Mostly though I just feel sad for how this money is going to power the next wave of scams to be that much more prevalent and effective. They do this because it works and they are never going to stop.

Let me make this abundantly clear. I have been around awhile. I have been around for many significant events in crypto. No one reputable is ever giving away free ETH. For any reason. Ever. I don’t care if their account name is Elon Musk and you think he’s so eccentric he might actually be doing it. I don’t care if they have a blue checkmark next to their name and it appears to be the same account as the one making the announcement. I don’t care if it says its part of a fun new airdrop they are doing. Ever.

More generally, even in an ecosystem where 1000% gains aren’t uncommon, if it looks too good to be true, that’s because it is. If you see some 1000% yield LP position on some token you’ve never heard of it’s almost certainly being fueled by inflation and you are gambling against the loss of value of your collateral. If you see some stablecoin position with unusually high yield that stablecoin probably isn’t stable. If it actually is using a safe collateral and is on a safe platform and isn’t a scam it’s either a very new position and is about to be quickly diluted or it’s being fueled by someone’s marketing budget and is about to be quickly diluted.

Whether in web2 or web3, if you don’t understand how you’re adding value to an ecosystem you’re the product. When you receive airdrops, you are being compensated for being an early user, taking early risks, boosting the numbers the team uses for valuations so they can get more funding, etc. Even legit airdrops that you can sell the day you get them are not free crypto. No one is giving away free crypto.

Inflation Is Not Profit

Every bull market in crypto has been marked by certain design patterns in tokenomics. I can mostly tell you a time range when a token was launched by its tokenomics alone like how an archeologist can tell you which civilization some ruins come from by pointing at architecture and art styles. One of those design trends in early 2021 was to launch highly inflationary tokens and then use high APR numbers to encourage people to buy the token and stake it for rewards. This was basically just a new type of casino. Your net worth would go down even as the number of tokens you hold went up 10x a year. This was basically preying on the ignorance of users who didn’t really understand finance but it worked for a time while the profit the hype generated was able to expand the user base faster than the inflation rate. Once the model ran out of users to expand to the rest was history.1234 Whenever you see a high APR in some LP or staking pool you need to slow down and investigate where the money is coming from. If it’s coming from inflation you need to understand that inflation is not profit.

If It’s Good Enough For a Screenshot, Take Profit

As volatile as crypto is there will come a time where you are massively up. You’ll be up so much you will be in disbelief. You will refresh your portfolio checker every 15 minutes and the person sitting across the table from you will know you’re doing it again because the green from the screen will reflect from your eyes. At this point, they will think you have a problem. At this point you actually do have a problem but that’s besides the point. Here’s the thing: you aren’t a genius. Even if you actually are a genius you aren’t up because you are a genius. It’s just that time of the cycle.

At that time of the cycle everything you’ll see in your media feed will reinforce how much of a genius you are. It’s like the whole world just woke up and finally saw what you saw first. However, if you haven’t heard this yet let me be the first to tell you: sentiment follow price. People love the investment now because it is up. If the price wasn’t up, you’d still be waiting like you were when you first bought. 90% of those investments everyone seems to agree can’t possibly fail are destined for the dustbin of history. Ever heard of Feathercoin? If you were around at the time you couldn’t not hear about it. How about EOS? OmiseGo? Luna? None of these things are going to be top 100 again. When prices are up, everyone is a genius. At the end of the cycle when you’re holding the bag you won’t feel like it any more.

How will you know when the top is? If there was a numeric answer to that then we’d all just sell then and the top would come sooner. The game theory of that makes the price chart look highly chaotic at the tops. The best answer I can give you having lived through some unbelievable peaks and valleys is if it’s good enough for a screenshot, take profit.

Leverage Will Fuck You Up

Leverage in crypto takes many forms. We have all kinds of financial gizmos you’ve probably never heard of and which you’ll take years to acclimate to. Like, yes, we have options protocols but we also have rate stripping futures protocols, perpetual swaps, and leveraged derivatives. The leverage around here goes to 100x and it all seems to get more complicated and interwoven every year.

Regardless of the form of leverage though, the goal is to amplify the effect of a market change on your portfolio. This is all well and good when you’re dealing with something like bond rates that adjust like 0.25% a month and you can just afford to wait to expiry if you’re wrong. Waiting it out is basically what banks are doing right now and why their unrealized loss chart looks like blood dripping down a painting. Crypto assets are more volatile. You’re not just playing with gasoline here; this stuff might as well be nuclear. I wouldn’t advise you to play with the nuclear bomb without knowing what you’re doing. I don’t care if it has a red button that says “Press Me for Limitless Energy”. I wouldn’t advise you to play with crypto leverage either even if their website has a fun points system.

Applying leverage to crypto assets, means amplifying the financial effect of something that is already known to drop by over 90% and with rate swings in the thousands of percentage points over a year. If you aren’t right, continuously right without any blips, you won’t be waiting this out. You’ll be liquidated. I have seen too many veterans fall to the hubris of thinking the price can’t possible fall to X level. Then, for one brief candle of intense market fear it does and they’ve lost more than they’ve bargained for. Before you play with leverage you should have a forecast for what the market will do that justifies taking such a risk. You should have contingency plans to execute on if your prediction isn’t coming true in the timeframe you expect. Don’t let it linger on until you feel like it’s a sunk cost. Definitely don’t double down. Every time you sign a transaction involving leverage repeat this in your head: leverage will fuck you up.

Get Rich Slow

This last one summarizes the spirit of all the above advice. Thriving in this ecosystem is first and foremost about survival. Surviving is often a matter of having a clear head and assessing risks rationally when everyone else isn’t. That requires having your emotions under control. Whenever you take any extreme action you are going to experience extreme emotions about it. Those emotions will cause you to act rashly. This is how you end up scammed, overexposed and holding shitcoins you don’t honestly believe in, having missed the top of the cycle without taking profit because everything seemed so bullish, being liquidated at the bottom, in debt to the government, and joining the ranks of the disillusioned about what is otherwise a wonderful civilization changing technology. Life is a marathon. You are only racing yourself. Take the time to learn before taking big risks. Don’t try to get rich quick here. Get rich slow.

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Interesting news on the application front. I came across Rarimo protocol, which is building ZK passport-based voting. In this post, I’ll concentrate on proof of identity aspect of voting. Proof of identity is a stronger guaranty than proof of personhood.

I’ve been intrigued in leveraging government issued documents as a proof of identity for a while. Yes, government issued. Blasphemy! First of all, I’ve been disappointed with current web3 approaches to proof of identity. Ones based on monetary incentives - “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Social recovery - not that I delved too deep - seems gameable. Dedicated piece of hardware to scan biometric features - maybe. Think about it, which entities have always had the problem with uniquely identifying a person? Who are the incumbent identity providers? Governments, banks, and lately IT companies like Google, Twitter, FB…(“Sign in with Google”…).

Right of the bat, IT company’s proof of identity is shit. You can easily sibyl it. Banks - much beater. Having a bank card pretty much means you are a person or a legal entity and not a bot. Nobody can take your money if they don’t scam you. Thing is, banks rely on government issued documents. Who caries the burden of identifying a person from the moment they are born? Can they enroll in a school? Can they cross a border? Did they pay taxes? Are the eligible for health care? Important stuff, right? Governments have been doing this for a long time. They have institutions on institutions for making sure that you are who you say you are. The world works thanks to them having done a decent job.

As we enter the third millennium, machine readable government documents have become a thing. Biometric passports are standardized (ICAO Doc 9303). Almost all the countries in the world now issue passports compliant with this protocol.

Rarimo developed the Freedom tool - opensource, ZK powered, mobile app which scans your passport and creates a user profile. It claims to preserve authenticity, eligibility, anonymity and uniqueness. The whitepaper addressed security claims and assumptions.

Thanks to ZK proofs, you could prove claims about yourself, without giving away unnecessary personal information. You could prove that you are of legal age, without giving away any other info, including your identity. Are you a resident of certain country? Are you human and not a bot?

Proper digital identity unlocks a lot of applications web3 people have been talking about: voting, reputation systems, user profiles, social networks…These are the use cases which cannot be tackled with crypto-economics alone. What do you think?

Edit: grammar.

Edit 2: short demo video.

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u/benido2030:

I am bearish hardware wallets. Obviously smart contract wallets are getting way better, which is one reason. But if a nation state can manipulate 1000s of small electronic devices and people don’t find out until it’s too late, they can manipulate hardware wallets as well.

This is just a general thought. But be aware of the risks.

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u/haurog:

The only thing I can say is that when you become a target of one of the larger 3 letter agencies or equivalent governmental (emphasis on ‘mental’) agencies of some countries there is pretty much nothing you can do. They will get to you, get all your assets and only if you go to the most extreme lengths you might be able to prevent that.

We know since the Snowden revelations that the NSA has an internal catalogue where you can order ‘replacement’ parts which then get exchanged during shipment of an order to the target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog This is happening by diverting the shipment to a unknown location, replace part of the electronics device with an NSA produced one and then continue the shipment to the customer which obviously is not aware of any diversions or replacements. As far as I remember they also had ready made casing which included a spy device for the most popular laptops and electronic devices.

I guess the same thing could happen with a hardware wallet. But to be honest I expect it to be easier for them to monitor your used wallets, get a list of your addresses and get to the seed phrases afterwards when they arrest you. Most people will have it written down somewhere. Sure you can always just keep your seed phrase in your head (brainwallet) but I guess only a very small fraction of crypto users really go that far.

For them getting in your hot wallet will probably be easier than attacking a hardware wallet. So, a hot wallet is not safer at all.

If the goal is to attack the chain itself by compromising thousands of hardware wallets. I am pretty sure they could do that. Not sure what the legality of this would be, but hey as history and current events show these agencies have a different legal rulebook than most of us have to follow.

I still think having hardware wallet in some form is one of the best defense one can have. Normal hackers will not be able to get to the private keys as they ideally never leave the device (hello ledger). If you pair it with a smart contract multisig wallet where an attacker would have to attack several hot wallets or even hardware wallets at the same time I deem it pretty much impossible that you will lose your ETH due to a supply chain attack.

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The ratio matters for me because objectively Ethereum is better at everything that Bitcoin does. There is no reason why Bitcoin is a better SoV. And this reality has to be reflected in the ratio at some point. BTC is very flawed and is not sustainable. A BTC failure without profound change is inevitable. It is absolutely perplexing that the market does not realize this. I dont care about Dollar price as much because I think the crypto space realizing whats important is the first step on the journey. I care about the ratio because it reflects the market realizing rational facts.

Its not about money. I care about the future of human society and about the improvement of our society. And I honestly believe that only Ethereum can deliver a credibly neutral trustless financial system a bedrock for finance that can not be corrupted. I want this platform to succeed because it will improve the world. Finally a level playing field that can be set up in a way that empowers people and organizations and stops corrupt governments. Its can be a counterweight for fraud and corruption and government overreach.

That is why I am into crypto. That is my main focus. So I care aboout the ratio because Bitcoin is the wrong way. And Solana is the wrong way as none of them can deliver what is needed.

A financial system that is trustless and can cater to the entire planet. Ethereum is on its way to achieve this. Aslong as Bitcoin ratio is so bad it means people are not realizing what the purpose of blockchain technology is and people did not realize what tools they have at their disposal to manage their finances in a way that can not be tampered with.

Yes obviously we are not there yet, Ethereum has many many flaws, but we are on the path to it. And the ratio is an indicator for blockchain technology to actually fullfill its purpose.

Holding coins that can not be deflated (Bitcoin will fail at this btw) is just part of the equation. People using crypto for everything that banks usually do for crypto to replace centralized systems. That is what I want. I want traditional companies to be either replaced or reorganized on Ethereum rails. I want the upper people to slowly distribute their power to more people.

Blockchain did not achieve anything yet. Its just the start the very first day of a century long journey. And the ratio is an indicator when we are out of phase 1. Realizing why blockchains are valuable. We are still in Phase 1 where the people do not know why blockchain is important.

For me its not about money. Its about change. And the ratio is an indicator for that change.

If Ethereum does not flip Bitcoin. Then blockchains are useless and its really just a speculative meme coin casino. And nothing more.

Bitcoin for me is the nr1 meme coin. It has a strong narrative but it fails at real world utility and is not designed to be sustainable long term. It needs centralized entities to offer services thus the fact that its decentralized matters only in so far that it cant be inflated arbitrarily. However the security of the protocol is dependent on the inflation so the system is about to fail.

Ethereum flipping Bitcoin and Ethereum becoming the most expensive asset on this planet is when we will be able to see crypto change the world profoundly. And thats all I want. Everything else. Is just secondary. I do have enough money. I dont need a Bugatti. I do have a job. I want Ethereum specifically to be a guarantee for a free and open Internet/monetary system that can not be censored. I want entitities like EU China America Google Facebook Apple AGI to not have total control to have to deal with a platform that they can not censor and that wont be corrupted by them. I want Ethereum to be that strong. We are not there yet but we could be one day. And flipping Bitcoin is the first step on that journey.

Seems outlandish but this was the reason why I even got interested in Crypto in the first place. The prospect of that happening. And Bitoin dropped the ball by ossifying too early and just focusing on an unsustainable inflation schedule.

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A good while ago I told you all I am slow to get around to things but I wanted to add some default user flairs. Well, as prophesied, I was indeed slow to get round to it. But lo and behold, we now have default user flairs!

The new ones have some colour where the old custom ones didn’t. Custom ones are still an option, they just won’t be as colourful as the default flairs. Also, these default ones should give us a good idea of your vibe. if you’re new, a TA guy, long term investor etc. Hopefully we can get a better feel for what angle you’re coming from when you make a post here. At the end of the day we want less conflict and hopefully a bit of context as to your leanings might help a bit. If not, it’s still just a bit of fun. Feel free to grab a meme flair if that’s your style!

Finally, I’m happy to add some more, so let me know what you want to see added and maybe even a colour request (send me ur hex codes 😉). Though I think we might reserve one colour for the mods. Maybe we can colour coordinate our flairs. Currently it’s a bright ugly shade of blue so you’re not missing out on much.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2347.90

u/TimbukNine

0.04056

u/usesbinkvideo

90,849 hodlers subscribed (-1)

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Beating up the polls,

Not giving up owner roles,

ZK among goals.

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

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I recently got to feel like a whale, I sold a larger amount on CB, like 100k, on the USDC/EUR pair which is rather low volume.

Here’s how it went:

I put it up in a single sell wall, shadowing over the puny trades of the mere mortals. Every bid and ask before mine paled in comparison. There it stood, a monolith, looming over the market.

As soon as the order hit the books my counterparties must’ve recoiled in shock. Who was the nameless entity, willing to dump a vast fortune in a single breath? Whispers filled the market - has a whale arrived? Has Megalodon decided to feast?

At this point, time stood still. I have become death, maker of the markets. A force to be reckoned with, altering the fabric of the order book itself.

Who would be brave enough to challenge my creation?

Eventually, all monuments must fall, but the battle was one for the history books. At first only a few daring souls nibbled away at the edges of my fortress. But after the market overcame the initial shock, larger buyers emerged, each of their trades echoing like hammer strikes against the stone of my stronghold.

It should not go down easy though, over the course of 6 long hours and 211 individual fills, they relentlessly dismantled my towering order, brick by brick. An epochal amount of time in the fast paced crypto realm.

Finally, when the dust settled, and the sun rose, only rumors remained of what once stood tall. Another testimony to the patience of the market, able to move even the biggest mountains, with enough time.

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Most popular questions in the EF AMA right now:

1. Value accrual thesis
2. Lowering blob fee?
3. Driving value to eth
4. Blob fee pricing

The community push for increasing blob fees has me a bit worried tbh, I still think this would be an extremely bad move. Not going into the details again today but 2 weeks ago I detailed why I believe free blob fees + zero rollup congestion are fantastic combo for institutional adoption. One that’s needed.

Then a couple of days later Sony announced the launch of an Ethereum rollup. Our first non crypto native rollup ever. Fantastic news. This confirmed what future Ethereum adoption will look like: companies with huge user bases will bring millions of users at once. Just like Base brings us 4 million weekly active addresses. Not gaining users one at a time. Millions at a time. Millions per institution, millions per rollup.

And then, a few days ago, Solana makes a 180° pivot from calling L2s parasitic and announces it now supports L2s. Rebrands them “network extensions”.

Please take a second to wonder: why would Solana pivot to L2s right now?

At a moment when overall blockchain activity is moderate at best?

Could it be that Sony made them realize Ethereum is about to onboard one institution after the other? That the only way they’ll compete is by faking their way into L2 adoption partnerships?

This is why the community push for blob fees worries me:

The only reason Solana got any traction to begin with is because Ethereum L1 fees were way too high in the past. That’s what drove users to less decentralized lands.

Do we really want to make the same mistake again and offer an opportunity to Solana’s L2s to gain any sort of traction? Not because we needed to but because we got greedy with our own few L2s?

Ethereum should do what a market leader does: grow the market as fast as possible and cash in when the whole world is in.

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For people wanting to know what EOF is and does, this is the most comprehensive discussion I have seen about it yet:

https://xcancel.com/uttam_singhk/status/1830526179105001771

or

https://twitter.com/uttam_singhk/status/1830526179105001771

It was shared by a Nethermind dev who works on EOF a few days ago, so I think it is technically accurate. It is a 30 minute video going through the why, the scope, the improvements, the changes and also addresses some of the criticism. It is definitely worth a watch as it gets pretty deep into the weeds, but he manages to explain it reasonably well. Some things were over my head, but I definitely learned a lot.

In short EOF helps to better store smart contract code on chain by adding a header and ordering code and date sections. Interestingly this even reduces codes size by a few %. EOF does many validation checks during deployment instead of runtime, which can prevent some DOS attacks and might also help to increase the max size of smart contracts again (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-170.md). It also contains many smaller quality of life improvements for solidity developers. Some new calls are also introduced to interact with external contracts which improve efficiency. Overall the EOF improvements are rather complex and the disadvantage is that the legacy contracts still need to be supported which increases complexity by duplicating some of the logic. This means it will take a lot of testing to make sure things work correctly.

All in all most people do not really need to change anything for this upgrade it will all be handled in the background. I think if you are a solidity dev you will have to learn a few more call functions but otherwise there is also not too much to do. I personally think EOF improvements are a very good step forward for the EVM.

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Wanna share here - starting today, I’m going to be working with Protocol Support at the EF

https://x.com/nixorokish/status/1833209686272971079

r/ethfinance is where I started as crazy eth lady 🔧 (well… really r/ethtrader but I donut know if that matters). EthStaker is where being active in this sub took me. Volunteering and then working with EthStaker has been an insanely good decision in my life. I’m so crazy excited and happy to be working with insanely smart and creative people I admire greatly.

This community is the first good home I found in crypto <3

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u/superphiz:

I’ve been thinking about these words from /u/BuyETHorDAI:

The longer I’m in this space, the more I dislike tokens in general, but maybe I’m just jaded.

It causes me to wonder: What are the vital constructs of web3? It’s hard to set aside price and market performance and just consider this question. Right now they seem to be coins, tokens, and NFTs, and everyone hates tokens and NFTs right now because they’re salty about prices being down, but the question remains - ARE these the three fundamental constructs of web3? Are any of them truly irrelevant and going to die away? Are we missing more constructs?

I really don’t know the answer, I’m just running it through my own mind. I could easily be convinced that they are the only fundamental constructs, or that we have too many or too few.

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u/LogrisTheBard:

I think on-chain governance software is and will be indispensable. Code needs to be upgraded. How do we do that with so much at stake as safely as possible?

Otherwise I think tokens just represent digital ownership and are one of the best product fits blockchains have found. It’s hard to hate on the concept of ownership, even if you may not like the distribution of ownership amongst all people. Changes of ownership often use what we consider financial tools which is basically all of Defi. That’s not going away either.

I think we’ll continue to see the proliferation of personal digital spaces. You were just talking about the base profile system yesterday. I mentioned layer3 a few weeks ago. Guild is another one. I think curating a digital identity is something most people understand from Facebook and will be better served when done on a system that isn’t explicitly manipulating you with the data you give it.

The last thing I think will become vital on chain is peer to peer services. Payment will often be part of this so it will be intrinsically linked to the chain but you’ll be able to pair yourself with someone willing to do something for you using the chain as a matchmaking service. This is pretty much all DePin and AVSs to start but I see little reason these systems couldn’t be expanded to non-digital services eventually.

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I can see ethereum impacting so many facets of life, but here are some that I would love to see personally:

Transaction settlement becomes faster and cheaper, with more assurances. I no longer wait 3-5 business days for something to clear. I’ll have the stablecoins in my account and know that it’s there. Cross-border payments no longer take a big % fee and several days to finalize (as someone who has lived abroad but been paid in USD this was very frustrating).

Tokenize the world. Deeds. Royalties. IOUs. Licenses. Securities. Tickets. I see tokens as a hyper-efficient form of a wrapper, much like ETFs are for the financial world.

Reduced communication and coordination friction. Especially when coordinating across time zones or governments. Ideally DAOs take form, but even without DAOs the ability to coordinate digitally worldwide with effective anti-Sybil features (via introducing costs or incentives) is amazing. Got a taste of it with ICOs before regulators shut that down, and fledgling communities around NFTs hint at what is possible.

Decentralized exchanges. If we indeed tokenize the world, exchanges allow free market forces to find efficient solutions. In fact I was not sold on Ethereum until I looked into smart contracts, and when I realized what DEXs were capable of I became fully on board. But more than just shitcoin roulette, I want to see a future where one can trade currencies, assets, community access, etc., with more freedom and less cost than currently possible.

There’s a lot more that I’m excited to see implemented, like personal privacy and public transparency, freedom of expression, the digital empires that are built now that digital ownership is enforceable. But that’s enough rambling from me already.

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I can see ethereum impacting so many facets of life, but here are some that I would love to see personally:

Transaction settlement becomes faster and cheaper, with more assurances. I no longer wait 3-5 business days for something to clear. I’ll have the stablecoins in my account and know that it’s there. Cross-border payments no longer take a big % fee and several days to finalize (as someone who has lived abroad but been paid in USD this was very frustrating).

Tokenize the world. Deeds. Royalties. IOUs. Licenses. Securities. Tickets. I see tokens as a hyper-efficient form of a wrapper, much like ETFs are for the financial world.

Reduced communication and coordination friction. Especially when coordinating across time zones or governments. Ideally DAOs take form, but even without DAOs the ability to coordinate digitally worldwide with effective anti-Sybil features (via introducing costs or incentives) is amazing. Got a taste of it with ICOs before regulators shut that down, and fledgling communities around NFTs hint at what is possible.

Decentralized exchanges. If we indeed tokenize the world, exchanges allow free market forces to find efficient solutions. In fact I was not sold on Ethereum until I looked into smart contracts, and when I realized what DEXs were capable of I became fully on board. But more than just shitcoin roulette, I want to see a future where one can trade currencies, assets, community access, etc., with more freedom and less cost than currently possible.

There’s a lot more that I’m excited to see implemented, like personal privacy and public transparency, freedom of expression, the digital empires that are built now that digital ownership is enforceable. But that’s enough rambling from me already.

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EVMavericks Weekly Recap (Sept 2-8)

Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph

Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!

1. Degen chat covers NFTs and what’s worth buying, some airdrop potentials. Pooltogether and their insane APR are discussed.
2. JT hosts Weekly Doots Livestream #77
3. bbroad is leading the way in applying for grants. This time it’s gitcoin+octant community round.

4. Still a decent amount of chatter about new platforms, new coins, accumulation phase, another potential politifi seaason, pumpfun and volume.

   Calls of the week:

   ~8x+ $clippy by GreenGeorge

   ~6x $IRS by whatthefuck.eth

   ~4x+ $FARM by whatthefuck.eth

   ~2x $worth by whatthefuck.eth

5. Farmers talk about blobs, Monad, elixyr, Eigen and more.
6. heeey appears on an episode of ‘get to know EVMavericks’.
7. A new member - moonie.eth - joined EVMavericks this last week.
8. New EVM multisig election is on the horizon. We are in need of signers!
9. Lots of activity in our general public chat. Mostly talks about the market with some bullish sentiment being sprinkled in.

Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here are a few guides!

• EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.
• Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord that’s open to public and there’s a decent amount of activity there!

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I just read a VERY cool NFT (Punk) story on X. While you can click on the link and read the tweets, I have assembled them all here!

📜

Today happened one of the biggest crypto punk heists of all time. Someone with a lot of patience and knowledge just bought ape 2386 for 10 ETH.

Once upon a time when fractionalisation was en vogue, ape 2386 was fractionalised and valued at like 450 ETH. This happened on a now dysfunctional site called niftex. The ape stayed fractionalised even after they shut down as it was in an escrow contract. 10000 shares were all distributed between loads of people. And a buyout was not possible. Until now..

The contract worked in a way that if you propose a buyout, a 14 day grace period was initiated where the rest of the shareholders had time to ponder and accept or reject it. 14 days ago someone made a proposal for .001 eth per share. It was not rejected and went through.. Buying price: 10 ETH (last apes sold for 620 eth, 3.3k eth and 2.69k eth)

🤯

Tech Dive here! (pasting it below)

Punk 2386, with a current high bid of 600 eth, sold for 10 ETH today. A combination of clever sleuthing, followed by an unfortunate miscalculation lead to a 7 figure payday for 0x282.

This ape punk was fractionalized into 10,000 ERC20 tokens on 9/26/2020, and spread out among what is now 257 holders.

This was done on a now decommissioned platform called niftex (the contracts continue to live forever).The setup is such that any shareholder can propose a “shotgun”, whereby any shareholder can propose a buyout price, and if nobody counters, they can purchase the asset after 14 days.0x282 initiated a shotgun on 8/28 (14 days ago).

Some people took notice, including at least two shardholders. One put it off because they thought they had more time, but the other (@gmoneyNFT) made an attempt to block.. In order to block the buyout, you must effectively purchase the proposer’s shares at higher than their proposed price.

0x282 proposed a price of 0.001 eth per share (10 eth for all shares), so a valid counter needed to be 0.0010000001, as defined by the shotgun contract. gmoney submitted a counterclaim of 0.000001 ETH (1000000000000 wei), just short of the requirement.
At this point, if any other shareholder had contributed 10,000 wei (two TEN TRILLIONTHS of a cent) to the counterclaim, the shotgun would have been blocked. But two ten trillionths of a cent was not committed, the shotgun was not blocked, and 0x282 walks away with the steal of the century: 1 of only 24 ape punks, for 70% under the global punk floor.
🔥

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Tough pills to swallow

Throwing shade and vitriol at TA people won’t make the ratio any better.

I personally (not speaking for the mod team) would like to see less hate for certain users or types of posts. When JT and the other OG mods founded this subreddit they did a stellar job in fostering a positive and welcoming community, even in the darkest of times price wise. I would like to encourage people not to take out their frustrations on others. I get it, you don’t think TA means anything and you’re probably right, but that doesn’t justify vilifying people posting TA here or a YouTuber who has been calling for the ratio to “come home” back to 0.03 or 0.04.

I wouldn’t even say I’m siding with the TA folks here, in fact I’ve expressed not being super approving of some TA and also bashing on the semi-predatory paid private group model which folks like Ben Cowen use which has simply never sat right with me (but to be fair, it is better than shilling bybit leverage affiliate links etc). Anyway, I feel caught in the middle. I don’t really side with anyone but I’m sick of the negativity of people picking on certain names and types of content. One side of this debate is constantly being angry and bashing people while the other just stays quiet and often times leaves altogether and that’s not right. This is a subreddit which is welcome to all. So can we please just chill out a bit and keep it a bit more wholesome?

It’s always personal attacks and bold claims about TA working or not working and never any evidence to back it up. Baseless rants just spread negativity and makes this place a lot less welcoming which is against the subreddit’s ethos. If you must go on a crusade against TA, at least find some peer reviewed papers which prove that it is bullshit or something because I’m yet to see anyone do anything like that when talking about this topic and I say that as someone who is very much a TA skeptic. At the very least one could go back and review all the TA posts here and sum up how many of them were right/wrong and use that as evidence (albeit low-quality evidence).

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u/Equal-Jellyfish1

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2380.90

u/TimbukNine

0.04217

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Go where you belong,

Knock your chest and sing along,

Apes together strong.

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First they ignore you

Then they laugh at you

Then they fight you

Then you get an ETF

Then they ignore you again

Then they laugh at you again

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Introducing https://boasty.app/ - Schedule Your Ethereum Posts

Dear ethfinance, special day for me today - after 7 years in the space, i get to show something small i built. Inspired by this u/benido2030 post last Saturday, i spent the last 5 days building Boasty. I always wanted to try building an app on Ethereum, and this idea sounded simple enough so i gave it a go and now it’s live.

TLDR Pay 1 USD in stablecoin and schedule a post on Ethereum, you get a https://boasty.app permalink to reference and share which contains your published message and transactions associated. See an example here

The app is an MVP but everything works as far as i can tell. It is currently permissioned, meaning the messages are stored in a centralized database and no smart contracts yet, but as you can see on the roadmap, I intend to introduce message storing on IPFS, smart contract(s), sha256 hashed messages with auto or user reveal, supporting more wallets (currently only tested with Metamask), L2 networks and hopefully more.

Last but not least, I’d like to make the app free to post for my fellow solo stakers and the /r/ethfinance community (EVM holders for now?). Happy to hear any ideas on how to make this happen!

Feedback appreciated, feel free to say it like it is and try to break the app. I am not on crypto twitter or any of those, so if you like it, please share it! Thanks u/benido2030 for the idea!

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Started a new series. As always, subscribe to EVMavericks’ paragraph to get all new content immediately when it is out! I hope you enjoy!

Get to know EVMavericks #1 - Etheraider aka EVM 1209

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

Hey, this is Etheraider and I’m EVM 1209.

Who or what introduced you to crypto?

My brother bought into ETH in 2015, held for 2 years, and sold right before the 2017 bull run. I didn’t know anything about crypto until I saw he missed out on life-changing gains, so I decided to learn from his mistake!

How and when did you find your way into EVMs?

Well, actually, I was there at the very beginning and helped bring EVMavericks to the blockchain!

So it’s been a couple of years since the beginning; what made you stay?

I think we’re one of the best communities of OGs on Ethereum—a lot of good people around with all sorts of talent, perspective, and experience in the space. It’s a good place to be.

What’s your best EVMavericks memory?

There are a lot of good ones. But I’d say that first EVM podcast we launched, where many of us (who knew each other only on Reddit for years) “talked” together for the first time. It was awesome.

What are you most excited about EVMs looking forward?

In the short term, I’m looking forward to us getting into the Octant funding round. In the long term, I’m excited to see future endeavors our community members will pursue!

What is your favorite hobby or way to spend time outside of crypto?

Well, this past year, I got really into going to the gym and living a healthier lifestyle. Decided to place an emphasis on taking care of my mind, body, and soul! As far as hobbies go, I’m a big fan of disc golf, tabletop board games, and ping pong!

What one piece of advice would you give to someone who’s just getting into crypto?

Learn about why crypto exists, how powerful its impact can be, and how it can dramatically change all our lives for the better.

Any piece of alpha that you can share with us? It can be anything, not just crypto-related.

When you’re on your deathbed, are you gonna care about how much money you’ve made or how nice your house/cars/etc. are? No. The only thing you’ll care about is the people you love and the impact you’ve had on them. Don’t wait until then to go all in on the people you love.

Lastly, is there anything else you wanna share? Maybe a project you are working on? Latest accomplishments? Whatever you want! The stage is yours Etheraider!

In a time such as this, where the world is so crazy, divided, and full of darkness, my favorite verse to quote is this: “The light has entered the world, and the darkness has NOT overcome it.”

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It seems like ETH has 3 big problems this year.

1) Airdrop flop - the hype for eigenlayer and others was completely unreal, while the airdrops themselves were a terrible combination of stingy and overpriced. If a token launches at its best possible market cap, there’s nowhere to go but down, especially if there are gigantic unlocks coming. Tokens were a lot more interesting when you had a real chance at making a killing at buying something that seemed like it had real fundamentals or promise. If some hyper-complicated protocol launches at an insane valuation, there are going to be very few buyers - it’s too complicated for non-crypto natives, the upside is already priced in, and people are going to want to unload the tokens. So every new token has pretty much gotten crushed. tough way to build market hype.

2) ETF Flop - The BTC ETF set up some incredible expectations, but ETH matching it was always going to be an issue. BTC got huge early inflows from crypto-natives wanting to offload some of their unchain coins so they don’t have to worry about custody. It makes a lot of sense from a diversification perspective, and there’s basically nothing to do with unchain bitcoin, anyway. Institutions/financial advisors are much more slow moving, but the retail buyers disguised this. This was huge for bitcoins narrative and expanded its presence among the broader world. ETH, by contrast, will only be bought in the ETF by those who really can’t interact with onchain infrastructure - basically, financial advisors, institutions, 401ks, which all take a long time to spin up. Holding ETH onchain is valuable, so there’s a real cost to using the ETF instead. This makes sense to us, but makes ETH look bad to the tradfi world/retail, furthering the narrative that there’s bitcoin as the main crypto, and then there’s everything else. While this is disputed by the fundamentals, the fundamentals are complicated. Narrative is tough.

3) Solana meme coins - memecoins on Solana have been a retail incinerator. They look appealing - zero transaction fees that let you avoid extractive vc coins - but the reality is that Solana’s centralized validator, sequencer, and MEV setup allows for colossal extraction, while the meme coins themselves allow for easily faked volume metrics and huge insider dumping. It’s hard to imagine a worse market to participate in. However, the notable crypto influencers are some of the only people making money off this, so they pound the table about how great Solana is. VCs are (and have always been) huge owners of Solana, so they. ALSO pound the table on how great sol is/how bad etc is. So Solana is stealing retail mindshare while impoverishing everyone who uses the chain. It’s a bad outcome.

So what does ETH need to re-attract retail? Yield farming and gambling. Onchain options that are actually liquid. New tokens launching quickly (as a quasi ico while avoiding being direct icos) at low valuations so that some momentum can build. Tokens that actually result in cash flow when staked, so that people have an actual reason to buy/speculate on them.

What ETH REALLY needs is to capture mindshare from bitcoin as a pristine non-sovereign store of value. ETH should be fighting with bitcoin and gold, not with Solana. Solana as a network may be great (I don’t think it is but ignore that for now) but SOL the token is complete garbage unless things change dramatically.

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Vitalik Buterin started an unofficial AMA last weekend on Warpcast after he posted about stablecoin decentralization on X

TL;DR of the original X post:

• DEX: great
• Decentralized Stablecoins: great
• Polymarket: great
• Semi-decentralized Stablecoin like USDC: Not great, but they’re a practical and convenient necessity. The issuer is centralized, but the rest of on-chain use is decentralized
• Anything that has no sustainability like “decentralized” liquidity farming or yield farming: Very bad. The key reason is lack of sustainability. These are just get-rich schemes.
• It’s not enough to only have finance on blockchains. It needs more real applications outside of finance
• Useful related post: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism.html

These are the highlights from the Warpcast AMA response to that X post:

I’ve paraphrased the important parts of some of the longer questions and responses

• Q: Banana Milk or Chocolate Milk?
• Vit: Coconut milk is best, almond if I can’t find coconut. I don’t drink either independently, I put it into stuff, and that stuff in question ends up containing bananas and dark chocolate at roughly equal frequencies (usually both)

• Q: Do you have any heuristic for when compromises to decentralized principles go too far for stablecoins?
• Vit: My main worry is when they start entrenching network effects that become hard to undo. For example, if we start normalizing “sign in to this crypto social thing with Google”, I think that’s really bad, UNLESS it’s done in an account-abstraction way where under the hood it’s using zk-email and individual users can sign in with their ethereum account instead (and convert their account from one to the other). This way, it’s not entrenching network effects of centralized web2 platforms, it’s actually creating a bridge that lets users join the ecosystem with them, but then more easily migrate away from them.

• Q: Last TV series you watched? And if you liked it
• Vit: “Three Body Problem” was good
• My opinion: Hell yeah! Lots of Ethereum devs are “Dark Forest” fans due to its parallels with Ethereum MEV. Personally, I would recommend the Netflix adoption over the gigantic Chinese soap opera one, but neither series has reached the “Dark Forest” book yet.

• Q: Do you prefer °C to °F?
• Vit: I prefer C, but it’s a weaker preference than all the other units. I would gladly take a trade of switching to F in exchange for never hearing about either feet/miles or ounces/pounds again.

• Q: How can we offer decentralized access to content? Http is not good enough any more. Ipfs feels unusable when it comes to normal users (without http gateways). Thoughts?
• Vit: We need browsers with IPFS integrated. Brave was supposed to be that, but unfortunately its IPFS gateway is quite slow so I never end up using it.
• My opinion: Agreed. I hate how difficult and slow it is to access IPFS gateways via browser extensions. IPFS is barely accessible unless you pay for premium gateway services.

• Q: [Pure decentralization is overrated] Farcaster, Base, and Telegram have a decentralized foundation, but were built by centralized teams.
• Vit: If the team behind Farcaster didn’t build and market Warpcast, we wouldn’t be here now. The use cases we want Ethereum to take on need the centralized approach to grow, but are placed on a decentralized foundation.
• My opinion: Agreed. Almost nothing we do in crypto is purely decentralized, and that would be an unrealistic expectation. We would never be able trust anything on-chain without prior off-chain trust for the teams that build those protocols. That is, unless user were a senior crypto developer with code-auditing expertise, which is ridiculous requirement.

• Q: Do you see usdc overtaking cashapp, apple pay and the likes as a generally acceptable form of payment
• Vit: I think we need to have easy to use ethereum-ecosystem-wide L2 payments first for that to happen.

Source: https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xa3ad7913

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There has been a lot of posts of people feeling down recently. My honest response to this is stop looking at numbers and make something for the fun of it. If you can code write contracts that do something fun. If you can design then make mockups for weird fictional games. If you can write, publish an article about a future society where eth never existed. Start playing with apps. use things. break things. find the glitches, the edges. look in the mirror. uniswap backwards is pawsinu. What if the aave ghost is haunting the chain? How many times have people sent exactly 0.666 eth? What if we start calling them nifties again instead of nft? can we make bingo on base?

there is so much for us to do. now it is september. summer lull is over. what is dead may never die 🐙

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At the same time transaction count is near ATH and active addresses maintained pretty well throughout the summer. The main reason why blobs seem to go down is thanks to optimizations by L2s.

Showing the market that Ethereum has room to grow is absolutely needed, if we were near saturation today we wouldn’t have institutional rollups tomorrow.

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This is like a vampire attack we used to see during 2020 - 2021 defi time frame. I kind of like this thought process

https://x.com/CloutedMind/status/1830405365898580245

i take the stance that blobs being 0 fee is bullish

it chokes competition

DA is ultimately a race to 0 anyway, might as well weaponize DA as loss leader to expand ethereum GDP

not only does it tell all these DA layoors to go fk themselves like TIA etc, it chokes any ethereum L2 competitors

no longer can an alt-L1 use “cheaper” as a selling point, only “faster” and “more decentralized” (than an L2)

i think soon we see L2s that be “faster” like megaETH and then we get 2/3

then as the roadmap for L2s go along and they become more permissionless without centralization risks we tick 3/3 (cheaper, faster and more decentralized with the inherent security of eth)

then where does an alt-l1 compete ? it doesnt.. its just L2 vs L2 and its all on ethereum

and ETH is their money

thats moat

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EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 26-September 1)

Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph

Catch up on a week’s worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.

1. We voted for Doots Podcast and Aestus MEV Relay in the Octant’s snapshot and both projects made it to the upcoming Epoch 5 allocation window!

2. JT hosts Weekly Doots Livestream #76

3. 696 hosts a new series: get to know EVMavericks. First episode with Etheraider is out now.

4. GreenGeorge starts a thread asking lions about one project that really excites them.

5. interweaver shares that Starknet has undergone a massive upgrade, now introducing 2-second transactions and it’s making a big difference for projects like Influence.

6. cybersea published a website about their artistic journey

7. Degen chat has a little bit of everything this week. Some base mints, some random stats, some talk about Maker, some memes ofc.

8. Memecoins have slowed down, but people still share some useful tools and degen TG groups. Generally, there’s a lot of chatter about coins, the market, and vibes. Discussions include safer memes and strategies for longer meme team positions. The top play of the week features Etheraider longing ETH, with several other lions following suit

Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here’s a few guides!

• EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.

• Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord that’s open to public and there’s a decent amount of activity there!

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Ethereumn Foundation is doing an AMA on 9/5, get your Q’s ready and post them here:

https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1f81ntr/ama_we_are_ef_research_pt_12_05_september_2024

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Yesterday night I was devastated, I have a big part of my funds in Penpie a yield aggregator for pendle and it was exploited yesterday evening.

I saw an an alert on twitter and was hoping I would be not affected. But the asset rsweth that was my main holding in one of their LPs was part of it. I had the worst night.

I found out today that only one of the two rsweth pools was exploited, the bigger one with higher tvl and apy, the smaller one that also gets swell L2 points(the reason I was in it) but less yield was not drained and I was spared by pure luck, I guess the attacker focussed on the higher TVL Pools. I should be okay when withdrawals open again. I can still be part of ethfinance and all the crazy ups and downs.

I don’t want to experience that again, is there a safe way to get some yield at least? Or should I just stick by pure ETH on a ledger secured cold wallet? Or maybe rETH?

Losing your funds like this would be the worst, it is worse then (controlled)leverage trading and shitcoin trading because everything could be gone without an error of your own , besides trusting a protocol you should not have trusted.

One small advantage I gained of that experience is I really don’t worry about the short term price action, I know we will be rewarded if we are patient and ETH will come back and we will reach new ATHs at some point.

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Posting as a top level comment a reply I was drafting to a deleted comment regarding onchain vs. tradfi “yield farming”.

No doubt a large portion of “yield farming” is circular nonsense. BUT, even in the world of circular nonsense, the onchain version is transparent with respect to its risk profile and that is a consequential distinction vs. things like FTX/Celcius.

As an example, if Bernie Madoff launched a classic shitcoin yield farm with copies of battletested smart contracts, participants can trust the contracts without having to trust the person.

On the other hand, if the Pope himself started a centralized “yield farm” where I have to send him money via Western Union, the risk profile is now comparatively opaque and a million different risks must be weighed, no offense to His Holiness.

Ponzinomics aside, it’s worth highlighting that more sustainable sources of yield do exist on Ethereum, think of AMM liquidity providing for example. It’s making money from market making, totally normal financial service, but onchain and therefore transparent/permissionless/non-custodial/always online :)

Of course, the question of which tokens are being traded and how many have sustainable value is important for the long term viability of the ecosystem. It’s a complicated question. The Ethereum economy has a lot of bullshit (just like the “regular” economy), but I think it has already “made it”, there’s already real activity in payments, savings, tokenization of treasuries/corporate debt, collectibles, etc.

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u/danseidansei

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2516.30

u/TimbukNine

0.0425

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Storage can’t go bloat,

Blockchain should not be a moat,

Accept that banknote.

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Vitalik ETH bull post lol

https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1826253901240431083

Edit: it will be hilarious if this marks the bottom

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Wake up babe, Vitalik is bull posting.

Ethereum has gotten stronger:

• Under $0.01 txfees on L2
• Two EVM L2s (@Optimism @arbitrum) now at stage 1
• Cross-L2 wallet UX has improved a lot (eg. no more manually switching networks), though still a long way to go
• Much more powerful and mature ZK tooling making life easier for app builders
• Starting to see second-generation privacy tools (eg. @0xbowio)
• Identity/reputation/credentials ecosystem much more powerful, and starting to actually be used more and more
• Progress on STARKs leads to much clearer long-term security and decentralization story
• Much more clarity on account abstraction roadmap
• Much more clarity on block construction endgame (it seems to be down to FOCIL + APS vs multi-proposer)
• Staking decentralization stable (see comparison charts below, the “PoS is more centralized than PoW” line has proven completely false)

The fundamentals for Ethereum are actually crazy strong right now.

https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1826506920393355347

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1. Conviction. Ethereum thesis from 2016 is unchanged; still the most decentralized blockchain, most trusted, energy efficient, second-most lindy, and the core developers have an excellent war chest even 9 years onwards as everyone here has noted today. Also, for anyone who thinks Ethereum is too big or too boring to make great risk-adjusted returns - remember that Ethereum was the second-largest market cap cryptocurrency when it was trading at $6 in Dec 2016.
2. ETF flows are only just about to get started with major RIAs allowed to begin allocating in the coming months - only the very most sophisticated self-directed individual investors have begun allocating in US retirement accounts.
3. Market liquidity from rate cuts and dxy tailwinds incoming - send it.
4. Regulatory environment outlook in the world’s largest economy is looking better than it has ever been.
5. Stablecoins remain the near-term killer app and the Ethereum ecosystem is still poised to capture most of this; the world’s smallest economies are adopting first on the lowest-cost blockchain solutions but the largest economies will adopt last and they will choose Ethereum-based infrastructure for a stronger security guarantee due to the larger economic risk.
6. Medium-term the continued rise of AI applications will provide more tailwinds for crypto as automated financial agents leverage the machine-friendly interfaces of blockchains for banking and transactions.

This is a much easier investment thesis to make than it was in 2016 and consequently is the reason I’ve remained close to fully invested since then.

The short-term frenzy of memecoins and L1-of-the-year technologies will continue to be eclipsed in the long-term by the secular growth of cryptocurrencies with incredible value accruing to the leaders in the space. The risk/reward profile of Ethereum is better than it has ever been..

Am I talking my book? Hell yeah I am.

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New tweet from Roman Storm (tornado cash) today:

Folks, I have to win and it takes resources!
Please help.
Im severely underfunded for the trial.

If you have any spare ETH, consider donating to him and Aleksei Pertsev. Pertsev is already in jail, but here’s some info about his situation from Ameen Soleimani https://x.com/ameensol/status/1822280721870016711

There’s also NFTs to be claimed if that’s your cup of tea. I’m putting up the links for their donation sites, but please do your due dilligence of course.

Roman Storm

https://juicebox.money/v2/p/618

Alexey Pertsev

https://juicebox.money/v2/p/713

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Latest Week in Ethereum News

🎂 Eight year anniversary

https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-august-24-2024

Huge thank you to Evan Van Ness for 8 years of Week in Ethereum News. Evan puts in a huge amount of hours in each week to gift the Ethereum community high quality curated news.

I’m forever grateful to have played a small part in this amazing public good. 3 and a bit years editing for me.

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I thought this article was a pretty good read.

Give it a click if you want some content.

https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/11-critical-moments-ethereum-history-that-made-eth-no2-blockchain/

To summarize the events.

• The Ethereum white paper — 2013.
• The Red Wedding — 2014.
• ICO and launch — 2014.
• The DAO hack and Ethereum Classic — 2016.
• CryptoKitties breaks Ethereum — 2017.
• DeFi summer — 2020.
• Rollup roadmap overhaul — October 2020.
• Proof-of-stake, the Merge — September 2022.
• Decun upgrade: blobs and sharing - March 2024
• Blackrock - March 2024
• ETF’s - July 2024

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At it again today to fight misinformation in r/cc

Anytime Ethereum is mentioned there will be someone to say it’s not decentralized. I’d say half of them believe it, and many of the people who read them will believe them.

I wish Ethereum had armies of people fighting disinformation like other projects have armies to create it. But it’s a frustrating way of spending time.

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EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 19-25)

Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph

Catch up on a week’s worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.

1. Voting for Doots Podcast in Octant’s epoch 5 is live.

   Big shoutout to bbroad.eth aka Ben for spearheading this opportunity for EVMavericks and r/Ethfinance!

2. If any mav is going to Permissionless and needs a place to stay - dm coco on discord.

3. Zombie is looking for 10-14 EVMs to participate in the annual Fantasy Football League. Check out one of the recent announcements in discord to find the exact place for that or just tag ZombieBP.

4. 696 is asking around for a website creator to help out with a project for public goods. if you are one or know one - dm.

5. Degen chat mints base subnames.

   Some talk about ENS ensues.

   Tron gets degens’ attention.

   Attention shifts to EF and them selling ETH.

   Untouchable2k reminds us about his 0xbitcoin call that’s at x2 and he shares his future predictions.

   GreenGeorges long TON, other mavs proceed to follow and all involved end up making some moneyz.

6. Our memecoins connoisseurs continue being early and hitting it consistenly. Lots of talk, it’s the most active place as of recent months. Discussions from polymarket bets to long term ‘safe’ bets on memecoins. But most importantly, lots of plays. Of course we have some losses buuuut

   Here are some top plays of the week:

   ~15x $suncat by eleusys

   ~6x $pjeet by etheraider

   ~5x $tiedan by eleusys

   ~4x $vibes by whatthefuck.eth

   ~2x $odong by eleusys

7. Decentralized onchain governance consultants aka airdrop farmers talk about the state of airdrops and whether they are going to be worth it and majority conclude that the frenzy is over for now.

   GreenGeorge keeps being bullish on Hyperliquid and their ecosystem.

   Hocilef shares scroll farming opportunity.

   Onchainscore link is shared by dray.

   And much more!

8. Our creative lions ain’t sleeping neither. TheBenMeadows dropped his first Gamma print.

9. Our ETHFITNESS thread has been revived. That’s for all the ETH heads who are trying to stay fit 💪

10. We had a mini sweep and a total of 4 buys last week.

11. JT hosts a ninja edition of the Weekly Doots - #75.

Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here’s a few guides!

• EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.
• Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord that’s open to public and there’s a decent amount of activity there!

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Today’s finally the day I get to share something with you I’ve been working on for some time - a new validator client targeting Ethereum. It’s biggest advantage is it allows you to use and combine the data from multiple beacon nodes. This allows us to use multiple client implementations at Serenita, combining their output and results in us being completely protected against single-client bugs! My hope is other operators adopt this too, resulting in a more client-diverse and resilient Ethereum.

I made an introductory tweet here , I would appreciate any likes/retweets since our Twitter presence is not that huge yet.

Some more details over on r/ethstaker, I’m happy to answer any questions here as well!

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u/haurog:

Makerdao rebrands as sky. The protocol is now sky protocol. You can swap MKR to SKY tokens, but you can keep your MKR if you want.

A new stablecoin called USDS is created it can be swapped from/to DAI 1:1. Not sure how long this is possible. DAI can still be used. The protocol gets officially launched on September 18.

USDS seems to have built in SKY rewards. SKY tokens will be distributed to USDS holders/protocol users.

More info on: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/sky-has-arrived/24959

Really curious how this relaunch will turn out in the coming years.

EDIT: As announced, the new USDS has a freeze function which makes it similar to USDC adn USDT: https://xcancel.com/functi0nZer0/status/1828432650152935605

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u/Stobie:

Seems strong negative initial reaction to makerdao and dai upcoming upgrade, largely because it has a “freeze function”. AFAICT from https://github.com/makerdao/usds/blob/dev/src/Usds.sol there’s no explicit freeze function for now, the issue is it’s upgradeable which is equivalent to having a freeze function. I think to be fair to sky people should acknowledge basically everyone has exposure to upgradeable protocols already, including the major stablecoins. It was inevitable if the goal is to work with RWAs with sufficient compliance, should be no surprise.

Practically we can’t avoid mutability exposure (use immut. silo and USDC or chainlink multisigs can still get you), key is how it’s done. Is it a multisig that might be one guy with no time delay? Or is it a token vote which is very slow / is multisig behind a timelock? Seems likely in this case auth is DAO which is too transparent and slow to freeze anything, user can move before DAO adds them to pause map.

I think sky and usds will have their place, excited to see how it goes. But more so for “pure dai”, we lost NM but he still talked to Rune about these things a little, maybe they can come up with something which meaningfully improves on RAI.

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Something I miss from the bear market of ~2018-2020 are the inside jokes and the dark humor to get us through the rough times. EZPZ $324 that one rhino account mocking us as we slid further, the hodl messages. I look back at that time weirdly well. I guess I was so self assured that we were misunderstood or not understood at all.

The last bull run we were learning about maker, compound, uniswap, aave, yearn finance and it was this adventure to try all them out and exciting to try a whole new world without filling out forms, showing your identity or waiting on someone’s approval. It was fun to be an explorer and then it got even better because we got airdrops out of it. And from there it turned into something else where we turned into airdrop hunters. I didn’t feel incentives to try out something unless it had airdrop potential. Other protocols started getting hacked and it felt even worse to try things that weren’t battle tested. Our tolerance to take risks and explore was diminished by the two prong attack of protocol hacks and airdrop expectations.

All of this compounded with the idea that none of the l2 experience feels like the OG experience of eth. Trying to explain to outsiders how you found a new protocol to try out on scroll becomes an absolute chore. I.E purchase some eth on Coinbase, purchase a hardware wallet, send eth to your wallet, bridge to scroll, and from there trust that this protocol doesn’t have an exploit that loses your funds.

Like yeah maybe it’s not all that difficult to figure out if you put in the effort. You take the time and learn. The logic is sound if you find the right places or people to guide you. But it’s too much to expect people that don’t share the passion to get into.

I’m optimistic it’ll get better truly. But to get to that next level I think a lot of these L2’s need to consolidate. OP or Zksync or Arbitrum need to feel just like Ethereum or build their own brand to Ethereum’s level.

Thanks for reading. There just aren’t people I see in the world that understand or care about Ethereum.

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Three filled blobs are worth around 500 USD for ETH price in burn from blobspace alone. We are close to filling it up not even 6 months onto the upgrade. Ethereum’s usage has grown up 700% in one year from 50-60 tps to 350-400 tps and is not showing signs of stopping here.

Why I’m saying this… 3 years ago nobody had a fucking clue how to value Ethereum. So I wrote a little article explaining how you can value the network based on fee revenues, how to calculate a DCF, how the burn places a floor on Ethereum’s long-term price, how you can view the burn as having an equivalent effect to the price as a buyback… 3 years later this understanding has penetrated deeper and now you have CT “analysts” calling ETH dead because they don’t understand EIP-1559 fee mechanism and how it creates a fee market. And they are using the same arguments that were laid out on this subreddit first to price Ethereum, against it.

They still have no fucking clue. Ethereum is gonna fill those blobs, and then we are gonna release more blobs and they will get filled again. And every factor of 3 is gonna bring another 500 USD in price to Ethereum through burn. And in a decade you will have something like 64 blobs and that’s gonna bring you 10K USD/ETH just from blobspace. Not even taking into account L1 native blockspace. And not taking into account any monetary premium that will slowly form because ETH will become the most pristine collateral of all that economy flowing on top and has way lower issuance than USD and even Bitcoin.

Here are the numbers…

500 tps x (60 x 60 x 24) secs/day x 0.05 USD/tx x 50% (L1 value capture) / 2500 ETH/day

There are 3 assumptions here, so I let you decide their uncertainty.

500 tps with 3 blobs: Based on estimates of current tps and blobs filled. Blobs could get denser with compression improvements. But likely not an order of magnitude denser.

0.05 USD average L2 fee: This should land the median fee in around 1-2 cents that is low even for very low added value transactions like buying a coffee. Therefore at those fees even the lowest added value transactions are feasible onchain. This is also close to Solana average fees, so at those fees you can outcompete the promise of cheap fees of alt L1s.

50% value capture: the hardest to estimate. I suspect it will be a tad higher eventually, 70ish%. But assuming 50% has the advantage of not being too far wrong in either direction. If L1 only captures 25% of value (which I consider very low) we are wrong by a factor of 2. If L1 captures almost all value we are wrong by a factor of 2. So I’m splitting the bill here.

2500 ETH/day is just how many we issue nowadays. This is quite bounded from above given Ethereum’s issuance formula.

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This has been a LONG time coming, but /u/jtnichol, /u/nixorokish, and /u/logic_beach, and I met with Leo Glisic and Kyndle, founders of Guardians of the Ether to share their project publicly.

Guardians of the Ether is an upgradable NFT for solo & home stakers that serves as a badge that can promote inclusion of stakers in governance.

These NFTs are non-transferrable, so there is no economic incentive to claim this NFT - only bragging rights. (Think twenty years from now!)

Every year, a few weeks after September 15, these badges can be upgraded to show another year of beacon chain participation.

With gas in the low single-digits, now is an excellent time to mint yours.

Here’s the video launch describing the project.

You can also see the project on opensea.

Warpcast announcement

A tweet thread from Leo Glisic.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/SelfmadeMillionaire

$2651

u/FrenktheTank

0.0438

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Ether atmosphere,

Validators stand to steer,

No trust paint to smear.

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

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ETH price getting you down? Want to channel your inner Reno007? Post about it here in the daily of my new sub /r/ethwhinance!

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If you’re a home staker and were wondering why you’re missing more head votes than a few years ago, at least part of the blame seems to be on Kiln, one of the largest Ethereum staking node operators.

Toni Wahrstätter (EF) published a new article yesterday:

On Attestations, Block Propagation, and Timing Games

Kiln seems to have been pushing “timing games” to the very limit, “delaying block proposals to the 3-3.5 second mark within the slot.” Blocks are supposed to be published 0 seconds into the slot. Publishing 1-1.5 seconds into the slot is still considered okay for various reasons but 3-3.5 seconds is really pushing it since the attestation deadline is at 4 seconds into the slot. Before that deadline, the block needs to be propagated globally over the P2P network, and fully processed by nodes. That gets quite difficult (read: impossible) when the block is proposed 3.5 seconds into the slot.

Some other quotes from the article, I tried not taking them out of context but still would recommend reading the full article:

This chart shows the evolution of timing games. We can see that blocks from Kiln validators appear later and later over time.

the longer one waits, the higher the expected number of missed head votes

This comes with an impact on the network: for blocks proposed by Kiln proposers, the missed/wrong head vote rate is significantly higher:

Kiln shows outlier behavior. While most node operators’ attesters correctly vote for the parent block rather than the local block, Kiln’s attesters appear to disregard this norm. Over 10% of Kiln attesters attempt to keep the local block on-chain by voting for it. If such strategies are adopted, they might justify the losses from incorrect head votes if they prevent the local block from being reorged. However, these tactics are generally frowned upon within the Ethereum community: “don’t play with consensus”.

Full post on ethresear.ch

Tweet

So, are we ready to call Kiln a bad actor here? I myself am not quite there yet but I do think they’re already way too big of an actor regardless of these timing games, managing almost 5% of all Ethereum validators (rated.network, may be even higher). I strongly dislike this behavior though, that’s why I’m sharing it here with all of you.

I do like a few things that Kiln does, like their in-depth blog posts about client diversity (1, 2, 3) and their open-source validator monitoring solution that we also use at Serenita.

Still I can’t help but think playing these timing games causes unnecessary stress to the network, only resulting in short-term profits.

( For those that don’t know the full context - these timing games are played in order to extract a bit more MEV. So as a validator you basically make a selfish decision to make a little bit more profit that hurts the rest of the network because they get a lower reward for the wrong head vote. )

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Be wary when joining crypto projects from unknown people.

A notable Moon/Donut farmer was a victim of a spear phishing social engineering attack: https://x.com/ZoomerXBT/status/1823438152394055994

The attacker convinced the victim to check out the project to see if the victim would be interested in joining the team to create NFTs for it. The executable for the supposed game project turned out to be a Remote Access Tool.

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I was going to reply to this in the chain of comments of the case of that moon/donut farmer (which /u/HSuke posted) that was targetted and drained but I will make this as a top level comment for more visibility:

Windows itself is a riskier system to use and was mentioned as an attack vector in the thread, however, it’s also fair to say that there are several red flags here from the info i get from this chain of comments and it’s that:

• Never use hot wallets for any significant amounts of money
• Never run unknown software (this can happen on any system)
• Be skeptical of crypto jobs which are a significant vector of attack for scammers (esp. gaming, moderator, or unspecified soft-skill based jobs)
• Be skeptical of anything passed to you through telegram, as telegram despite being an excellent piece of software also makes it extremely easy to wipe the chat likely doesn’t pursue scams beyond simple bans
• If you absolutely need to open software or a document, use a virtual machine, this person ran that binary no condom in his machine
• Gaming projects are especially prone to be represented by scammers as they often require installing software, so this should immediately be a red flag
• Treat random messages as scams outright, in any platform, from anyone, making sure to take extra care and question absolutely every single thing the person tells you, often assuming it’s false and with intent to scam you. Especially if your wallets are out in the open and public or you’re a well known farmer/social media person/community manager or member/have a valuable doxxed wallet or if your email or personal details have been in any data breach.

For data breach related things I suggest checking https://haveibeenpwned.com which has several tools to check this which are well known in the privacy community. Also consider using tools and taking measures recommended by https://privacyguides.org.

I also wrote an article about this on my website which I posted on here a while ago. I’ve learned a lot about networking and other things since I wrote this, so some things might be slightly off, but if you wanna check it out feel free.

More importantly though, I highly recommend software isolation, which is the most important measure to take. Minimize your surface area for attack:

• Run unknown and potentially risky-to-use software in virtual machines
• Isolate your crypto activity to a different CLEAN browser (only with your wallet software) or a different clean machine altogether
• Avoid using hot wallets as much as you can

For more technical folk and programmers in this community, or those interested: You should also learn to use smart contract testing software like brownie (python), foundry (rust) or hardhat (javascript) to automate transactions and use hot wallets in a programmatic way, though when learning to use these always use testnets first to try. Learning to use software like this and learning smart contract programming languages like solidity, vyper or others will absolutely help you in navigating the space in a much more careful way.

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Besides “everyone and god hates us”, I’ve yet to see a good reason why the fundamental advantages of ETH won’t play out in price over the next 12-18 months.

ETH is the only smart contract platform that has the institutional/regulatory green light.

ETH is inflating minimally/deflating forever since the merge and 4844. (Compare ETH vs SOL)

ETH is the only smart contract platform that has a record of liveness that is acceptable for global settlement. (Again compare to SOL outages)

L2 scaling is a wild success and is up only. L2 usage is up only.

If smartcontracts/blockchain is a transformative technology there is no real competitor to ETH. BTC DOESN’T DO ANYTHING. Sure, it might be a good investment since enough people think it’s neat, but that doesn’t mean it’s in competition with ETH.

The ONLY reason I see ETH failing is if blockchain itself is rendered useless by some other unforeseen technology. But otherwise the instantaneous settlement, immutability, and resilience of a decentralized smart contract platform like ETH offers enough advantages over the legacy system that it can’t not be adopted. And if a decentralized smart contract platform is adopted it will be ETH.

Regulatory clarity in the US is coming. Continued scalability increases are coming. Widespread stablecoin payments are coming. Institutional adoption has started. DEFI use will be up only.

People are worried over 5 months of bad PA for ETH the asset and I agree it has sucked but narrative follows price- don’t let the bad PA make you think the ETH fundamentals have changed.

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https://decrypt.co/245173/franklin-templeton-ezpz-crypto-etf

This has been mentioned yesterday, i think the ezpz etf might be very interesting for european users. An etf holding only one asset is prohibited in europe/eu as far as i know, thats why the current etfs are not available to buy.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable can elaborate further, but afaik you need a basket of assets to get an etf approved in europe. Lets hope the minimum is 2!

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EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 12-18)

Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph

Catch up on a week’s worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.

1. Some EVMavericks were onboarded to participate in Octant’s rounds and help select various projects, thus contributing to public goods indirectly.

2. Our farmers discuss what’s hot, what’s cold. Orderly (TGE is on 26th), Debrdige, Tari, Hyperliquid.

3. Our quality chat is filled with talks about stocks and gold, what’s underrated and why.

4. Degen chat is not so degen nowadays. Discussions revolve around forms of money and the differences between real money and memes.

5. And from the Twitter land, Batz shows his bullishness on ETH by referencing RatioGang website which is built by our very own InsideTheSimulation.

6. We see a few nice sales as 930.eth picks up these cool looking lions!

7. Our memecoining thread has been the most active. Lots of discussions but notably some juicy alpha including coins and polymarket bets. While don’t be fooled that it’s all green and rosey, it definitely gets red at times, but here are some calls of the week:

~5x - $r/snoofi by WTF

~3x - $pop by etheraider

~ 2-30x - $TrumpFish by 696

Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here’s a few guides!

EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.

Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord that’s open to public and there’s a decent amount of activity there!

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u/MerkleChainsaw:

Would it be possible to defeat MEV with no protocol changes with smarter wallets?

1. Validators could choose to flag that they will avoid MEV and randomize transaction order in their block.
2. Their adherence could be observed by third parties and wallet providers to create a list of validators using and not using MEV.
3. Because proposers are known ahead of time, wallets could give users a toggle to transact either on “first available block” or “wait for first available MEV free block”. Getting a MEV free validator wouldn’t be guaranteed but could be targeted.
4. Assuming a critical mass of validators goes “MEV free” and enough users toggle to attempt MEV free transactions they could see a higher share of fee revenue to make up for lost MEV.

Besides the chicken-and-egg problem here, a problem I see with this idea is that if the “MEV free” validators captured a larger share of DeFi transaction fees this could be offset by regular validators getting a larger share of simple token transactions since their blocks would otherwise be emptier. Also for any really big MEV opportunities it would be worth it for any validator to just take the MEV, exit the pool, and re-enter with a new identity. If we could find solutions to these problems, it feels a lot cleaner to me than some of the currently proposed solutions like builder separation.

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u/cryptOwOcurrency:

To me this feels like the email reputation problem all over again.

In the early days of the internet, anybody’s computer could directly send an email to an email server and it would get delivered. Then as email became widespread, the concept of spam email arose.

So email service providers (ESPs) started tracking reputation by IP address, which is what they do to this day. Each ESP keeps a small rotation of “clean” IP addresses to send mail from, and they work hard to make sure nobody uses them to send spam so that their IP reputation stays clean. And each ESP keeps a list of blocklists that contain tons of low-reputation IPs, from which they auto delete all incoming emails.

The result is a system where yes, technically speaking you can send an email directly, but it’s largely impossible from a residential internet connection since they block the outgoing port (SMTP) to prevent spam, and it’s largely impossible from a web host or VPS too because chances are that whatever IP you get, someone else has already sent spam and ruined its email reputation (if the web host doesn’t outright block the SMTP port). So it’s a technically open system where the only way you can send an email in practice is to hand your email off to an ESP like Gmail or Yahoo or iCloud or specialized “email hosting” products for delivery.

Trust me, email servers suck balls to maintain. It’s a lot of writing blocklist maintainers to try to get off their lists - maintainers who only expect emails from email hosting companies. And the software is far less streamlined than web hosting software, since nobody hosts email servers anymore. It’s a full time job.

All that is to say, if there’s one or more independent parties certifying whether validators are MEV-free, the endgame is that it turns into another whack-a-mole reputation management scheme just like email. And I don’t want running a validator to suck balls like running an email server does.

Also for any really big MEV opportunities it would be worth it for any validator to just take the MEV, exit the pool, and re-enter with a new identity. If we could find solutions to these problems, it feels a lot cleaner to me than some of the currently proposed solutions like builder separation.

You have to track reputation somehow. And there are limited ways of doing so. You could track them by IP, which runs into the aforementioned issues and makes “clean” IP addresses expensive. Or you could track the coins themselves, which just means that every ETH on chain has a hidden reputation value, which makes “clean” ETH more expensive.

I believe the answer is “it fundamentally cannot be done in a fair way within the latest production version of the Ethereum protocol”.

Edit: Of course, protocol changes like shutterization can help.

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Warning, very geeky hardware topic ahead.

In the last few weeks I have worked on running Ethereum nodes on RISC-V boards. RISC-V is one of the more modern CPU architectures besides the well known x86 (most PCs) and ARM (Apple and cell phones). RISC-V started being developed around 2010 and got published around 2014. Only in the last few years the basic parts got standardized and the they are still in active development to standardize some of the extensions.

One big difference is than anyone can design and build CPUs on this standard and many companies actually do. This is in contrast to x86 processors where only 3 companies have a license to actually design/build them: Intel, AMD, VIA Technologies. For ARM CPUs anyone who buys a license from ARM Holdings can design and build ARM CPUs but these licenses can be very strict. For example, ARM Holdings is currently trying to force Qualcomm to destroy all ARM based Windows laptops due to a licensing dispute. RISC-V is open, which means anyone can design and build processors following this standard without having to pay anyone anything or follow any strict licensing rules. This means this is the most open CPU architecture we have. The disadvantage is that it is all very new and therefore the currently available Processors are not the most powerful ones. But the progress in just the last 5 years is quite amazing. Back then one could only get the most minimal boards which pretty much could only read some inputs do some basic calculations and control an output. There was no support to run any operating system on these boards. Linux support was pretty much non existent.

Today, we can get boards which can easily run full Linux distributions even Ubuntu supports some boards directly and about every 9 months a new iteration of ever more powerful boards hit the market. The driver for this development is the openness. Companies know, that no one can take their licenses away and this gives them security to develop RISC-V based CPUs. This open competition will probably enable many more people to get access to affordable and powerful enough hardware to run an ethereum node. To get there however, the node clients themselves will have to be optimized for this hardware platform as well.

That is why another node operator was asking in many discords if anyone else is interested to help in this effort. I obviously jumped on this opportunity and we have been working on it in the last few weeks. We now got Nimbus, Lighthouse and geth running. They can be built with some modifications and run reliably. Some of the modifications have already been pushed to the respective client teams and some more modifications will come in the next weeks. We are working on some other clients as well (grandine, Reth and prysm) but they have some more issues which need further investigation.

At the moment we have 4 different boards to test our stuff on. These are the HiFive Unmatched, the VisionFive 2, the Lichee Pi 4a and the Banana Pi F3. All of these are at most barely powerful enough to actually run a full node. Nevertheless, we managed to fully and reliably sync the sepolia testnet on the Banana Pi (Nimbus/geth) and we even managed to sync mainnet with lighthouse, but only for brief periods of time until it lost sync again and then it was behind the head for about 1-3 hours until it regained sync again. We even overclocked our board which slightly improved the sync reliability, but not by much. Looks like the current iteration of boards is a good basis to test nodes and get the clients ready but we need at least one more iteration to be able to run nodes reliably.

In parallel, my colleague tries to incorporate as many improvements as necessary into eth-docker so that prospective node operators will have a very convenient way to spin up a node on these boards. It still is a very rocky road ahead, but I am pretty sure that when actually powerfull enough RISC-V boards will hit the market in 1-3 years or so, a good selection of clients will be ready to run on them.

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It’s a little complicated because EIP-1559 served multiple purposes, and the burn achieved multiple goals. You can read all about it in the github of the EIP (it’s short, and really digestible - I promise!) — EIPs/EIPS/eip-1559.md at master · ethereum/EIPs · GitHub

The short of it is, the burn was absolutely a stated part of monetary policy, to the point I’d argue it was past ‘a nice side effect’. Honestly a fairly elegant solution IMO. And if you remember the narratives around BTC vs ETH at the time of it’s launch, issuance/inflation rates were a very hot topic.

I think where the disconnect came from was people misunderstood that it was an amplifier, not a driver, of price action. Meaning that in the event we saw a period of relatively little crypto demand combined with low fees the burn wouldn’t be as impactful. Which we sort of unfortunately saw post-launch.

An important aspect of this fee system is that miners only get to keep the priority fee. The base fee is always burned (i.e. it is destroyed by the protocol). This ensures that only ETH can ever be used to pay for transactions on Ethereum, cementing the economic value of ETH within the Ethereum platform and reducing risks associated with miner extractable value (MEV). Additionally, this burn counterbalances Ethereum inflation while still giving the block reward and priority fee to miners. Finally, ensuring the miner of a block does not receive the base fee is important because it removes miner incentive to manipulate the fee in order to extract more fees from users.

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I just thought I’d share a snippet I shared just now in yesterday’s daily about why the defeatist attitude to privacy around “oh they have my data anyway” is actually completely missing the point of privacy. It’s not about going off the grid, its about reducing your attack surface and if you hold crypto, then reducing your data footprint is not paranoia, it’s prudent.

One of the key things outsiders miss about the privacy community is the concept of the “threat model”. Who are you trying to hide your data from? Most people can’t hide from 3 letter agencies without hugely inconveniencing their daily life, but that’s ok because there are some legal protections to stop some degree of government abuse (for example police need to get warrants to search your home etc.) But if you post all of your life details to social media then police can just buy your data, they don’t need to search your home if they can buy info from tech companies. Stalkers and $5 wrench attackers can do the same and hackers have waaaay more places to steal your info from, making you more prone to phishing, burglary and much much more. Basically there are some super simple steps to make your digital footprint soooo much smaller. Things like degoogling, using uBlock origin and Firefox for browsing, avoiding cloud services in favour of physical backups or your own servers and not owning a car made after the mid 2010s which collects and sells location and converstional data (some car companies reserve the right to sell your sexual data, no I’m not kidding, its right there in their terms and conditions). These things don’t take much effort for tech savvy people and it gets 80 – 90% of your data off the marketplace and out of the easy reach of government agencies beyond the most powerful ones which you don’t really need to worry about if you’re not a terrorist.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$2662.54

u/Vinegar_Strokes__

0.043

u/usesbinkvideo

90,771 hodlers subscribed (+2)

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It’s a scarry chart,

Fundamentals outsmart,

It’s merely a fart.

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

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be me
wake up in cozy Airbnb on fine Sunday morning Tropical Storm Debby cancels flights home fuckthat.jpg
wife and I decide to drive rental car back to New York 12-hour drive ahead
leave at 11 am ETH price tanking, watching it on Apple Watch
realize I have a big loan on Aave
sweating.jpg remember liquidation point in low $2000s, can’t remember exact number
anxietyintensifies.gif
hit traffic nearly 12 am, price dropping faster
panicmode.exe
arrive in NYC, get in Lyft, tell driver to go fast
driver understands and drives like a maniac
wife has no idea get home, check position LTV at 76%, 4% away from liquidation
fire up Ledger, send more crypto lower liquidation price by half
calm.jpg

what. a. day.

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(1/2)

I broke my no conference rule and attended EDCON in Tokyo this year. Didn’t see any posts about it, but maybe I missed them, it’s been hectic running around to try to attend everything (and missing most of it). Either way I thought I’d share my subjective experience as a normally privacy-conscious grumpy internet man.

First, the quality of that conference was impressive. On every aspect. Coordinating any event is no easy task, and here the organization was top notch. As someone who doesn’t speak a word of Japanese and can hardly mumble coherent English, the EDCON team aptly corraled me and others wherever they needed to be.

Great venues too. Most days we were at the United Nations building. I think the whole building catered to the convention? One big conference room housing about ~400 people for the main talks, and side conference rooms for side talks/workshops. Then the main 2 days took place at the Yoyogi gymnasiums, which were OK for the more festive atmospheres they were meant to be, but a bit iffy on acoustics when it comes to listening to technical talks.

Of course this is what matters most, the quality of these talks. I have to say this did not disappoint. There’s something to be said for being committed to an event and passively sitting there for hours, as opposed to surfing the Internet and actively seeking knowledge. Whether you want it or not, when you’re physically present your brain starts to absorb knowledge like a plant does photosynthetis.

In particular, I found all the talks on MPC (Multi Party Computation), TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) especially interesting. Many of us have seen these terms many times, the most adventurous among us even try to read Vitalik’s blogs on the topic. Personally it still failed to click for me. Until I sat in these rooms and saw the points explained and reexplained in a variety of different ways by various speakers.

Major props in particular to the panel between Guy Itzhaki (Fhenix), Zhen Yu Yong (Web3Auth), Chua Zheng Leong (Automata). Three guys who manifestly know their stuff and engaged with each other to make these concepts obvious to the crowd. The theme was MPC vs TEE vs FHE, but really it came down to them explaining where each solution makes the most sense. I don’t know when EDCON will put the videos of these talks online, but if there’s one panel I’d suggest watching, it would be this one.

In person, you truly get to see who’s passionate and who’s acting. Either that or there were some excellent actors. The aura of highbrained discussion shifts your perspective, you get caught in the enthusiasm. When I first saw Fhenix (which is a L2) online, my cynical ass thought oh joy, they took FHE and made a little play with Phenix, how “clever”. Post conference? Oh, they took FHE and made a little wordplay with Phenix! How clever! (his frown and cynicism: gone)

Another protocol that flipped me 180 was Zircuit. Initially (online) their marketing as an AI-powered L2 made me scoff. But the talk by their CTO made an excellent case for the future of sequencers, differentiating themselves by subjective qualities rather than the objective increases of scale. I got to speak with one of their devs, who told me the AI is really used for data analysis, to classify the possible pathways for DeFi hacks we’ve seen in the past, and then identify transactions that look functionally similar and send them in quarantine before inspection. Which is entirely sensible when you think about it. So many exploits boil down to flashloans, oracle manipulations and high changes of volume in a single block, that it should be not only possible but practical to build heuristics to defeat most common attack vectors.

Needless to say, I’m now accumulating some Zircuit points…

Intmax people were on several panels, and then they featured proeminently at Plasmacon the next day as they were organizing it. Justin Drake had a pretty cool gigabrain (omegabrain?) talk about it. I won’t even try to pretend I can explain, save that you can run pretty aggressive compressions for payment usecases.

Justin also made the interesting case BTC as an asset could survive a 51% attack (which in his opinion will happen within ~10 years) by using one-shot quantum signatures and leaving the PoW chain behind. Right, I understand some of these words.

Adrian Brink of Anoma had several talks on completely different topics, all great stuff. He’s a good speaker and obviously a smart man, if a little bit too smart as his presentations tend to end up too dense with information. I liked his hot take in Plasmacon the most, paraphrased: if we define scalability as the ability to retain fixed costs no matter the activity, then rollups are not a viable scaling solution, while Plasma can be. Personally I think the burden on app developers (who have to guarantee data availability or think of the right incentive mechanisms for others to provide it) is too large for the time being, and I would not bet on Plasma being big at scale before 2030, but what do I know?

The more relevant point, maybe, is that a whole lot of people are clearly building for 2030 and beyond. If you’re ever looking for a fix of optimism to distract you from market trends or cryptotwitter feuds, I will wholeheartedly vouch for EDCON. This could not have been better exemplified than by Vitalik’s keynotes.

Finally got to see the unicorn… scratch that, the horse… amend that, the man… on stage. There is a special sort of energy to his talks. You can tell he’s exposing his concrete, factual vision for the space, which he makes accessible to the rest of us but doesn’t massage, inflate, nor reduce, in any other way. But I also liked the energy of his body language. Always moving around, pacing from one leg to another, the frame of someone who speaks of a topic he knows in and out and wishes our input/output bandwidth as human beings could stretch to accomodate the full speed of his thoughts as fast as they come. It hits different when mr Buterin says we can scale, because it MEANS we CAN scale.

The focus was on the next 10 years of Ethereum, touching on where we were, where we’re at and where we’re going. Main idea: we got the fees down, now we need to get back to 2016 UX of a monolithic construction from the user perspective. Main pathways: gas auctions (you have ETH on any rollup, someone else broadcasts your transaction on the desired rollup for a fee, competition should push that fee down to negligible levels), chain prefixes (op:0x1234 and arb:0x1234 instead of 0x1234, handled at the wallet/dapp level, all you see and use is 0x1234 and everything is taken care of).

In closing, he suggested the infra is good and we should expect to see a shift in focus towards applications. Music to my ears.

(re: unicorn. On the final day, Vitalik came in a Bufficorn costume. Then removed it to reveal his secret identity as a humanoid horse holding Dogecoin. Then became human. I feel the genius in that costume is that he waddled around the conference for hours before, incognito. How do you attend a show when you’re a rockstar billionaire? Without the suit he would have been crowded all the time, but as a mascot most people seemed to blissfully ignore him.)

(2/2)

So the main stuff was good. And there was a lot more to it! The hackathons were great, you get to see what people are building. Much of it was sponsored by zkSync. There was a funny dynamic to this. First you’d hear the zkSync guys describe their newest infra directions, the possibilities it allows. Then the hackers would show up on stage… and after their presentations, would be assaulted by technical questions from the very same zkSync people. “What do you think about this potential issue? Have you thought about using specific feature X in your app? What about…” All in good form, benevolent, but nonetheless you got the vibe of Infra Nobility questioning Application Peasants. If there ever was a need to illustrate this current reality in our industry, I think it was on display there, in those poor hackers’ confused answers.

zkSync had the best swag. They brought their eli5 books (which you might have already seen here: https://eli5.zksync.io/ ), in Japanese and English. A 200-piece puzzle box. Their mascot “Zeek” was proeminently featured. They’re killing it on branding, it’s stuff you’re happy to own because it looks visually pleasing, and it’s appropriate for kids too.

They had this pretty slick zkQuest website too: https://zkquest.zksync.io

Which you activated by going to their booth. It let you do a bunch of developer quests, ranging from very simple to rather involved, and covered a large spread of topics in their ecosystem. You got real ETH for finishing those quests, and the amounts were rather generous! Doing everything could net you about 0.065 ETH.

(Most people didn’t. I only managed less than half, and I’m in the top50 leaderboard.)

Oh, and finishing the first set of easier quests got you the coolest swag, a Zeek hat. It was genuinely cool to see people wandering around with theirs on, you could tell who’s engaging deeply with the developer side of the conference. Status signals like this make for fun crowd dynamics.

The PSE research group (pse.dev) worked the same magic in their FHE panel. They demonstrated this app letting you connect with other people by tapping your NFC-enabled phone to a ring, to then let you make private groups and vote on various things anonymously. In the end everyone who participated got a NFC black ring. More subtle than a Zeek hat, it was neat to spot other ringbearers in the wild through the rest of the conference.

The entertainment was fun. Partly because there was clear confusion between the attendees and the shows. You hear stories about fans going ga-ga for Kpop, then you’re here watching tripleS get on stage and half of the crowd is getting up and walking away.

(It was just after Vitalik’s keynote. You could see the flow of the wave moving in for his talk, then moving back out. Half of the total crowd or so.)

I made it a purpose to approach this conference while revealing as little about myself as possible. I did not specify my job, my occupation, made it a point to say I was neither a developer nor an investor, didn’t tell my name, never connected my Twitter or Telegram to anything. My goal in that was to see how open the culture is, to check whether reputation/identity are defacto requirements or if people are willing to engage with you regardless.

The conference scored highly on that scale. I applied to almost all side events, and almost everyone let me in. I didn’t try to approach people, but several individuals came to me. Out of them only one I would qualify as a shitcoin shiller, and even then he was fairly respectful and didn’t try to push beyond giving me the swag. Everyone else was insightful, loved to trade ideas and talk about what they were doing. I’m not a particularly charismatic person, so to come in anonymous and get this amount of positive sentiment and friendliness freely extended… truly suggests, at least to me, the community has done a good job translating the “permissionless” concept to real life.

There was a good spread of side events. Whatever it is you wanted to do. If you wanted to go deep into some technical topic, there was a side event for that in a crowded classroom somewhere. If you wanted to watch Japanese idols sing some songs about smart contracts being the next hope of humanity, there was a side event for that too. I went to everything I could, if only because as a first-time Japan tourist it made for a guide to discover the hot spots in town. It was a good reminder blockchain leans young. You could count the people with grey hair on your two hands, if not two fingers.

Subjective conclusion to subjective experience. I had a blast. In life it’s easy to nerd out and it’s easy to have fun, but it can be hard to find a crowd doing both. I’m also flabbergasted this value is delivered essentially for free. As the EDCON tickets were given to anyone who applied near the end. There was a healthy mix of foreigners to locals, maybe about 60:40. Most of the talks were in English with some AI real-time translation in Japanese.

Strangely enough, it only reaffirmed my belief going to conferences is a tricky path. As in, you can lose sight of the “real” users, onchain. Free tickets to attend or no, the guy from Serbia who makes €600 a month is not hopping on a flight to Tokyo anytime soon. The attendance was definitely biaised towards rich, and it’s easy to feel optimistic when you’re here either because you’re financially independent or because your well-paid job foots the bill.

There’s a counterpoint in that the Ethereum community goes through significant effort to diversify event locations and to make things accessible. At this point there’s probably something somewhere anyone could attend, given a reasonable effort.

It’s hard to stay objective when you’re having a good time. I now have so much positive bias towards several protocols based on my people encounters. There’s a reason many societies have strict anti-bribery laws, most of us get swayed easily; and man do I feel bribed out in the abundance of free stuff thrown my way.

But you know what? Maybe objectivity is overrated. Brings to mind a certain WEF video: “welcome to the 2030 roadmap. I own all the things, I have some privacy, and life has never been better.”

If you ever feel down about this space and have the opportunity to attend, do yourself a favor and take the plunge.

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Estimating the late game economics of blobspace. This is just a quick back of the envelope math, to get a taste of the numbers. Feel free to tweak the assumptions as you see fit. With current blobspace target of 3 blobs (1 shard):

500 tps x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 secs per year = 15800M transactions per year

Say average transaction fee is 5 cents. Which would make the median even lower, around 1-2 cents. Making even the lowest added value use cases (e.g. pay for coffee) perfectly viable. This is likely extremely conservative because if we start having serious financial applications on top of Ethereum (i.e. tokenized RWA) those fees are ridiculously low. Your broker charges you easily 5 USD per transaction. And registration of car titles, houses, etc… is even more expensive. So it could push the average much higher easily.

15800M tx per year x 0.05 USD per tx = 800M USD per year

Say Ethereum captures 80% of that. This assumption is based on the current burn %, which has typically floated around 80% of the tx cost. This is the trickiest assumption, I don’t have a good way of estimating how much value will be captured by Ethereum from the L2 transaction fees. This is dependent on the attractiveness of data availability on Ethereum vs all other options. So feel free to tweak this value. If we assume 80%, that gives us 640M USD per year with 1 shard.

With full danksharding we will go up to 64 shards. So that would puts of the order of 40B USD per year of burn just from blobspace. That gives you an implied price of ETH of 30-35K USD just from blobspace alone. Add to that Ethereum’s proper blockspace which in the past has been able to capture a similar figure of burn and you get to a price of ETH around 50K to 100K USD. The price estimate is simply a consequence of assuming ETH cannot be absurdly deflationary, if it were it would cause a supply crunch and the price would go upwards resulting in less burn until it estabilizes around the price that gets us to close to 0 inflation.

Mind you, this is a long-term view of the roadmap. It will take us still years to deliver Danksharding and 64 shards and onboard all the use cases. But it serves to illustrate how the ETH late-game economics could look like.

Disagree with any of the numbers? Change them! The point is not so much to derive a specific figure, but to get a sense of the order of magnitudes we would be dealing with.

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Word of warning to any validators out there - I recently updated all of my Linux Mint 21.3 systems to Linux Mint 22, and every one of them that had chronyd configured had it removed during the upgrade process. My one Ubuntu 22.04 server also didn’t have it after upgrading to 24.04, but I’m not certain that one ever did, so I don’t know if this is par for the course for any Ubuntu-based distribution or if it’s specific to LInux Mint.

In any case, if you aren’t running chronyd for timesync, I recommend it. There’s a CoinCashew guide for setting it up, but I recommend relaxing the frequency settings to minpoll 2 and maxpoll 10 to avoid KoD RATE messages.

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The most recent Bitwise memo from Matt Hougan is pretty great. Here is the relevant section:

The last time the market melted down like this was March 12, 2020. That was the day the world realized that Covid was a big deal.

In case you’ve blocked it from your memory, let me remind you: It was chaos.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sold off 2,353 points on March 12, its worst day since 1987. Tech stocks were in free fall, as were commodities. We all thought the global economy was going to end. The president would declare a national emergency the following morning.

Among all assets, bitcoin crashed the worst, falling 37% from $7,911 to $4,971. It was a breathtaking one-day move, wiping out a year’s worth of gains in 24 hours.

It felt as if we might never recover. The media claimed bitcoin had failed its test as a hedge asset.

And then something spectacular happened. As global leaders stepped in to stabilize the economy—cutting interest rates, printing money—bitcoin began to rise. A year later, it was trading at $57,332, up more than 1,000%.

In retrospect, March 12, 2020 wasn’t a time to panic. It was the best buying opportunity for bitcoin in a decade.

It’s easy to see why with the benefit of hindsight. Nothing fundamental had changed about bitcoin because of Covid. The maximum number of bitcoin that could exist (21 million) was the same on March 11 as it was on March 12. You didn’t need to rely on any bank, government, or company to store wealth in bitcoin on March 11, and that was still true on March 12.

At the same time, Covid supercharged the reasons for bitcoin’s long-term rise. It showed that central banks would bail out the economy at the first sign of trouble. It demonstrated the limitations of centralized institutions. And it reminded us that the future is more online and digital.

The changes all pointed in favor of bitcoin becoming more important, not less. And in the long term, that’s exactly what happened.

I see the same setup today.

Edit to add this:

But, in brief: Weak economic data in the U.S. on Friday sparked concerns that the global economy is slowing. This prompted a panic in Asia, where a rapid unwind of the yen carry trade—a strategy aimed at exploiting interest-rate differentials between currencies—pushed Japanese markets sharply lower. Things weren’t helped by rising concerns over geopolitical risks in the Middle East, where Iran is threatening to attack Israel.

These events collided with idiosyncratic negative developments in the crypto market, where a large market maker (Jump Trading) ran into trouble and faced forced liquidations of large positions in ETH.

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u/Dreth:

Yesterday I made an (apparently) well received lengthy comment of disorganized thoughts regarding the stock market crash that ocurred this week. I want to correct some inaccuracies or imprecise details I explained regarding the particular events in japan.

The immediate cause is the carry trade, but some corrections about it and the situation in Japan:

The first immediate reason why this happened is because while the FED and the ECB raised rates to control inflation, the BOJ kept rates at 0. This lack of coordination with other central banks, which is entirely within the rights of the BOJ as a central bank of an independent nation, but not ideal, has made a very profitable trade: borrow money in japan, sell JPY, buy USD or EUR and put that money to work in public debt or other yield bearing instrumnets, or if you prefer a riskier trade, buy stocks denominated in other currencies. So both the FED/ECB and BOJ are at fault because they kept rates high for too long and keeping rates low for too long respectively, creating a very profitable trade. Hence why central bank coordination matters in large markets.

And also bad data from other directions causing more drawdown in the market in the days prior to yesterday’s crash:

The market had already been pricing in a slowdown in the economy, with unexpectedly low job creation in the US and less than ideal earnings from US companies, though the most concerning figure was the job data. This is likely what caused that first drawdown that brought us to 2700-2900 in the past couple days. But other markets have also been slowing down, not just the US, China too apparently, and Europe we already knew was weak economically from several different directions. Just an example of Europe’s weakness at the moment could be seen through Germany’s GDP growth, which shows a contracting or stagnant economy, rate hikes most definitely affect this by reducing demand and making credit more expensive, and Germany already had had a weak 2022 with lots of noise in its trade balance as a result of the sanctions to Russia, though this is old news.

Some inaccuracies I layed out that I want to rectify/correct:

I said the BOJ had had near-zero or zero % interest rates for almost a decade, but it’s way more than that. The BOJ has had interest rates at zero for MOST of the past 20 years, with short periods of increase that never went above 0.5%.

Hence this trade being not just recently profitable, but historically profitable, especially because this monetary policy from the BOJ was intended to remain for as long as possible. Even now the rates are extremely low, at 0.25% despite increases. The higher the difference between the BOJ rates and the FED/ECB rates, the more profitable this trade becomes, especially because the JPY was particularly weak vs these currencies, so the profit is double, you earn from shorting JPY relative to USD or EUR and you earn from having high interest rates, so the JPY weakness came from a lot more people taking this short position in JPY. Though this was especially profitable recently.

I said that the BOJ wanted to end the carry trade. This is not necessarily true, the BOJ only wants inflation in japan and purchasing power to remain static or to increase (currently Japan’s economy has been contracting). The carry trade had been hurting the JPY causing loss of purchasing power because (one example) e.g. commercially, if their currency is lower, their exports are cheaper, but imports are more expensive. Generally this hurts citizens, so the BOJ increased rates to reduce this disparity and give a little more strength to the JPY.

Given that many traders expected the rates to not increase in any meaningful way, and especially expecting the intent to increase them from the BOJ would remain the same, many traders took recent short positions on an already weak JPY, which caused a large cascade of margin calls on JPY borrowers performing carry trades, resulting in that immediate large rise in the JPY.

I won’t get into why the Nikkei crashed harder than it ever had in history, it could be due to several factors, but I haven’t done any profound research on it. It could be margin calls due to shares being collateral to loans, it could be due to bad earnings, idk, there’s probably multiple things at play here.

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u/pa7x1:

Pretty good content, both yesterday and today. Some quick complementary comments.

BOJ cannot raise substantially interest rates because Japan’s debt to GDP is a ridiculous 263%. This ties their hands, their interest payments would go through the roof. Yes, their debt is issued in Yen. They could always print more but you are just trading one evil for another one.

Nikkei went down because the Yen is strengthening to reflect the new conditions. Japan’s economy depends a lot on exports. If the Yen goes up their exports are less competitive. This compresses earnings of their companies. Markets try to see into the future and price that. Plus minus any short term market turmoil, liquidations, etc… But this is short term noise.

The carry trade is not ending here, it has started to unwind. The yield differential is going to keep existing for quite a while as it’s related to point 1. Because of that yield differential the Yen should be weaker and devaluing over very long time horizons (decades). What we have seen is just the tip of the iceberg, the most degen of the degen levered to their tits, getting exposed when the market moves a bit against them. And having to close down positions in a disordered manner. Seems some liquidations must have happened but nothing is publicly known yet.

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/rant, skip if you don’t like sad stories but I need someone to hear me out for my sanity

These are the hardest days for me ever.

The other day I got liquidated on my ratio long on the scam wick. It was not a very aggressive position (actual breakeven ratio for collateral/debt was at 0.0355) but I guess it got to 90% LTV on the protocol anyway.

I did not expect the ratio to drop that much that fast and I was stubborn and did not reduce it in the coming hours when it was at 0.045.

This is where I don’t know if I can ever get closure. The protocol that I have used (which I don’t want to badmouth but it definitely has some design issues) leaves the difference between liquidation threshold and actual value all to the liquidator. All this to say that the guy liquidated me at barely 90% LTV and actually got a 27ETH payout on a 225 ETH position because it probably actually bounced back in the time it took for him to actually exchange the BTC for ETH.

If I had not been liquidated, that position would be worth something like 40 more ETH than I have now. Had i kept most of that 10% it would have been 25ETH. Instead, I have zero left from that position. I feel like I got robbed.

So, for me that’s it. I am back at my initial ETH stack after all these years of working to increase it (I was at my record just over a month ago at 2x the current ETH amount) and now I’m just left with years of stress for nothing.

I can’t honestly bounce back from this, I don’t have the mental strength nor the stack to risk it anymore. I know that I would probably blow the rest trying to get it back quickly.

I don’t know how will I ever overcome this, I have missed real life goals and have been stressed constantly trying to increase my internet coins and now I have lost all that I had built.

I will stick around and follow the progress for Ethereum for which I truly believe in, just with a different outlook for myself and a bad memory of all these years. Hopefully I will be able to partially forgive myself for the mistakes I have made, because right now I am unable to.

Thanks r/ethfinance, you truly have been a beacon of light in all these years and that will be always a nice memory for me.

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Damn, I’m reading comments from overleveraged people after yesterday’s events. It’s a trip down memory lane (2018-2020), where plenty of people lost their precious eth. The biggest ethfinance loss I’m aware of was an 8000 eth position that got halved (back then we were talking about a couple of million $ iirc).

There are no “big lessons” imo. You just have to go through these events to learn, or at the very least, treat much more carefully than you think.

To those who have lost a lot yesterday (and the prior weeks), I hope you find your way out of it. It’s not easy. At least the tech is “proven” right now and eth isn’t going to zero.

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Things to be bullish about :

• ETH ETFs & positive flows
• +ve YOY M2 supply after 16 months of contraction (in layman terms, Powell is printing)
• We just had a black swan one per 10 year VIX event comparable to COVID crash and ‘08 financial crash
• ETH Retail is shitting the bed due to poor risk management, and is selling now to institutions
• Bitcoin Dominance & Altcoin Dominance Cycle theory points towards alt capitulation and a Q4 Alt-season. I’m under the belief we have experienced the last flush accelerated by the BOJ black swan, instead of mid Q4.
• ETH is underperforming all assets within the space currently
• As an example, in 2019, after the Mid-cycle top, we saw crypto markets & ratio bottom after 75 bps of cuts, which will be 2 FED meetings in our case (Early Nov)
• The time to be bearish was last week, you’re fucked now and it may be too late to be bearish
• Most metrics and leading economic indicators are flashing positive or neutral, employment is still historically low, the recession has already happened, and we are coming out of it. (Only -ve signal is yield curve, which is still fucked)

Source : NBER Recession Indicators, Conference Board LEI

• In inflationary environments, the unemployment SAHM recession indicator fires during or after the stock market drawdown has occurred - it appears to have been front-run substantially this time with all the recession fears in ‘22

BONUS - Short Term

• Jim Cramer bear posted on crypto a couple days ago

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I just wanted to share a bit of a mindset change I’ve had over the last couple of years in this bear market which I discussed in response to a fellow EthFinancier at the end of yesterday’s daily who lost a lot of ETH (but not their whole stack) to a liquidation this week. I’d love to hear how everyone else who is quite far into this game has had their mindset change over time. I also hope it doesn’t come off as pretentious. I’m not some zen guru who is holier than thou for being grateful for what I have. Far from it. I just stress a lot less and chase that calculating my net worth dopamine hit much much less and I hope others can achieve that too.

Hey friend, I can relate. I lost about 30% of my stack to shitcoins and another 20% I have cashed out because I let my lifestyle adapt based on a price movement (last bullrun) which didn’t stay around and which I didn’t take anywhere near enough profits on but still had a lot of taxes to pay. I recognise that your story probably stings a lot more than mine ever did with the scam wick, but I think the important difference here is I am 2 years further down the line after taking a big L than you are.

After the my big sudden L with a couple of shitcoins which basically went to 0, I went cold turkey on the bullshit. Anything risky is out of my portfolio. No shitcoins, no leverage. Not even “blue chip” or darling altcoins like LINK or RPL. At the end of the day they’re all about taking on risk to get more ETH. But that’s just a form of gambling. So all that’s left is DCAing (which is out of the picture for me as a student) and staking. So I’ve just been comfortably holding and staking for the last two years. As time has gone on, I have come to terms with not being able to attain my more lofty price targets and bullish financial goals. Instead I have focused on what I do have. And holy fuck, I’m only sitting on one home validator but my god, this still puts me way ahead of anyone else my age that wasn’t born into the 1%. This bear market has been humbling for me in a good way. I’m no longer trying to gamble for more ETH, so I have had time to reflect on what I have and how much freedom it can bring me, how much less it makes me stress over tough financial situations on a daily basis.

My friend, hang in there. You have not lost it all. In fact, if you’re patient and responsible, you’re right about to find what it is you have and it’s more than you think. Just give your mind time to adapt as it moves away from a dopamine filled moon chasing, ETH gambling mindset and towards a more grounded and grateful one. I hope it doesn’t sound cheesy or pretentious. But losing half of my stack has been good for my wisdom, financial responsibility and mental health. Try not to stress about it all too much and just let it be. From the sounds of it you’re still in this game and I don’t want to lose any more EthFinanciers to liquidations and high risk plays.

I know it is painful now, but it will get better. You’ve just got to focus on the right things.

---

_{Forgive me for my liberal use of the word gambling. You know what I mean though. It’s taking on risk with large sums of money which really shouldn’t be at so much risk.}

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u/ReluctantToast777

Ethereum

u/TimbukNine

$3152

u/alexiskef

0.0489

u/usesbinkvideo

90,748 hodlers subscribed (+1)

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Ignore politics,

Distrust their economics,

Store your mnemonics.

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There once was a coin called ethereum

With a fanclub in neigh-on delirium

They asked Ray to flippen

But he just kept on dippin’

Mayhaps life can’t be judged by this criterium

alt. last line:

Some patience to temper your accelererium

…maaan, ethereum is a stupid word to rhyme with. Impress me, ethfinance!

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When discussing crypto, and comparing ETH with BTC/alts online and offline, I can easily refute all points against ETH. Ethereum is so well thought out and designed, that it seems there are literally no weak points, and you can easily debate its superiority.

But I’m wondering about one point that I don’t have the technical knowledge to easily counter. Many altcoiners say that ETH suffers from “spaghetti code”, and a large technical debt that is going to be a big issue going forward, either by eventually causing a huge bug and collapse of the blockchain, or by just slowing down its further development and letting other, better written coins come on top.

So I’m asking anyone that’s more into Ethereum’s technicals/developement than I am. Is there any truth to this claim? My answer would usually be that Ethereum was mostly accused of slow development, which would indicate prioritizing quality over speed, but this isn’t concrete proof that the code is actually good quality. How would you reply to someone that claims that Ethereum’s code is bad code?

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u/cryptrd285:

Bloomberg guy Eric B is stating that out of all the inflow into new ETFS, 2/3 is actually new flow, and 1/3 is people swapping from ETHE to low fee ones

This would be super bullish…

https://x.com/Evan_ss6/status/1816882268075372756

If @EricBalchunas is correct here, this would be outrageously bullish

New ETFs have taken in $978MM in 3 days.

At 2/3 new, that’s $652MM or $217.3MM a day

During slow summer

Big if, small sample, but even something modest like $30-60MM a day would be bullish

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u/Caturday_Yet:

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Regarding the recent Compound governance attack the real danger here isn’t that they rugged the treasury. However much they stole there isn’t enough liquidity to exit that amount. The real danger is they went from having outsized control of the governance to do something like this to defacto ownership of the governance system to do whatever else they want soon.

I’ll remind everyone that Compound doesn’t use isolated lending pools. Every depositor/borrowable asset is at risk against price losses of every collateral asset. So the real risk here is that they mint a token e.g. LogrisShitCoin, seed it against a tiny amount of liquidity to give it a price while owning 100% of it, vote to enable use of that token as collateral, borrow all the assets in Compound, and let the liquidations rack up bad debt behind them.

If you have assets in Compound this is your cue to switch to an isolated lending pool strategy. We used to have more of these but some like Rari and Euler have gone the way of the dodo. Euler v2 is just around the corner but given their history I’d probably give that a year before trying it. Otherwise I can recommend Silo, Gearbox, Ajna, or Llamalend.

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u/HSuke:

It’s really cool that I was able to traverse back one day at a time a whole year via Daily Doots without encountering a single broken link. Great job, u/Tricky_Troll and Substidoots!

Anyways, I was looking for a list of scams techniques that our community has encountered. Here’s a short summary of the scams and how to avoid them, if even possible.

####Google Ad links

How it worked: User searched for polymarket and clicked on a google sponsored ad link (right above the actual link) directing to an identical page with a 1-character domain name difference. User then signed a permit Tx draining user of a specific token.

How to prevent:

1. Be extremely careful with Google ad links.
2. Also be careful with domain typo squatting. Entering “Umiswap” instead of “Uniswap” is all it takes to get drained.
3. Test with a small amount first, and don’t do unlimited approvals/permits on the test transation

A wallet guard or advanced-security wallet like Rabby wallet can prevent some of these kinds of attacks.

####Bridge hack

How it worked: DeFI protocol LI.FI’s L2 Bridge got hacked. Contract was drained. (User narrowly avoided hack by using good practices.)

How to prevent: Don’t approve more than you need to use. Try to use official bridges when possible. Be careful with DeFi bridges.

####Persistent spear phishing attack + Homoglyph attack

How it worked: Attacker called and emailed multiple times about a known recent hack of specific account belonging to the user that got its info leaked (the leak part was true). They had the user’s account due to the recent leak. The domain was indistinguishable from the official domain, but it used an identical-looking foreign character instead of the real English character (a homoglyph). User didn’t fall for it, but attack was convincing due to its persistence and professionalism.

How to prevent: Remain skeptical about calls and emails. Always be wary of ayone who tries to rush you into making hasty decisions. Always check email and website domains, though in this case that wouldn’t have helped since the domain was practically indistinguishable (homoglyph). In this case, don’t click on the email link. Instead, retype the link in the address bar.

####Home break-in with armed attackers

How attacked: Crypto dev with 10k followers had a home break-in with armed attackers

How to prevent: Well, this is really hard to prevent if you already have your info public due to a previous mass data leak. Everyone has already had their data leaked multiple times. If you’re rich, maybe get good security and have a throwaway wallet. Honestly, I don’t really have a good way to prevent this. On the other hand, this attack is not specific to crypto.

####Address poisoning a test transaction

How it worked: User made test transaction (which is good practice) in preparation for a bigger transaction. Immediately got address-poisoned by an attacker monitoring whale addresses. User then used the poisoned address from the account’s transaction history. (Story seems a bit fishy since the user should’ve been an expert at avoiding common attacks.)

How to prevent: Use an address book with whitelisted addresses. Be wary of address poisoning attacks. Don’t copy addresses from the transaction history.

####Liquidity Pool was hacked

How it worked: Self-explanitory. Liquidity Pool was hacked. User’s LP wallet was drained.

How to prevent: Be careful when joining LPs. Some of them have bugs or exploits. User was able to avoid heavy damage because he kept his LP wallet separated from his main wallets.

####Warpcast frames

How it worked: Blindly trusting a mint via a Warpcast frame

How to prevent: Don’t immediately assume that people on Warpcast are trustworthy. Treat it like a slightly-safer Twitter.

####Supply-side attack

How it worked: 2 separate reports for this kind of hack. In one, a hacker pulled off a BGP hijack (compromises routing protocol) of a crypto platform’s service provider. In another, hacker compromised a github account of a library the a wallet software used.

How to prevent: If you’re the end user, there is no practical way to prevent this kind of attack. It doesn’t matter if it’s crypto or traditional finance, a supply-side attack can destroy you, and there’s very little you can do about it. Stick with wallets and platforms that have good security practices to minimize the chances of this happening. Realistically, if some infrastructure’s DNS or BGP gets hijacked, even crypto security experts can get screwed.

####Fake revoke scam

How it worked: This got reported multiple times, though I don’t think anyone on the sub fell for it. Basically, after a large hack, scammers would link to fake revoke_dot_cash sites hoping to trick careless users who were rushing to revoke their approvals/permits.

How to prevent: Don’t fall for schemes that try to rush you into doing something and making a careless mistake. Type in website addresses manually.

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u/Dreth:

In 2022, I started writing a book on crypto, that I intended to self publish to help complete beginners get a head start on the philosophy of crypto, how to get into it, how to self custody funds and how to avoid scams.

I never quite finished everything, I had a little over 30 thousand words, but I did ask for help for scam examples in this subreddit at the time.

Today I decided to publish the ‘identifying and avoiding scams’ section because the longer I wait to ever publish this, the more outdated it’ll be. It’s likely already outdated. It was still missing some examples I wanted to show, but I believe it’s already valuable enough to at least post here.

Here it is in case anyone wants to take a look: https://dac.ac/blog/identifying_and_avoiding_crypto_scams

Feedback is appreciated too, just bear in mind that not even I have given it a full re-read in a couple years.

There’s an acknowledgements section at the bottom giving credit to those who helped me out, but I want give a shout out to them here too:

• u/alexiskef for many of the discord DM
• u/busterrulezzz for his writing tips and his narration of the experience he had on a crypto startup that turned out to be a scam narrated on r/CryptoCurrency (don’t worry I didn’t copy it or anything, I know the post is deleted now)
• The ethfinance mods for allowing me to ask for examples of scams publicly on the daily thread
• u/pocketwailord, u/excellentpantschoice, u/datacruncha, u/actualbadger, u/sinnU2s, u/lawfultots, u/RedPillInjester, for all the examples they sent, all quite distinct from one another which was really helpful
• u/nixorokish for offering me to collaborate on a different project on a scam-related diagram and for tagging me in a few other examples on the daily threads

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Our boy Song A Day Mann is suing the SEC for the sake of all NFT projects lol

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i1yd58id0lcbez3x2hiqp/1-2024-07-29-Complaint.pdf

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Tweet where I highlight how to present yield distributions for non-pooled stakers. Some webpages and researchers rely on things like the median across all validators over some minuscule time period, averaging these medians over time. This fails to capture the probabilistic outcome facing the solo staker. Half of the validators will never propose a block during the same day, yet half will still propose within a few months. Order statistics are instead relevant on a per-validator basis over longer time.

To check if it is raining, do not extend your hand and measure the median number of fingers impacted by raindrops every millisecond. The result will always be zero; yet it might still rain.

The figure shows how distributions vary with pool size after one year. This is a more appropriate way to communicate order statistics. The tiny vertical black line segment is the solo stakers that do not have a block proposal or sync-committee duty over a year, presented as the “all-time median” on sites such as Rated. The real median outcome facing solo stakers after one year is indicated by a black arrow, fairly close already to the expected yield.

The context of this discussion is the modeling assumptions in the post on maximum viable security (MVS).

The modeling and the same figure can also be found in my latest response to that post.

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Ethereum came a long way:

When I joined prediction markets and decentralized social media were concepts people pointed at when discussing potential use cases of the network

Today both concepts are implemented (polymarket, Farcaster) and show how it all makes sense. The teams that implemented them were not the ones which people initially thought would but that’s the beauty of decentralization

Both of these are early and have lots of growth ahead but we’re at a stage where we’re beyond imagining with live apps in production. We’ve came a long way so far

ETH is an asset I feel comfy holding for the next 20 years+

I can not say the same about any other crypto asset. The ones that are mostly VC hyped are the ones that get dumped at the end of the cycle so I would certainly not recommend to hold these for the long run if your objective is to take home profit

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u/MerkleChainsaw:

How would Blackrock (or anyone else) actually implement tokenization of real world assets?

They’d need to maintain some centralized control even if KYC whitelisting wasn’t required, just to reverse transactions of lost or stolen coins. North Korea wouldn’t actually get to be part owner in Lockheed Martin because they stole some shares and “code is law”. That’s not too big a deal because RWAs will always require trust in the issuer anyway, and Blackrock is of course more trustworthy and regulated than crypto startups like Celsius were.

I don’t think Blackrock would be comfortable using existing L2s for the token smart contract. They wouldn’t control the governance and any breaking changes could be catastrophic with billions (or trillions?) of dollars worth of assets at stake representing claims to real world things. I know technically this governance argument could apply to Ethereum itself, but I think Ethereum governance will always be more reliable since validators with ETH at stake are the ultimate approvers of any changes. L2s will either be centralized or have changes decided by cash grab governance tokens. If Blackrock or an industry consortium designed their own specialized and controlled L2 then wouldn’t we lose most of the benefits of the openness of DeFi?

At some point it’s just easier to just build an API with specifications for transferring ownership between accounts when a trade has happened. They could even have an address / signed transaction scheme similar to blockchains so that any exchange could instant settle a trade, but that would still just be tradfi.

I’ve sold my ETH, but the possibility of RWAs coming to Ethereum gives me some FOMO because the opportunity could be absolutely massive. I’m trying to visualize how it would actually work in a way that accrues value to ETH.

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u/pa7x1:

I suspect BlackRock, Nasdaq, etc… will run their own permissioned L2s. I.e. you cannot execute orders directly, you won’t have the private keys and a wallet to create your orders directly. Your experience as a user might be exactly the same as it is today, through your broker app. These L2s will be the underlying infrastructure where the trades are executed.

What’s the advantage for them? Running their trading on their systems already works and is likely cheaper in terms of infra, so why bother? The answer is composability. They will be all interconnected by Ethereum, acting as the infrastructure backbone for finance. Moving assets from one L2 to another is trivial, immediate, auditable, cryptographically secure and you know the assets are truly there. Finance works currently with D+1, D+2 settlement. During that 1 or 2 days, your assets are in the limbo. And that settlement is costly, in terms of resources and delays. Sprinkle these with a bit of zk magic, based rollups, pre-confirmations… and you will have global instant settlement.

For trivial stuff, like small trading, they give us the perception of immediate settlement. Your MSFT stock appears directly in your brokerage account when you click buy, but it’s not really there yet. But for big money, you cannot really trust the money is there until it’s settled. The financial world was on the brink of collapse during the 2008 crisis as nobody could trust anybody else’s balance sheets.

Have a watch to this podcast if you haven’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUMGYEKIiGw

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Daily Holesky:

I reported something causing Nethermind to crash and it got fixed. In more exciting news, erigon has otter art now.

INFO[07-31|16:50:18.454]
   _____ _             _   _                ____  _   _
  / ____| |           | | (_)              / __ \| | | |
 | (___ | |_ __ _ _ __| |_ _ _ __   __ _  | |  | | |_| |_ ___ _ __ ___ _   _ _ __   ___
  \___ \| __/ _ | '__| __| | '_ \ / _ | | |  | | __| __/ _ \ '__/ __| | | | '_ \ / __|
  ____) | || (_| | |  | |_| | | | | (_| | | |__| | |_| ||  __/ |  \__ \ |_| | | | | (__ _ _ _
 |_____/ \__\__,_|_|   \__|_|_| |_|\__, |  \____/ \__|\__\___|_|  |___/\__, |_| |_|\___(_|_|_)
                                    __/ |                               __/ |
                                   |___/                               |___/


                                        .:-===++**++===-:
                                   :=##%@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@%#*=.
                               .=#@@@@@@%##+====--====+##@@@@@@@#=.     ...
                   .=**###*=:+#@@@@%*=:.                  .:=#%@@@@#==#@@@@@%#-
                 -#@@@@%%@@@@@@%+-.                            .=*%@@@@#*+*#@@@%=
                =@@@*:    -%%+:                                    -#@+.     =@@@-
                %@@#     +@#.                                        :%%-     %@@*
                @@@+    +%=.     -+=                        :=-       .#@-    %@@#
                *@@%:  #@-      =@@@*                      +@@@%.       =@= -*@@@:
                 #@@@##@+       #@@@@.                     %@@@@=        #@%@@@#-
                  :#@@@@:       +@@@#       :=++++==-.     *@@@@:        =@@@@-
                  =%@@%=         +#*.    =#%#+==-==+#%%=:  .+#*:         .#@@@#.
                 +@@%+.               .+%+-.          :=##-                :#@@@-
                -@@@=                -%#:     ..::.      +@*                 +@@%.
    .::-========*@@@..              -@#      +%@@@@%.     -@#               .-@@@+=======-
.:-====----:::::#@@%:--=::::..      #@:      *@@@@@%:      *@=      ..:-:-=--:@@@+::::----
                =@@@:.......        @@        :+@#=.       -@+        .......-@@@:
       .:=++####*%@@%=--::::..      @@   %#     %*    :@*  -@+      ...::---+@@@#*#*##+=-:
  ..--==::..     :%@@@-   ..:::..   @@   +@*:.-#@@+-.-#@-  -@+   ..:::..  .+@@@#.     ..:-
                  .#@@@##-:.        @@    :+#@%=.:+@@#=.   -@+        .-=#@@@@+
             -=+++=--+%@@%+=.       @@       +%*=+#%-      -@+       :=#@@@%+--++++=:
         .=**=:.      .=*@@@@@#=:.  @@         :--.        -@+  .-+#@@@@%+:       .:=*+-.
        ::.              .=*@@@@@@%#@@+=-:..         ..::=+#@%#@@@@@@%+-.             ..-.
                            ..=*#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@%%@@@@@@@@@@@@@@%#+-.
                                  .:-==++*#######%######**+==-:

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3247.62

u/TimbukNine

0.0487

u/usesbinkvideo

90,668 hodlers subscribed (+2)

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Ether ten year old,

Outperform the bitcoins sold,

A story still told.

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So, during that little dip, I said to myself, Solana’s very likely going to outperform ETH because everyone’s retarded.

I went to hit the buy button, but my body started convulsing and I threw up in my mouth. I physically could not do it.

I bought more ETH instead.

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If you’re a Rocketpool operator and haven’t yet, please initialise your voting power as described here: https://medium.com/rocket-pool/rocket-pool-protocol-dao-governance-a3c3e92904e0

If you don’t care about participating in governance, you should still initialise your voting power and then delegate it to someone from the delegates listed here: https://delegates.rocketpool.net/

You can always override your delegate’s decision on a particular vote if you desire.

This setup just takes two minutes and ensures the on-chain voting system can fully launch soon (they’re waiting for 50% initialised voting power).

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As per a suggestion from u/stablecoin a few weeks ago (yes I’m slow to get onto things), us mods would like to put together a default list of flairs for users to choose from. Stablecoin suggested that this may help in discussions by providing context into the perspective through which someone is probably coming from when we are having discussions. For example, if you see a permabull flair, then maybe their hopium should be taken with a grain of salt or with a long timeframe in mind. Or, if someone has the developer or tradfi flair, then they may have some extra credibility when discussing those topics.

So, anyway, please help us brainstorm a list and we will get them on the default flair options!

Starting off, this is me borrowing from what u/stablecoin put:

• DeFi Power User

• Home Staker

• Value Extractor/Mercenary

• Trader

• SocialFi & NFTs Enthusiast

• Here for the societal revolution

Please brainstorm away! Cheers!

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I have continued the “educational battle”/”fight the misinformation campaign” on /r/investing. It’s really amazing how poorly Bitcoiners understand their own investment.

https://np.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1e7mbip/for_the_same_amount_of_money_is_it_better_to_buy/le7g2rg/

Here I explain that Bitcoin is, in fact, not unstoppable. On the contrary, it will stop itself in the year 2038 due to a time overflow bug. The fix to this requires a hard fork. The issue is that they have pinned themselves into a corner by making hard forks taboo. A hard fork is also what you need to change the issuance schedule of Bitcoin, if you fix this bug it would be implicit recognition that 21M is not a feature of Bitcoin code, but of social consensus and it can be changed through social consensus.

When you have been in this space long enough you understand that people that approached Bitcoin over a decade ago through an ideological lens, are not Bitcoiners anymore. Those that approached this space with the intent of removing the monopoly of money from the State and giving back the rights that governments had been eroding for decades from their citizens, have left and moved on to Ethereum. And likely this will remain the case for as long as Ethereum keeps fighting for those principles through math.

Ethereum’s development resembles much more the discovery process of science, Ethereum is not the way it is because of capricious choices. It’s the way it is because the constraints you have to work with are so binding that it cannot be in many other ways if you want to maintain security, decentralization, credible neutrality, censorship resistance, scale to the serve the world needs, inherit those security properties on the upper layers of the financial world, etc…

These properties alone have lead us to PoS, EIP-1559 burn mechanism, the roll-up centric roadmap. These choices are a result of these constraints, and there really is very little leeway around it, as far as we know.

In much the same way Einstein’s theory of relativity is not the way it is because scientists decided those were the equations. It’s the simplest solution that respects relativity, respects the equivalence principle, reproduces Newton’s gravity in the low energy/low speed regimes, reproduces the gravitational curvature of light, the precession of perihelion of Mercury. Those requirements are binding enough to give you Einstein’s field equations.

There are some higher order details that can be tuned in both General Relativity and Ethereum, but the core principles become rather constrained to the point there is a single theory that meets all those in the case of General Relativity. It’s unclear to me yet if the case is as constraining for Ethereum, but we are progressively getting there as we understand better this problem space.

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I made a post about blockchain resilience to bugs in a separate thread between PoW and PoS:

https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e8a62w/pow_vs_pos_and_safety_vs_resilience_why_ethereum/

It’s quite long, so here are just the Preface and Summary sections. Use the link above if you want to read the rest of it.

##Preface

I originally wrote this piece after Ethereum lost finality back in May 2023 twice when both the Prysm and Teku minority clients encountered bugs. Around then, Vitalik also dicussed the possibility and concerns for staking bailouts in his “Don’t overload Ethereum’s consensus” article if a catatrophic bug were to happen.

I’m updating and reposting this in light of 2 recent events:

1. Vitalik’s Keynote speech at EthCC 7 where he warns that Ethereum protocol design needs to be careful of other vulnerabilities besides just the typical 33/50/67% consensus-level attacks. It’s a great, humble lecture from Vitalik, and I highly recommend watching it if you haven’t already done so.
2. Geth client developer Marius van der Wijden making it very clear that he wasn’t ready for including EOF in the Pectra update

This is a reminder that there is a reason Ethereum updates are slow and methodical and use multiple testnets.

It only takes one unlucky bug to cause catastrophic damage to the blockchain and cause a mass-slashing event where the majority of stakers will lose their Ether. We got lucky back in 2023 because the bugs were in minority clients and it only halted finality. A bug affecting the majority of clients might not happen now or even in the next decade, but there may be one day where another catastrophic event as damaging as the 2016 DAO hack causes the chain to split again.

##Summary

Historically, successful PoW attacks have been numerous, but successful PoS attacks are virtually non-existent.

History has proven that PoS consensus is a more secure alternative to PoW consensus against Sybil attacks like the 51% attack. However, this is at the cost of PoS being less resilient than PoW for disaster recovery. This is because PoW by design allows for miners to re-attack/reorg the blockchain to revert mistakes.

While client bugs are exceptionally rare, they do occur, and most PoS blockchains have no on-chain method to revert past finality. It’s important to avoid reorgs in the first place because any transations that finalize off-chain through DEXs, bridges, and CEXs are often irreversible even after the blockchain is reverted.

• Security is the ability to protect against malicious attackers
• Resilience is the ability to restore the chain after an attack or catastrophic bug

Similar to the Blockchain Trilemma where there are trade offs between Security, Decentralization, and Scalability–Resilience is also a tradeoff of Security.

Even the 2 biggest blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum (when it was still using PoW), have encountered 51% attacks. Bitcoin (in 2010 and 2013) and PoW Ethereum (in 2016 and 2016) had both been successfully 51% attacked twice each in order to fix catastrophic bugs and issues. It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to accomplish this in reasonable time under PoS Ethereum and most other decentralized PoS blockchains today.

Past finality, it usually requires a DAO-hack like chain split or bailout to undo a catastrophe: i.e. through Layer 0 community consensus and off-chain governance.

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u/betterluckythengood:

ETHE rotating FYI

The NAV price of an ETF corrects at the end of the day, but can deviate a bit during trading hours because of supply and demand forces.

Nobody likes the high ETHE fees, but it might be worth waiting a couple weeks before switching to a different ETH ETF as the ETHE sell pressure early on may push it below NAV during the day. If you sell ETHE and immediately buy another ETH ETF, you may end up with slightly less ETH value than you had before.

This was evidenced during the first week or so for GBTC when the BTC ETFs started trading. Immense sell pressure during the day took GBTC below NAV and strong buy pressure for the popular BTC ETFs may even have pushed them slightly above NAV during trading hours. Those that quickly sold GBTC and immediately rebought another BTC ETF early on often lost a bit of their value.

Best of luck, may the ETH ETFs help take us to the promised land.

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u/Brent_the_Adventurer:

Here’s my understanding of how it works. Let’s say you have 1000 shares of ETHE purchases at $20 each, and these shares represent 10 ETH for easy math.

Since settlement for shares is T+1 and the “Record Date” is today the 18th at 4:00 PM, any shares purchased before today will be included in the spin off to the mini ETF. Now if you fall in that camp this is what will happen.

You still own 1000 shares of ETHE but they only represent 9 ETH now, so your cost basis on those ETHE shares is now $18/share. You will also own (on a later date to be determined, the “Distribution Date”) 1000 shares of mini-ETH representing 1 ETH, or a $2/share cost basis.

If you sell your ETHE shares today or beyond, you will still receive your 1000 shares of mini-ETH because of the T+1 settlement. This also means that if you buy ETHE today, you will not receive any mini-ETH shares.

So, the 10% “discount” is not really a discount and is pricing in the new NAV, meaning it’s basically at fair value.

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I’m a longtime follower who primarily lurks the daily since finding Ethereum in 2017. I want to share my story about my massive wake-up call on the importance of account security and backups after becoming complacent due to my time spent in the space. You never think it could happen to you…

For 3 weeks, I believed I lost access to all my crypto savings and cold wallet / validator withdrawal address. I travel extended periods for work and have some large life expenses right now, so I brought my Ledger with me. Not the first time I’ve travelled with it, but it is the first time I had a bag stolen. I was frustrated but knew I had my seed phrase stored and could recover when I returned home.

I’ve recently bought my first house and moved in with my partner. In the confusion of moving 2 apartments into one, my recovery sheet and other old 2017 financial records were missing. I was feeling pretty despondent knowing that my carelessness and non-urgency about prepping for disaster recovery were starting to bite me in the ass. I fully believed that I lost access to my cold savings and minipools.

It’s not like I couldn’t afford my mortgage, but all hope I had for early financial independence were gone. That planned 2 year maternity leave, funded by ETH, for my pregnant partner wasn’t financially feasible anymore.

I did eventually find my ratty old college notebook with my Ledger seed phrase scrawled in the margins from 2017 when I originally set it up. The euphoria and relief on that day was enormous. I got lucky, I restored everything and have it all secured now. But I feel the need to share my near miss with others so that no one has to feel that rollercoaster of emotion going forward. I made plenty of mistakes to put myself in this situation.

My advice learnt from this; Setup an annual recovery method testing reminder. If you have a trusted partner, teach them about how to access things in the event you pass away. Keep your position records up to date, it also makes me less inclined to toss ETH into various flavours of the month that inevitably crash and burn. Pull the trigger on that Eversteel and set it up properly.

I made my mistakes but got lucky. Dont let complacency and one moment of misfortune ruin multiple years of making the right decision to invest and hold Ether.

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https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1815316383233925498

ETH is 10 years old today!

The ether ICO started July 22, 2014. Back then ETH was sold on Bitcoin at a rate of 2,000 ETH per 1 BTC—totally permissionless, no VCs, no vesting.

Today 1 BTC buys less than 20 ETH. Few assets have outperformed BTC over 10 years; even fewer have outperformed by 100x.

ETH is blockspace currency. 4.3M ETH have been burned to pay for gas since EIP-1559. Many more millions of ETH will be burned for blobs.

Through staking ETH provides $100B of economic security for Ethereum, 10x more than Bitcoin. ETH is also pristine collateral for defi and restaking, unlocking economic bandwidth in size for the internet of value.

Tomorrow ETH spot ETFs start trading in the US. ETH is now widely recognised as a digital commodity. The institutional journey is starting.

And for those who know what the emojis mean, ETH is 🦇🔊 :)

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The clock started today my friends.

The trifecta will burn from today forward of: (1) 1559/merge tokenomics, (2) growth of L2 usage/competition and the ETH ecosystem and dapp creation (enabled by cheaper transaction fees and a growing developer base), and now (3) tradfi and retirement account access (ETFs).

Cry all you’d like about the ratio bleed until now. I remember 2019 well. We bled until the eventual lows in the fall even through the optimism and fake breakout of BTC and crypto in the first half of the year. If you were there, you know how things went. If you weren’t, open the charts.

I shook my head often over this year as I see ratio complainers or people impatient for a golden bull. There’s never been a crypto bull run in history short of a 3+ year bear market. I’m not saying it can’t happen from here forward, but until it happens, we should exercise caution with our impatience.

I’m one of the people who thought we’d ratio gain throughout this year. I was wrong. But, zooming out, and overall, the ratio has held stronger and better than anyone could have imagined in 2018-20. Now the games begin as we have the banks and tradfi financially incentivized to explain the benefits of ETH, as the ecosystem itself continues to improve itself and expand/grow. Make no mistake, this will still take some time to percolate. Enjoy the ride.

Happy ETF launch day. Our first future bull with all the pieces align. It only took 7 Lubins and I still pray nightly for Vitalik to not turn off the master node.

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Here’s something that’s been bothering me for years. As Ethereum continues to gain adoption, I cannot see a future where Ethereum is left to be a neutral settlement layer without having it’s fair share of battles.

How will large financial institutions excercise control over Ethereum? As centralized stablecoins increase in size and gain adoption, and large TradFi institutions accumulate and stake ETH, the economic and social power will shift towards them and away from retail.

How does the community ensure development of Ethereum doesn’t get co-opted by these institutions?

Centralized Stablecoin liquidity and support is a huge social attack vector. While I doubt the ETH devs and researchers will care about that, the social pressure from the community may become to loud to ignore if coordinated propaganda is used.

Large TradFi institutions may also begin funding client teams or even create new clients themselves. I’ve already seen questions of conflict of interests raised proposed ERCs and upgrade proposals. I can only imagine what would happen as larger financial players enter the scene.

Creating troll armies are easier than ever and can quickly flood social forums with coordinated messaging. These social attacks would be the most impactful as they would cause the most confusion in discussions. The discord from bad faith actors could put a stranglehold on development and research.

Anyway, that’s my half baked doom and gloom. Haven’t been posting here since reddit got rid of the 3rd party mobile apps but I’m trying to get used to the Reddit app now.

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I’m DELIGHTED to share this Ethereum Spot ETF POAP with everyone. Not just because of the collectible, but because of all of the years it took for us to get to this place. Congratulations frens! POAP mint requires a $3 donation to AestusRelay

https://checkout.poap.xyz/176266

Congratulations everyone :)

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Don’t mind me, just bumping u/stablecoin’s post from the end of yesterday’s daily.

https://juicebox.money/@defend-roman-storm

stop larping about freedom and make it happen. donate to Roman Storm to keep him out of jail and ensure the freedoms of censorship resistance transactions.

LifelongHODL then asked:

Who is Roman Storm?

Tricky:

A Tornado Cash developer.

So basically a man who is being prosecuted for spreading what has previously been defined by the US supreme court as free speech. Should an arms manufacturer go to prison for a mass shooting? No, that would be ridiculous. So why should he go to prison for creating a piece of open source software which allows me to stop people connecting my public facing wallet to my cold storage just because North Korea also uses the same tool? Surprise surprise, North Korea also uses the internet. But I don’t see the US government charging web 2 companies or Tim Berners Lee for that.

This is a huge double standard and we will be living in a very dark future indeed if the US government wins its case against the Tornado Cash developers.

Edit: Also, u/stablecoin is there an update or something? I see a recent uptick in donations.

Edit 2: Update: https://x.com/FreeAlexeyRoman/status/1815466170948219153

They’re running low on funds for the upcoming trial. Their fees are $500K/month 🤯 reason being it’s a novel case and they really need as robust of a defence as possible.

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u/LowElectrical9680

Ethereim

u/FrenktheTank

$3085.73

u/HBAR_10_DOLLARS

0.054

u/bagogel12

Day 666 since the merge.

u/Atyzzze

290tps

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Markets wind the clock,

Use cases filling the block,

An EthCC talk.

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

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u/NeedlerOP:

Life cycle of an ETH holder:

1. Suffer for 2 years of bear market thinking you’re an idiot (you are, should’ve sold some)
2. Euphoria for 1 year thinking you are literally the wolf of wall street (you’re not)
3. Cope for a 1 year in the early stages of the bear ‘but actually it’s consolidation’ (it’s not)
4. Return to 1)

Source : my poor decisions

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u/Dreth:

the real cycle is:

• 1 week of damn bro the tech is so good, inject that green papery stuff with the faces of defunct important humans and big numbers into my veins
• 7 weeks of im so fucking bored
• 3 weeks of fuck this market party’s over bros pack up

rinse and repeat

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u/superphiz:

The year is 2098. After years of building the network, Eth finally touches $5k for 0.08 seconds before being sold into oblivion. The poap is deployed, but we’re all dead anyway. If you go to a cemetery and listen closely, you can hear the muffled cheers of dead Ethereans celebrating that they were right the whole time.

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u/VbV3uBCxQB9b:

Guys, I’m kinda freaking out, if someone could help me understand what’s happening, I’d be very thankful.

I have a Compound position that I intend(ed?) to leave running for the long term, managed with Defi Saver, on the Base Layer 2 network. It supplies cbETH and boosts by borrowing ETH, buying more cbETH and supplying that etc.

So I wake up today to find that my APY, which last I saw was 15%, is now at -40%. This caught me by surprise, as you can imagine. The reason has to do with the price of borrowing ETH, which went up from 1% to around 8%.

I had a CDP position back when it blew up, in 2019 if I’m not mistaken, so at first I thought some kind of problem like that, but I come here and no one seems to be talking about anything related to this, no crisis, no liquidity problem on ETH or anything like that.

So can anyone shed some light on this? Should I liquidate this position right now, or is this a temporary thing that will normalize soon?

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u/nikola_j:

Hey, good ser, so a person from defi saver here, as u/TheCryptosAndBloods mentioned below (thanks for the tag once again!).

These kinds of spikes in borrowing rates are common in all pool-based money market protocols (i.e. protocols such as Aave, Compound, Morpho Blue) where rates constantly change based on current overall utilisation of the used pool.

I wouldn’t panic about it and would rather wait it out for a day or two to see how the rates change further. Usually there’ll be new (ETH) depositors quickly that have noticed the high available APY for supplying, which is usually considered one of the lower risk opportunities for yield on ETH when it comes to tier 1 protocols such as these.

Hope that clarifies things?

And p.s. the net APY specifically is calculated based on your position balance and how it would change in one year from now based on current supply & borrow APYs, if that wasn’t clear.

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Excellent tweet from @materkel:

I’m kind of fed up with all the negativity around #Ethereum and Rollups when the whole ecosystem is shipping out of its mind right now. People who look at what we have now and still think Ethereum should have scaled L1 first… are you all out of your minds?

Let me tell you what approximately would have happened if we scaled L1:

• Maybe 50-100 TPS now on L1… wow… I’m sure all the skeptics would have jumped on Ethereum L1 and done all their stuff there.
• Rollups that were previously aligned with Ethereum would most definitely have chosen alternative solutions for DA to meaningfully scale (which is now possible using Ethereum as DA).
• We would not have hundreds of Rollup teams contributing back to the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem.
• Minimal marketing for the Ethereum ecosystem… L2s would just end up doing their own thing, because why should they stay if Ethereum chose to abandon them in the most critical of times?

Ethereum would have essentially pushed the most valuable allies away despite funding a lot of the ZK and rollup research in the past (even 5+ years ago).

We now get so much more back from L2s, and with PeerDAS and full proto-Danksharding on the horizon, there will be no argument left for why those rollups should even think about doing their “own thing” or choosing a different DA. I mean, look at what is happening with $TIA… Ethereum is basically eating their lunch right now.

We now have:

• Multiple Consensus and Execution Client Teams making Ethereum the most decentralized public Blockchain to ever exist by a large margin. AFAIK no other Blockchain even has 2 meaningfully adopted clients… Ethereum has 7 clients with >10% distribution, that’s just incredible if you think about it
• Multiple Rollups that are among the most active chains right now
• Both @base and @arbitrum breaking their own records every few days, attracting billions in TVL and millions of users, shipping out of their minds, having meaningful traction, and a growing app ecosystem
• Multiple more theme-focused, Ethereum-aligned L2s like e.g. @Immutable onboarding hundreds of game studios and eventually millions of gamers
• Account abstraction wallets that wouldn’t have been easily possible on L1 (at least not so soon) via @Immutable passport or @infinex_app offering sponsored meta transactions
• The cheapest L1 gas fees we’ve probably ever had. Introducing blobs with EIP-4844 made room for more meaningful transactions. At peak times, L2s made up for up to ~30% of the Ethereum blockspace (this most likely still is temporary and also bought us some time to give L1 some love)

I have no doubt in my mind that what Ethereum did has led to the absolute best outcome for the protocol we could have hoped for in the last 3-4 years. Of course, L1 could have used some love, but that critique is on such a high level that it feels like we’re just coping because the price is not catching up with fundamentals.

If you had told me where Ethereum would be right now 3-4 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined a more solid position for it to be in.

Now we can discuss what should be next and that going further down the Rollup path might be a bad idea, or that we should focus on fixing fragmentation, etc., and that delaying this and that in favor of some L1 love is a good idea. I’m totally into that, but please stop with all the coping when we basically just shipped an upgrade that gave @base and other Rollups <1 cent fees ~4 months ago…

#Ethereum and its whole ecosystem is still winning, and nothing can stop it from winning even more, as the whole behemoth that is thousands of ecosystem teams all shipping in parallel is just getting started.

(* These aren’t my words, but I didn’t feel like doing a massive quote block to share it! -phiz)

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I know I’ve been woefully non-reporting my ARB delegate updates the last month, but for those who want to check voting records I did make a reporting thread a few months ago if people want to follow for the links to all my votes + rationale

https://forum.arb.seamonkey.tech/t/bob-rossi-delegate-communication-thread/23653

Beyond basic duties, notable projects I’ve taken on recently. Which if people want to discuss / voice opinions about I’m all ears.

• I’m on the interim oversight committee for the ARB gaming project that passed. There is a vote for the actual oversight committee soon, but they wanted some of the prominent delegates on there for between period where the program was approved but no oversight board voted on. I was partially chosen since I was no voter, and they wanted representation from dissenting opinions. I am not running for full time council, if anyone was wondering.
• I’m also (hopefully) going to be on another oversight committee for a separate project relating more to theory-crafting how to more efficiently run the DAO. A little up in the air at the moment, but have said I’d do it if it goes forward.
• HOP related, but they are starting a grant committee. Which I’ve applied for… I do need to get voted in but if elected I’ll for sure be reaching out to people here. It is small given the project, but might be a good thing for those who are looking for that type of funding.

Also don’t forget ARB is still running the LTIPP incentives so there are likely some good projects out there to earn some extra APY, or simply getting rewarded for using. Here is the list of them all if your curious - Powerhouse Connect (arbgrants.com). May I suggest checking out the “H” section as well, although forgive me as i’ve been busy and a little behind on what I need to update (I will be this weekend)

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On Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Altcoins

Many people might have noticed that I’m one of the most vehemently anti-Bitcoin people in here, and also very often diss Altcoins. They are not wrong. So I will attempt to explain why there’s a world of difference between a Bitcoin Maxi and an Ethereum Maxi.

It’s strange, because I was really, really late on Ethereum, and really into Bitcoin. Not only was I completely oblivious to its existence until 2017, I even initially dismissed it as another altcoin that’s going to zero. Up until 2018, I was essentially a Bitcoin Maxi. After a few short months or reading up on several coins, getting heavily rekt in the 2018 crash betting on NANO, and educating myself about crypto, I had completely converter to Ethereum. And I left Bitcoin completely behind.

Why is that?

Gresham’s law states that bad money drives out good money. The good money that is driven out is hoarded, so if it is scarce, it increases in value. Many people understand this as “Crypto will always outperform Fiat because it’s better money”. But there’s another angle to it. In my opinion, this applies even more strongly within the highly liquid and interconnected crypto ecosystem, sucking value out of every single Altcoin and giving it to the leading crypto, which is the one that has the most “moneyness”. During this process, the leading crypto builds even more status as money, and altcoins are dismissed as bad investments at best or scams at worst.

Every cycle, once the speculative frenzy dies out, and it eventually does, every single crypto ends up being valued exactly as a company stock: according to the current and future profits it can bring to the holder, taking into account the potential for its future growth. For most altcoins, that means following an asymptote to zero, since they don’t really have any profits.

Why has Ether escaped this fate for a couple of cycles? After all, Ethereum is constantly regarded as one of the most undervalued altcoins not just by Ethereans (of course we would think that) but even by neutral Altcoiners. “Ethereum can only dump after good news” is a meme in most crypto subreddits. But somehow Etherum persists. In my opinion, this can be explained because even though in the minds of the majority Ethereum is still an altcoin, it’s again valued as a stock: according to its profits. It’s seen as undervalued precicely because a lot of speculative value has evaporated due to it having been around for a couple of cycles. The fact that it’s not only profitable, but the only profitable altcoin (OK there’s also BNB and maybe TRON with some light profits) is the reason it is not following every single other crypto to oblivion.

Every single crypto… except one. The one that in the minds of the majority is the best money. The one that every single cycle, without fail, will be the safe haven that’s not going to zero, because it has a hard support of rabid acolytes that see it as the best money on Earth. Bitcoin.

So, sometime during Ethereum’s development, I think some very smart people realized that this is the game. As a result, Ether is the only crypto that has worked and fought to be seen as a better money. Ultrasound money might or might not be the best attempt to communicate that to the general public, but in my opinion is very apt.

Ethereum is an absolutely unique altcoin in this regard, because from the moment it was created, its scope and capabilities exceeded Bitcoin’s by such a huge margin, that it could legitimately claim to be the money of the crypto ecosystem, superseding Bitcoin.

Many of you think there’s room for both BTC and ETH on the ecosystem. Sure, there’s room for both, if BTC is the money and ETH keeps being valued as a stock. If BTC reaches $1M and ETH reaches $12K.

But if you want a $150K Ether, then you just can’t have Bitcoin being seen as the better money. And if Bitcoin ceases to be seen as the better money, it’s not even going to be in the top 20 on Coinmarketcap.

So, when you people try to be moderate with Bitcoin Maxis in order to drive a civilized discussion you miss the fact that this is impossible. The smart Maxis know that Ethereum is a mortal threat to Bitcoin. There’s no civilized discussion that can happen in light of this fact. They can only dismiss Ethereum as the worst shitcoin, because acknowledging it might lead some moderate Bitcoiners or people that are on the fence to jump ship. And when you’ve build a personal brand and an entire livelihood on Bitcoin being the best money, you might not be able to do the same. But even though you might know that Ethereum is objectively better money, you do have some very strong weapons to fight back. The early Bitcoiners are some of the wealthiest people in the ecosystem. They can help launch “Ethereum killers” and pump them 2000%. They can spread FUD. They can go on podcasts and shit on Ethereum non-stop. The vitriol and dismissal I’ve seen against Ethereum from smug Maxis is not even close to other altcoins.

Because they realize the fact that you can have many cryptocurrencies and a thriving ecosystem, but not all of them can be money. Crypto needs a King. And so far, this Maxi strategy is working, because it keeps Bitcoin’s network effect intact and damages Ethereum’s. And the network effect is the only thing that gives money its value.

So, I am an Ethereum Maxi. But here’s the difference: I am not an Ethereum Maxi because I can’t move to Bitcoin. I am late enough to be neither rich or have buit a business around Ethereum. I’m a Maxi because Ethereum is just better. So, unlike Bitcoin Maxis, I don’t really have to resort to arguments found at the lowest levels of Graham’s argument pyramid. I can make intelligent points, refute Maxi’s stupid arguments, and be an Ethereum Maxi myself. It’s easy, because there not even a conflict. The world benefits along with my bags, which I think is pretty rare.

So be a Maxi, because what Ethereum is trying to do is neither easy nor certain. We are coming for the King, and we definitely best not miss.

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ACDE 191 Recap posted by ralexstokes in the ETH R&D Discord:

ACDE 191 Recap

Started with Pectra updates

• Clients moving ahead with devnet-1 implementations
• Waiting for a greater number of clients to be ready before we launch devnet-1, but expect to be there in the next week or two
• Got an update on 7702 progress that will likely go into devnet-2; please take a look as the intention is to merge in the next week

** Note: devnet-1 will reflect the current spec of EIP-7702

Then turned to discuss EIP-7212

• There’s support for the feature as it brings a lot of nice UX improvements around key/wallet management with a widely supported cryptographic curve
• We discussed the point around formal inclusion in Pectra, but will wait till the next ACDE to make that decision. While the EIP in isolation brings a nice set of features, it needs to be weighed against the already large scope of Pectra
• There are a few minor things to address around the EIP itself, including mirroring the precompile address across L2 deployments and L1. These will be resolved over the next two weeks to tee us up for an inclusion discussion on the next call

Next, we discussed a proposal to add events to the predeploy system contracts for cross-layer communication with EIP-7002 and EIP-7251. Consensus was that this change makes sense and the corresponding contracts will be updated.

Then, we had a call to deactivate EIP-158 to simplify the effects of deploying EIP-7702 and the Verkle migration. In light of the latest updates to 7702 we no longer need this proposal and decided to ignore it.

And to wrap the call, we had a discussion around making progress on other protocol improvements like history expiry and changes to the blob mempool to streamline usage of blobs by users like rollups. We jumped across various concerns here so check the call for the details. In short, there was a call for more regular updates on EIP-4444’s progress, and a call out to various things both rollups and clients can do to more intelligently handle the pipeline from blob producer to blob inclusion on-chain.

Reminder: Goerli has been deprecated and so clients will (or have already!) dropped support for this testnet.

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200 sustained tp/s and still only 1-2gwei gas fees

https://imgur.com/a/05zT8vK

we are severely over capacity

the infrastructure currently in place is able to support so many more users

it will destroy all shred of doubt whether or not blockchain can scale to support the entire world as it was intended to

the next bull run will be like nothing we’ve ever seen

and the etfs going live might just be the linchpin

cba for the flippening

I want to see the great supply crunch as the economic beast awakens and is firing on all cylinders

on to the next cycle of new tech –> new users get interested –> eventually current tech limits are hit –> users face frustration and lose interest –> technology improves and readies itself for round of user adoption –> repeat

It’s safe to say we’ve at least x100 our user capacity since the last big bull run

now let the users come back and see what happens

I’ll never forget this time I was waiting at a bar for my btc transactions to be confirmed, had to wait over an hour to get the needed confirmations, PoW RNG be damned. The UX experience is crazy much better compared to back then.

At some point, we’re all going to realize this technology isn’t going anywhere and is not a ponzi, or at least, not any more than all other fiat is.

Except that this is money by the people, for the people.

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How did you find your way to ethfinance?

My story was that I was a semi active user on r/silverbugs and r/pmsforsale. Around 2016 I noticed more people accepting “crypto” as payment. I remember someone selling about $50 worth of silver for something like 10 eth. Once the boom of winter 2017 happened a few friends brought crypto back up and we all bought the top (btc, eth, ltc). That’s when I found ethtrader and became a lurker. Once ethtrader dissolved into whatever the hell it is now, I followed dcinvestor, jt and a few others here where I still am someone active.

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u/baggygravy:

Adding to the staking posts below (or above if you’re in Australia) - I have also been onboarded to NodeSet recently, and my first testnet validator went live today and is chugging away just fine. The Gravita project looks good, but Constellation is the one I have my eye on - basically staking for and on behalf of others via RocketPool, taking a cut of their earnings for running the node - hopefully coming by next year.

I’ve also just signed up for the Stakers Union, and have been having fun with Heroglyphs the last few weeks, and there is Etherguardians coming up soon too.

This has been the best and most interesting few months for a home staker like me, at least since the excitement of Genesis - it’s great to see community efforts to encourage and reward home staking that are supported by the ecosystem as a whole . A big shout out to u/superphiz for his ceaseless efforts, as always.

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u/TheHansGruber:

A few months ago I was onboarded as an operator with nodeset. I have been running a few thousand genesis validators alongside a dozen or so other techno-acolytes that coalesced in the rocketpool discord, so I threw my hat in as I thought I had some qualifying experience in and around the college ball level.

Well, the first validator I have spun up using their hyperdrive software stack goes live in about an hour on holesky, and I am looking forward to spinning many up on mainnet when the opprotunity to do so presents itself. The software stack is straight forward and does require some registering on their website to finish things off, but overall the process was painless and left me feeling good about the whole thing.

There already are some lucky operators attesting on mainnet permitting the existence of Gravita Protocol’s LST, gravETH which is a part of the Stakewise Vault ecosystem. I haven’t kept up with stakewise recently, but I did lose some eth trading their token like, a year or more ago. Not a knock on them or anything, I am just a bad trader.

Gravita does have a points program running (they call them marks) and while I don’t know too much about their roadmap, I do think the space/time dilation art style and theme is kickass. It’s hard to launch an LST in this already crowded market, but I wanna take a minute to remind everyone that every additional LST out there helps decentralize the entire network a little bit more. Which is overall good.

Diva/Nektar staking development is coming along, as is Lido’s CSM which is also currently operating on testnet with some early permissioned adopters. I am on this list, but have not yet gotten around to spinning up another VM. Will try to find the time today or tomorrow but several big-ass tree limbs came down in a storm yesterday that I have to bust out the chainsaw to deal with unexpectedly…and as much as I enjoy a hard-days work outdoors…I am doing all of this keyboard clacking and button clicking in an attempt to not have to do as much manual labor.

Vaya con dios, amigos.

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Staking survey data just dropped on ethstaker. The most surprising stat for me is that 77% are staking 60-100% of their ETH. I know us solo stakers are in it for the long haul, but damn that is a lot higher than I imagined.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5

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u/franzperdido

Äh…thereum?

u/usesbinkvideo

90,560 hodlers suhh…ubscribed (+4)

u/Tom_The_Moose

$3509

u/FrenktheTank

0.0544

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Bridge in and bridge out,

An habit we must ditch out,

Intents will switch out.

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It’s 3am and Gary hasn’t been home yet. He’s sweating, gently waxing his red stapler for the last time over a bottle of Jim Beam. Elizabeth Warren said he could only keep the stapler, which he stole from the strange man in the basement, if he destroyed crypto. After glossing over the TPS reports on his desk in a bourbon-daze, Gary picks up the phone. A smokey Eldritch voice answers.

“It’s Gary,” Gary says, wondering if any other color of stapler will ever fill the vessel of his soul like the red one has. “Drop the investigations against ETH.”

He pours himself and his red stapler a snifter of whisky; then he simply weeps.

(Which is to say: https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-to-drop-ethereum-investigation-says-consensys)

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[edit] these amendments are in committee still and likely will be tough for Brad to get his way this time. we will know more when the bill is finalized. [/edit]

Brad Sherman just cucked the USA again by effectively banning P2P crypto amending shit last minute into a must pass defense bill.

Every node connects to Russia, every transaction must be doxed. There is no escaping this hell until the tech is so innocuous and private it is impossible to regulate.

https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1801228173851394204

🚨NEW: California Democrat @BradSherman filed an amendment with the House Rules Committee for the following to be included in the must-pass NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) bill:

1. The @USTreasury Secretary would have “clear authority to prohibit digital asset trading platforms and transaction facilitators under U.S. jurisdiction from transacting with cryptocurrency addresses that are known to be, or could reasonably be known to be, in Russia.”

1. @FinCENnews (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) would be able to require U.S. taxpayers engaged in a transaction with a value greater than $10K of cryptocurrency offshore to file FinCEN Form 114 (FBAR).

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https://honeypot.is/?address=0xd52456e8a33718f72ba38469539c082eb761f78b

POPCAT (POPCAT)
Honeypot Detected

Run the fuck away.

execution reverted: TransferHelper: TRANSFER_FROM_FAILED

The taxes on this token are extremely high. You will get significantly less from a trade than expected, be careful!

A very high amount of users can not sell their tokens. This is likely a honeypot.

all_snipers_honeypot

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From twitter:

People don’t understand why markets pump. How the flow of money works. The first tier of money goes to top tier stocks and government bonds. Then to high level private equity private credit etc .. Then it flows to higher risk bonds. Then to higher risk stocks…to top tier corporate bonds. Lower tier private equity… alternative investments like bitcoin. Then….

After everything is filled … money flows to high high risk like Altcoins etc and alt stocks penny stocks what not. The reason no Altcoin or even Ethereum has hit a new ATH or broken or even come close to breaking 2021 highs is because there isn’t money to make it that far.

You need liquidity events in market to reach the far depths of risk. That far depth gets touched once everything else is full. Similar to money flowing bucket to bucket. The liquidity event that happened in 2008 and 2020 has not happened yet. Liquidity events are lower rates, or stimulus. Without it you cannot have high risk products pump. In January 2024 market was pricing in a huge liquidity event for 2024. 7 rate cuts. This is why everything hit 3 year highs. This along with bitcoin etf got us a new high on BTC and saw many alts climb several 500-1000% from 2022 lows. That liquidity event never materialized. We went from 7 cuts, to 3 cuts to a shock 1 cut now for 2024. The only way for market to go back up to all time highs accross the board is for liquidity event. Unfortunately if we get a shock event like Covid , or something else black swan that forces the Fed to cut rates quicker or a hard recession it’s usually too late. Market will crash ahead of it. That crash you buy and ride it back up into the liquidity event.

Fed has decided they don’t want to cut aggressively. They going to cut in December this year and then next year. This will possibly result in a recession or maybe we just see soft landing and gradual cuts over next 2/3 years. I. That scenario market will slowly grind up over next 2-3 years and we might see altcoin highs during that time. Market is forward looking so it can always change. If we approach a recession worse than expected and say u employment ticks up to 5% then Fed will cut but by then we will see a big dump in market on recession or stagflation fears.

It’s always a tough battle. The last 15 years of bull markets were on the back of liquidity events. This is the first time we have no stimulus. It’s a diff ball game. It’s a much tougher grind market for high risk assets in such scenario. That’s why all money is flowing to easy tech stocks that are giving better returns than crypto. Nobody wants to risk anything because there is no liquidity event. Ofcourse things can change but that’s the state of the market.

https://x.com/wizardofsoho/status/1801419487201071423

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Remember that Solana chain everyone was so worried about a couple of months ago?

Solana currently has a 4.24% TVL market share over defi. Ethereum has a 60.8% market share. Include L2s and it’s closing on 70%. Include EVM chains and sidechains and it’s over 90%.

A part of me used to wish for eth to remain king on all fronts, including memecoins.

My worst case scenario used to be “even if everything fails, there’ll still be demand for Ethereum to be the internet’s casino, which will require eth for gas (more demand) and this usage will burn eth (less supply). So even in the worst case, price goes up over time”.

But memecoins have migrated to Solana. Is it a bad thing? Well, not anymore.

Given the recent surge of L2s, the tx cost drops, the ETF, and the institutional demand for tokenisation, the worst case scenario is far better than it used to be. The complete vision seems to be happening, green and scalable. Ethereum becoming the world’s settlement layer isn’t a pipe dream anymore, it’s becoming a realistic scenario.

Today solana is alleviating Ethereum from scam, grifters, and hopefully regulator attention. It’s taking the garbage that didn’t require decentralization to function out of our ecosystem.

Ethereum is taking everything else.

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In case you didn’t see it yesterday:

• The Wall Street Journal figured out that stable coins help the american dollar to stay relevant (because everyone in any country can/do hold and use USDC or USDT) and provide the american state with buyers for their debt (indirectly, in the sense that Circle and Tether convert the USDs of their customers into bonds). Guess which blockchain hosts 70% of the TVL of stablecoins?
• BlackRock reiterated that public blockchains are more secure and offer more opportunities than the private ones.
• A commissioner of the SEC stated that tokenisation is the future of financial markets.
• ETH ETFs candidates informed journalists that the SEC gave them feedback on their S-1 forms and the feedback is light, and asked them to update them within a week.

Meanwhile, information sources do business as usual: Coindesk, Cointelegraph and The Block ignore Ethereum-related news or turn them into “blockchain news”, Crypto Twitter and YouTube shill the shaky and declining Solana, BTC cultists and Solana moonboys repeat outdated propaganda against Ethereum over and over.

Why? Because they know. They are worried.

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Farmer’s POV: $ZK takeaways

My personal insights and experience from farming $ZK airdrop.

• Variety of strategies.

It really paid off using different strategies and although medium and small wallets basically got nothing, it was a good bet to try it out. Focusing on more than 1 big quality account was really smart and that’s one of my main takeaways: have 5ish big juicy legit farmor accounts with a deeply rich history and previous qualifications and go at it. It also allows for easier and more pleasant farming because it’s not that tedious to repeat.

• Giving up small sybilling accounts.

ZKsync had 9M+ wallets and only ~696k qualified. It makes no sense to continue using low-value and quality wallets while spending one’s time and energy. Farmers are not going away, thus you’d still need to stand out in the sea of hopeful airdrop chasers.

• Farming can be ze wei - great risk/reward.

Airdrop farming can be profitable due to great R/R. You have a capped downside of how much money you will burn on gas fees, NFTs, and what not and you have quite an unlimited upside. Yes, zksync had a cap at 100k points but that would have been more than enough to guarantee an insane upside.

• Sybilling is a must.

Due to the upside being capped sometimes, we have to hedge ourselves or, like in the case with $eigen, lower value accounts are rewarded for being too low of a value lol. For those reasons, it’s important not to whale projects unless there’s a transparent structure of unlimited upside that aims clearly to not forego whales.

• Overview.

I’ve heard and been told that it’s too late to start farming yada yada but a decent chunk of $zk considering that I started late with no prior knowledge is a great accomplishment. Airdrop farming was and still is one of the most lucrative ways to gain the edge. However, I would argue that the edge lies in whaling some metrics or in the ability to access those resources to pump up your stats, and lesser accounts without that capital are unable to compete, therefore missing out on the great R/R play which in turn makes it worthwhile for lower value portfolios. Time and effort is no longer enough not just to outcompete but to even have a decent chunk of making it.

• $ZK price speculation.

At current premarket prices of $0.3-0.35ish, it would open at $7ish bn FDV given the 21bn of the total supply. To me, that would be a hold. As always I expect a dump at the open but being realistic even if I am not that skillful to be one of the first to dump, I won’t be able to buy back lower. Historically, it has also been true to wait for a pump within days or a week, sometimes up to 16ish days or in rare cases for up to 1.5 months. With those things in mind, I can see a dump, a post-dump pump and I’m personally hoping for a cope pump - you know, that type of pump that TIA had. Ideally, I’d get ~$0.7ish+ and exit.

What are your takeaways?

p.s. this better edited article + more articles, including recent ones on how to get on farcaster and tips for the newcomers are available on my paragraph

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u/benido2030:

I just played around with the zksync dao tool / delegation portal and the search is… not optimal. I wanted to add an ENS after not having one when setting up the profile and I did, but you can’t find my or any profile via ENS. I think starknet used the same tool (Tally) as well I thought it didn’t work because starknet has different addresses. You also can’t search for usernames, it seems to be not working by default.

So a quick summary for tomorrow in case you’re not dumping on day1:

• u/haurog: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/haurog.eth or copy paste this address: 0x1c0AcCc24e1549125b5b3c14D999D3a496Afbdb1

• u/_weboftrust: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x7aaba482329d001d9ab7120f0546b6760ae3fe19 or copy paste this address 0x7AAbA482329D001D9AB7120f0546B6760AE3FE19

• u/benido2030: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x05429d5113c06405398f613eaad632f5a00b43e1 or copy paste this address 0x05429D5113c06405398F613EAAD632F5A00B43E1

I guess searching for the address is the easiest since I expect claiming and delegating to be one process. You probably can skip delegating and then go to the profile and delegate manually, but doing it in the claiming process is more comfy…

I’ll repost tomorrow morning as well!

zkGM - reposting from yesterday re: delegation in zksync

I just played around with the zksync dao tool / delegation portal and the search is… not optimal. I wanted to add an ENS after not having one when setting up the profile and I did, but you can’t find my or any profile via ENS. I think starknet used the same tool (Tally) as well I thought it didn’t work because starknet has different addresses. You also can’t search for usernames, it seems to be not working by default.

So a quick summary for tomorrow in case you’re not dumping on day1:

• u/haurog: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/haurog.eth or copy paste this address: 0x1c0AcCc24e1549125b5b3c14D999D3a496Afbdb1

• u/_weboftrust: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x7aaba482329d001d9ab7120f0546b6760ae3fe19 or copy paste this address 0x7AAbA482329D001D9AB7120f0546B6760AE3FE19

• u/benido2030: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x05429d5113c06405398f613eaad632f5a00b43e1 or copy paste this address 0x05429D5113c06405398F613EAAD632F5A00B43E1

I guess searching for the address is the easiest since I expect claiming and delegating to be one process. You probably can skip delegating and then go to the profile and delegate manually, but doing it in the claiming process is more comfy.

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u/_WebOfTrust:

Claim is still not working for me; I changed to custom RPC, but Rabby is not responding. However, there is some hope on a related topic. Every time I used to look at DAO governance, I would see the same faces as delegates with only token-based governance, which never motivated me to contribute or participate. Everything changed when Optimism governance was announced (plus few other things).

I just looked at the ZKsync delegate page. The Ethfinance delegate combined has a voting power of more than 10M ZKsync (Benido + haurog + Liberosist + smol amount delegate to me as well). This might be a fraction compared to Syncswap or Olimpio, but the point of my rambling is to highlight a change, a positive change that I wanted to see. New faces, views, opinions, and ideas- not just projects representing themselves as delegates, but also community members. Even though they are invested directly, they care about the ecosystem and want to drive it in a positive direction.

Haurog DM’d me on Farcaster to create a profile as they could not see my profile there, and time was running out. Benido took this initiative to form a sort of delegation council emerging from Ethfinance. To me, I don’t see any financial benefits they might be getting for doing this apart from their belief in helping, improving, and contributing to this evolving ecosystem.

So, my dudes, thank you, and I look forward to reading more from you outside of this forum.

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ETHEREUM SURVIVES THE SEC.

Today we’re happy to announce a major win for Ethereum developers, technology providers, and industry participants: the Enforcement Division of the SEC has notified us that it is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0.

This means that the SEC will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities transactions.

https://x.com/Consensys/status/1803230653120659641

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If you plan to go to devcon this year, the first opportunity to get a ticket just opened: https://devcon.org/en/tickets/

It is a raffle. You bid on tickets. The 20 highest bids get a ticket and then 184 are raffled among all the participants. Minimum bid is 0.08 ETH to participate. The raffle will be open until July 9th. On July 9th they will open discount ticket to which you can apply and plead your case on why you are an important part of the ethereum space. Discount tickets have the same price as the raffle minimum bid (299$). On july 16th the normal tickets go on sale which cost double (599$).

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Lighthouse devs released a blog post about attestation misses. It goes into a lot of details on the path from attestation creation until it is included in a block and discusses all the possible ways an attestation might not get included due to failures at any of the intermediate steps. It also shows how to analyze the origin of possible misses in the logs and their grafana dashboard. This part is obviously focused on how to do it with lighthouse. All in all it is a great read.

The take home message is that quite often attestation misses are outside of the users control. To minimize attestation misses the user can make sure that their clock is synced, has opened the necessary ports to get enough peers and have a hardware setup which does not have a bottleneck (SSD, CPU and bandwidth) to make sure to get attestations out as efficiently as possible.

https://lighthouse-blog.sigmaprime.io/attestation-analysis.html

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3755.67

u/usesbinkvideo

90,496 hodlers subscribed (no change)

u/TimbukNine

0.0548

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One you can’t ignore,

Gas burns like never before,

Still Ether candour.

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Today’s the day boys and girl, I’m wearing my finest t shirt and shorts (least amount of stains) wife asked me what’s the occasion.

I told her future of France is happening she rolled her eyes, but I know you understand.

Cool as a cuecombone 🍻

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Now just in case people are starting to speculate about other crypto currencies getting an ETF. Only Bitcoin and Eth have embarked on this journey. There were several milestones that took years to achieve.

Namely CFTC Futures and Futures ETF. For CFTC Futures there needs to be a sufficiently liquid market of a certain size before that is going to happen. I honestly dont see any coin following Eth quickly at this stage.

Other coins do not have that nor is there any application or similar filed for this. So even if we assume an expedited process for the next coin. We wont see it any time soon imo. If FIT21 gets approved in the Senate there will be finally clear rules to see what constitutes a security and what a commodity in the crypto space. Decentralization IS important and the entire point of crypto. The market being to dense to realize this doesnt change the fact that this is the reason why crypto exists and why it is valuable in the first place.

I am really happy to see america moving towards clear rules when it comes to crypto. Being a crypto security should also not be a death sentence because if the SEC does their job their will be a clear path ahead for exchanges and security tokens to be traded.

Removing uncertainty from crypto is a great step. It will help the market mature and also will kill many needless CT discussions.

Next fight is uniswap legal precedent there will be very very bullish for ethereum and defi. Defi could finally become part and replace parts of traditional finance forever.

Ethereum is the future.

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I stumbled upon hackedwalletrecovery.com, which helps you recover funds if your wallet has been hacked and a drainer is observing your wallet. It helps you build a flashbots bundle which moves ETH from a non-compromised wallet to the hacked wallet and then moves the desired token out of the hacked wallet address. This happens all in one bundle which is sent to the flashbots RPC to make sure it never hits the mem pool. The wallet drainer monitoring the wallet cannot steal your funds as they do not see the transactions and it will happen in one big transaction anyway.

I learned about this project from a presentation by Austin Griffith who works at the Ethereum Foundation. This is a project from the BuildGuidl which does the ‘speedrun ethereum’ course. I personally have not tested it as I do not have a hacked wallet available, but I clicked around a bit and it overall makes sense even though some steps leave me a bit puzzled. It is a very limited tool, but maybe it will help someone recover some of their funds in case of a hack.

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u/2peg2city:

So, what will ETF flows be? Obviously significantly less than the BTC ones IMO but let’s look at what happened in Canada with their ETFs:

CI Galaxy:

• BTC Net Assets 790M (CAD)
• ETH 651M (CAD)

Purpose Investmets:

• BTC 2.5B (CAD)
• ETH .47B (CAD)

Evolve ETFs:

• BTC 240M (CAD)
• ETH 92M (CAD)

3iq:

• BTC 326M (CAD)
• BTC 615M (CAD)
  • Total 941M CAD
• ETH 72M (CAD)
• ETH 366M (CAD)
  • Total 438M (CAD)

I’d say 20-30% is the benchmark, though many of these Canadian funds are staking which the new US ones will not be.

EDIT: These are CURRENT values, each page has charts but I’m too lazy to see spikes at launch

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u/15kisFUD:

Some sobering thoughts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx4pwSXycck

James Seyffart makes a pretty good case for why he thinks ETH ETF inflows will amount to around 20% of Bitcoin inflows. His argument: Market cap is around 1/3 so base case would be 33%, but you lose more with putting your ETH into an ETF compared to Bitcoin.

1. You lose staking yield.
2. You lose utility of using ETH in defi etc

Makes sense to me. Bitcoin was made to put in an ETF and it’s core to its value proposition. The entire ETF narrative just fits Bitcoin better. On the day of the Blackrock BTC filing, the ratio was 0.065. Given that I think ETFs are more bullish for Bitcoin than ETH, I think the ratio should even out around 0.058-0.061 now to fully price in ETH’s ETF.

For ETH to improve on the ratio and take the spotlight away from Bitcoin it needs something more, something that is core to Ethereum to take off. This could be real adoption by institutions like with the BUIDL funds, a new mania like with ICO’s or NFTs or the breakout consumer dAPP that we have been waiting so long for. Perhaps the improved regulatory climate is the catalyst for this, I hope it is. If such an event does happen, the ETH ETF will allow a pathway for a lot of net inflows making a flippening more possible. So it could end up getting more inflows eventually, I just think that the mere existence of an ETH ETF is not sufficient to take significant market share from Bitcoin.

That being said. I am extremely happy that ETH got it’s own ETF, mainly so it does not start falling even further behind Bitcoin in the zeitgeist. It’s back to “Bitcoin, ETH and the rest” instead of “Bitcoin and the rest” and that is extremely bullish

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Had a first round interview at one the biggest crypto media companies in the space on May 6th. And was asked what my most controversial take was. I said I think the ETH ETF would be approved by the end of the summer. The interviewer strongly disagreed and said there were not any signs pointing towards that. They decided to pass on me after the second interview. Oh well I will just keep building.

In other news I have been collecting a bunch of data to start to look into the correlation between price/price change/market cap/market cap change and social media/GitHub metics. My first shallow dive into some of the data showed a Pearson correlation of 0.72 (which is pretty damn good) between market cap and twitter followers. After dropping meme coins (often have bought/fake followers), CEX tokens (they have a bunch of followers because they are well known, but most tokens are not valuable), and pure BNB ecosystem tokens (the theory here is that Chinese users probably don’t use crypto Twitter much, which I would assume are a large percentage of BNB buyers and users). Going to test the correlation going back historically next, and see how this changes during bear/bull. Will also look to see if month over month changes in market cap are correlated with month over month Twitter follower count change. Finally I want to use all this to build a index / watch list for coins that are gaining momentum, tying in trends that indicate a coin in the say top 200 to top 500 by market cap is on a trajectory to the top 100 by MC. My theory is two fold, one is network effects, the more followers a page has the more it gets shown to other users via the algo and second coins are the ultimate marketing tool as buyers are likely to talk about a project when they buy, trying to get others to buy, others will follow the project to learn more before potentially buying then repeating the process. Plus most projects get more useful with more users and liquidity/TVL.

Any feedback or thought ideas are much appreciated.

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Hey ethfinanciers, I want to warn about a very sophisticated scam that I was targeted with (unsuccessfully, of course).

If you get contacted about some kind of job at a very legit looking (at first glance) project called UNI APT, it is A SCAM.

Seems obvious to some of us, but it is a rather elaborate and above all expensive social engineering scam.

If you want more details about it check this tweet: https://x.com/iknowgoodthings/status/1790737051219845562

Every single person claiming to be a member of this whole UniAPT or UNI APT project is a SCAMMER, so please please beware. Their twitter account is @uniaptio, PLEASE BE VIGILANT AND STAY SAFE OUT THERE.

This is not the first scam of its kind, there are plenty like this, so be careful, doubt everything they say, DO NOT DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM RANDOM ENTITIES ONLINE and NEVER give deeply personal information to them.

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https://x.com/AdrianoFeria/status/1794364149012545665

institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals will look past the maxi narratives when considering which assets to allocate within crypto.

Here is what they will find out:

• The 21M cap is not unconditional. Issuance is a subsidy, and BTC still relies heavily on it (within the last year, issuance subsidy exceeded 99% at times).
• ETH has a superior S2F, and while net issuance fluctuates, it has averaged a NEGATIVE 0.19% since the merge went live.
• ETH has managed to provide over 4% native yield while being deflationary over the same period.
• ETH’s PoS has eliminated structural selling related to miners as well as ESG concerns.
• BTC’s glorified scaling solution, the LN, has been a complete disaster. It suffers from horrible UX limitations and nuances, and is bottlenecked by L1. For this reason, it has failed to gain any meaningful traction over its existence (only 0.025% of circulating BTC is operating under the LN).
• The rollup-centric model on ETH has been extremely successful, with L2s seeing explosive growth in adoption (currently processing about 10 times ETH’s L1 capacity).
• L2 scaling on ETH is so sound that the most disruptive and dominant company in the crypto space, Coinbase, launched its own L2 (Base). They have also made official statements about using it as their primary network for on-chain services and products.
• Stablecoins are a killer app and will see faster and wider mass adoption ahead of all other use cases in crypto. The most reputable and regulated USD stablecoin, USDC, operates primarily on ETH.
• BlackRock has just launched their own USD stablecoin exclusively on ETH.
• ETH has had 100% network uptime. Not even BTC has been able to achieve this.
• There are no major upgrades ahead for ETH. Prior to the merge, execution risk was a real factor, but that is no longer true.
• ETH ETFs have simultaneously provided a financial instrument friendly to institutions and cleared all regulatory uncertainty and FUD about ETH. ETH is officially a commodity.

These are not opinions. Drop your biases and look at reality for what it is.

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Every time I venture out into other crypto subreddits I am always disappointed. They are either ghost towns or filled with mostly bots/shills.

I was worried that this community would fall apart when ethfinance forked from ethtrader. Instead, what happed is all the knowledgeable and engaged people came here. While ethtrader became completely filled with bots trying to earn money on donuts. Forking ethfinance also had the side effect of purging most of the bots/shills that ethtrader had accumulated over the years, so the signal to noise ratio actually improved too.

While I hope our community will continue to grow, the fact that it smaller and less known has actually been a big blessing, since the bots and shills go to the largest subreddits to chase the largest audience. With ethfinance being outside the top 25 crypto subreddits, we manage to fly under the radar of many bots/shills. The main downside is that it makes it harder for ETH newbies to find good information about ethereum, but it also preserves our unique culture here.

TLDR - Thanks for being such a great community ETHFinanciers! Crypto and ethereum wouldn’t be the same without the high quality daily discussions here.

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Ok reading several posts on the daily insinuating that the latest Mt Gox news are FUD.

It’s not FUD, repayments are coming soon. It’s been a decade long saga but it’s close to certain that it’s about to end.

Cash repayments already happened, I’m one of the creditors and I received cash about a month ago. I’m sure others here are creditors too.

I wrote in here about the rehabilitation plan 3 years ago, which is the point at which it had been determined what to do with the remaining fiat, bitcoin and bitcoin cash.

Deadline to vote on the plan was then extended two years to make sure all creditors could fill all required documents, I wrote about this in ethfinance too.

Then in April 2023, I wrote here that the deadline was most likely not going to be extended this time. This was confirmed a few days later, no deadline extension, I’ve informed Ethfinance too.

Cash repayment started in December 2023 with a fuckup that later got solved, I was sharing the info too.

Then in February 2024 I told you guys that I believed the bitcoin repayment was likely to happen in 2024, and everything points at this.

Today $2.9B of bitcoin belonging to creditors and expected to be paid this years were moved to a new wallet. This is in preparation to repayments that are likely to start soon.

Close to 1% of all bitcoin in existence are expected to be reenter circulation.

This will clearly have an effect on the market, and there’s going to be some btc selling. But I expect a significant portion to be reallocated to eth. Even if it’s far from statistically significant, a post in the Mt Gox insolvency subreddit today asked members if they intended to diversify in eth, most popular opinions were yes.

Regardless of price action, this post is just meant to say that it’s not a rumor, it’s not FUD, Mt Gox repayments are most likely happening within a few months.

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I don’t normally write huge blog posts, but I am very passionate about getting EOF and PeerDas, among other upgrades included in an Ethereum upgrade sooner rather than later. I started writing, and it became a blog post.

https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d1yce1/why_we_should_ship_eof_peerdas_and_other_upgrades/

Google Link

Part 1 gives educational background of how Ethereum upgrades work and gives definitions.

Part 2 gives my long form reasons of why I believe that Pectra should either be a large upgrade –dubbed Mega Pectra, or split into Pectra 1 and Pectra 2 to make testing easier. Either way, I think EOF and PeerDas should be included before a year+ upgrade that will see the database structure of Ethereum transition from Merkle Trees to Verkle Trees.

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Hi everyone!

Thanks to Tricky_Troll for pointing out an error on kollit.ai . the issue was related to some math issue, which stemmed from my parallel development of a new and improved website for Kollit. Anyways i am like 95% sure it’s fixed now :D

Despite the lack of recent updates (i think the last update was more than a month ago), I’ve been thrilled to see so many of you continuing to use Kollit. It’s the best feeling ever!

Since you guys brought it up organically, I want to give you a sneak peek of the new website: here’s a preview. I’m working hard with another developer to bring you the best version of Kollit possible.

once it’s ready, I’ll be looking for around 10-20 alpha testers. If you’re interested in being part of this testing group and providing feedback on the new platform, please leave a comment below or send me a DM.

Wishing you all optimal trading!

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It looks like Biden’s crypto about-face is complete and they go back hat-in-hand to the crypto industry they spent a whole presidential cycle persecuting: https://www.theblock.co/post/297504/biden-campaign-shifts-crypto-stance-engages-crypto-industry-presidential-elections-2024

If I was a crypto lobbyist though, I would expect way more from the administration than an eth ETF approval before I open my purse for the Dems (albeit it was a welcome first step): (1) approval (not just pocket veto) of the SAB-121 resolution, (2) Gary Gensler at least announcing that eth is a commodity and dropping their most egregious anti-crypto lawsuits, if not retiring for family reasons :-), (3) Elizabeth Warren not just sulking in the background but eating dirt in public or, even better, Biden appointing one of the high profile pro-crypto Dem politicians in her place as the political crypto policy head honcho. She had three and a half years to do damage, that should be enough. In fact, (4) a presidential speech praising the crypto industry as a beacon of American innovation and worthy of support, enumerating such concrete measures would not be amiss :-). Cheap talk is cheap.

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3804.56

u/the-A-word

0.056

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A commodity,

Programmable oddity,

Ether quality.

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

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It is a tale as old as time. In the days of yore it was the exploitation of serfs and the indentured servitude of the layman for the few pulling the strings at the top. Nowadays it is venture capitalists going public once market saturation is reached and multinational corporations squeezing the last drop of profits through shrinkflation and enshittification so that they can buy up all of the family homes in western nations.

It was said, that one day the tables would turn. Some thought that was the communist revolution in Russia, but we all know how that turned out. Other more shrewd folks have been saying that the wealth flippening has yet to come and is almost upon us. The time is nigh. I can feel it in my loins.

From 2009 onwards, for the first time in history, the little guy could get access to new financial primitives from the very beginning. Following Bitcoin’s unprecedented rise, there was a second opportunity with the Ethereum ICO which launched in 2014. Open to all, the gateway into a new financial system had opened. Sometime in 2017, I somehow stumbled my way onboard this movement and that’s despite being a broke university student. But that didn’t matter. That’s just how big this opportunity was. Shortly afterwards, the long rumoured flippening was supposedly on the table — no, not the ETH/BTC flippening — the flippening which the lower and middle class have been waiting for since the dawn of time. The flippening of financial opportunity.

For once, the incumbent, antiquated systems designed to entrench wealth amongst the upper class was holding them back from the latest opportunity. The gatekeepers of TradFi tasked with keeping the everyday man “safe” from the best wealth building opportunities now found themselves gatekeeping the rich and powerful out of the biggest opportunity yet. At first they laughed. Such an opportunity couldn’t be anything other than a bubble! But the bubble showed no signs of popping. Soon, they realised that they had to fight it or else it would become entrenched on its own, outside of the existing system. Knowing better, the grassroots community building out this new paradigm did not yield. With every line of code and every battle fought in court, their new system became stronger, more resilient.

And so here we are. Sitting on the precipice of this long rumoured flippening. The cycle is nearly complete. Upon realising the inevitable game theory of a superior technology in an adversarial and capitalist world, the Finks of the world made their intentions clear and the gatekeepers could no longer stand in their way. The future is tokenised and the future is public. The big gates are opening. For the first time in human history, the people have had the opportunity to front run the establishment. The established has become the exit liquidity. The institutions are coming.

It has been an honour being on this ride with you, gents. Not only has this opportunity been once in a lifetime, it has been once in an aeon. Gentlemen is imminent.

Lol just kidding. Larry, you can pry my ETH from my cold, dead hands. This solo staker ain’t going anywhere. If you’re lucky you can have my staking rewards for a pretty penny.

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Okay you debbie downers, here’s some small bits of optimism:

1) Article highlighting growing tokenization push by TradFi, this time in the form of a pilot project involving some TradFi heavyweights (bonus - in article, note the image referring to DTCC’s Ethereum network… every time I read about tokenization, it always seems to be riding on Ethereum’s rails)

2) Yesterday, BTC broke out of its downward trend since March, and is also just over its 50 day SMA. Yes yes, I know many here love to shit on TA, and Bitcoin for that matter, but a rising tide lifts all boats, and this could be telling us that the worst of the pain is over (which isn’t to say we won’t go sideways for months). Concurrent ATH’s on the S&P and Nasdaq don’t hurt, either.

3) Look, ETH ETF denial is priced in. And not only that, I’d go as far as to say that if the main reason for denial is some bullshit like ‘weak correlation between spot and futures’, ETH’s price is likely to see a nice bounce. And even if the SEC goes the ‘it’s a security’ route, I’m still not even convinced that it’ll be bad for price. After all, the market has already been digesting this possibility for months, and there will at least be less uncertainty, something markets loathe. Anecdotally, back in January 2017 when the the Winklevii BTC spot ETF got rejected (right around halving time, not unlike now), BTC briefly spiked down before rocketing up throughout the balance of the year. I’m not saying it’s an exact analog, but rather–it always seems darkest before dawn.

Now quit yer bitchin!

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Not sure if this was posted here already, maybe I didn’t spot it between all the whining.

Coinbase published a research piece about their Ethereum outlook.

tl;dr: they’re as bullish as ever

We think that ETH may yet have the potential to surprise to the upside in the coming months. ETH does not appear to have major sources of supply side overhangs such as token unlocks or miner sell pressure. To the contrary, both staking and L2 growth have proven to be meaningful and growing sinks of ETH liquidity. ETH’s position as the center of DeFi is also unlikely to be displaced in our view due to the widespread adoption of the EVM and its L2 innovations.

That said, the importance of potential spot US ETH ETFs cannot be understated. We think the market may be underestimating the timing and odds of a potential approval, which leaves room for surprises to the upside. In the interim, we believe the structural demand drivers for ETH as well as the technological innovations within its ecosystem will enable it to continue straddling across multiple narratives

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u/eth2353:

In the interest of keeping you updated on the Tornado Cash case in the Netherlands against Alexey Pertsev, his legal team filed an appeal with the local court of appeals right away, on the day of the verdict. It is not yet clear whether the appeal has been approved, but the good news is, according to some sources Alexey is free on bail for the time being.

Since I’m not a lawyer I didn’t feel qualified to objectively judge the court’s verdict, I like to leave these things to subject matter experts. Thankfully, today a local Dutch law firm published an article (in English!) analysing the verdict and concluding: “From my perspective, the judgment fails to address these questions adequately, indicating that it is ripe for appeal.”

Here’s what I found most interesting:

The role of Pertsev in Tornado Cash

The court asserts that Pertsev, alongside co-suspects Roman Storm and Roman Semenov—who are under prosecution in the US—are the creators of Tornado Cash. They engineered the system to function autonomously and immutably. Since the system’s basic operations were unalterable from the outset, the court holds these individuals are and remain accountable for its functionality.

In December 2020, the governance of Tornado Cash was transferred to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), meaning its governance structure was by then overseen by the community. However, the court concludes that the foundational operations of the system were unchangeable and, therefore, the original setup by the founders remains a critical factor.

Co-perpetration Concerns

The court’s reasoning on co-perpetration seems flawed to me. It suggests that Tornado Cash, let’s call it a digital platform or system, independently enacted the acts of hiding and concealing cryptocurrency with a criminal origin. This implies that a system can engage in criminal behaviour on its own—an unusual and potentially problematic interpretation, as it shifts the criminal conduct itself from individuals to systems. […] This could have significant implications for software developers if tools are perceived as independently capable of criminal actions, making the developers responsible for the tool’s ‘actions’.

Questioning criminal intent

Another aspect open to criticism is how the court motivates Pertsev’s criminal intent. […] The court’s assumption that the general knowledge that mixers could be used for criminal activities was enough to establish Pertsev’s intent for these specific transactions is questionable.

The court argues it is common knowledge that mixers are used by criminals, citing a report by the Financial Action Task Force and the classification by the Financial Intelligence Unit in The Netherlands dated August 15, 2017, that the use of a mixer is a money laundering typology. […] Does foreseeing that your software might be used by criminals make you criminal liable for their actions? And what did Pertsev know at that moment in time, as the assumed common knowledge in 2019 is highly debatable? The case file might indicate Pertsev was aware of criminal usage of Tornado Cash at some point, but this does not necessarily relate to his actions at the time he set up the system or to the timing of the specific transactions.

I believe the judgment for Pertsev’s criminal intent was poorly motivated, and the legal intricacies remain underexplored. An appeal will be necessary to address these issues thoroughly.

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u/Defacticool:

As someone in a legal field in a different EU country (Sweden), I cant say anything about dutch law necessarily.

But if our system is any indication of their system, it wouldnt at all be surprising if the lowest courts is a coinflip of whether theyre reasonable and rational or batshit.

And it also would surprise me if their lower courts (in this case and in general) defer to the “common sense” conclusion simply because this case is so novel, and leave it to higher courts to delve into the nuances if they deem it reasonable to do so.

Stupid as it may sound a lower court (so less authority, lowest hierarchy, little to none precedential power) may well decide to err on the side of simplicity because it recognises the complicated nature of a novel legal question is above their paygrade and they could throw a wrench in the gears by trying to “properly” deal with the complication.

At the same time a universal legal principle is that for criminal law the courts should side on the benefit of the defendant, where the law isnt entirely clear. So its not like I’m happy with the situation.

Also I will say that a reason for why the lower courts being tolerated for what they are here in sweden is because we have an automatic right to appeal (it cant be denied) to the second level courts. So a criminal case will always be tried at a second instance if the defendant wants it to.

I cant find online if the dutch have a similar systems, but if they do it would also go a long way to explain why a lower court may be less hesitant to be more stringent to a defendant.

The dutch also seem to have a more professionalist second instance of a tribunal of 3 judges, so the risk of the important questions simply being ignored is significantly lesser than in a trial with a single arbiter.

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Two charts to show to anyone claiming that Ethereum’s PoS is more centralised than Bitcoin’s PoW:

https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1791471483526463924

Bitcoin PoW centralization versus Ethereum PoS decentralization

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So Ethereum processes lots of user transactions. Those transactions are submited to many places, but commonly the public mempool that is maintained by all the Ethereum nodes. Validators propose new blocks to add to the blockchain, and they are the party that gets to decide which transactions, and in which order, those new blocks contain. If they do this themself, it is called “local block building”; but in practice, most validators use a piece of software called MEV-Boost (more on why it’s called that shortly) to receive built blocks from external builders, who pay the validator for the privilege of selecting the block’s contents. Those blocks are passed to the validator via a “neutral” third party called a relay.

Now, many of those user transactions “leave money on the table” in one form or another, and clever third parties can take that money, which we call MEV, for themselves. They usually do that with the use of bots.

A common (and relevant here) example of MEV would be sandwiching, in which a user submits a transaction for a dex trade, but with a relatively large slippage set, which means that the market can move by that percentage from where the user saw it, and the trade is still valid. A MEV bot that is able to see that transaction before it goes through (which is easy if it was submitted to the public mempool) can come along and frontrun/backrun the transaction, by taking a large amount of money (often VERY large) and making their own trade on the dex, moving the price in a direction disadvantageous to the victim, then letting the victim’s trade go through (losing some money due to slippage), and then going back in with the backrun tx and recovering all their starting money, plus some extra that came from the victim’s slippage.

It is of extreme importance (for the MEVer) that that sequence of three transactions (frontrun, victim trade, backrun) happen in exactly that order, without any other transactions in between, because potentially those other transactions might also trade on the same dex, and might do the “wrong” thing versus what the MEVer wanted, i.e. trading in the opposite direction from the victim transaction, which would result in the MEVer losing money instead of the victim. So these transactions are submitted in “bundles” by the MEV bot to the external block builder; the block builder promises to keep those bundles in exactly that order and without anything in between. That allows the MEV exploit to successfully take the money the victim transaction “left on the table”. It is essential that the MEVer can trust the builder to leave their bundles alone.

An excellent question at this juncture: the validator has to sign off on blocks that they submit. Why couldn’t the validator see all of the transactions in the block and mess with the MEV transactions themself? The answer is that MEV-Boost is designed such that the relay just passes the validator the header of the block, which is the thing that needs signing. The validator has no idea what’s in the block, or if it is even valid, when they sign it. This is a fairly trusting thing to do, but the ecosystem has accepted it. Back in 2023, as soon as the validator signed the header, the relay would send the rest of the contents of the block to the validator (who could now see the MEV transactions, but has already signed that version of the block, and so cannot change the block, at risk of getting slashed), and the validator would broadcast the block body to the network, and everything is hunky dory.

So that’s all necessary context for what happened. These smart brothers from MIT realized that in some cases, it’s actually worth it to get slashed. They set up their own validators, got some bot code ready to go, and waited.

When it was their turn to propose a block, they received the block header from the relay via MEV-Boost, signed it and sent it back, and were sent the block body (with all the transactions) like usual. But instead of broadcasting that block, they looked at the transactions, and saw that there were some juicy MEV sandwiches going on inside there. (In fact, they had made sure of that, by putting their own ‘victim’ transactions into the public mempool to bait the sandwich bot, once they knew they were going to be proposing.) And their bot unbundled those MEV sandwiches and did the thing the MEVers assumed no one could do: they inserted their own dex transaction in between the sandwich frontrun and backrun, going the “wrong way”. They did this in such a way that essentially all of the sandwich bot’s money, which again can be a LARGE amount, and in this case was around $25M, was eaten up by their inserted transaction. Basically the MEVer got MEV’d.

After very quickly doing all this, they took their modified block, signed that block, and broadcast it to the network as quickly as possible. Now there were two versions of the block floating around, one the original that they had to sign in order to see the block transactions, and one the modified version that they also had to sign. The modified block won (they made sure of this via another clever trick outside the scope of this post). Of course, signing two blocks is grounds for getting slashed on Ethereum, and their validator did indeed get slashed, losing the usual 1 Eth.

But the brothers were able to take $25M of the MEVers’ money, which they thought was completely safe, but due to this loophole in the way MEV-Boost worked, was actually not. (The loophole was subsequently patched by having the relay broadcast the signed block body to the network for several seconds before sending it back to the validator, so the validator doesn’t have a chance of getting their own version of the block accepted).

Was this a crime? I honestly don’t know haha. A lot of us were cheering for them at the time, because it was a case of one of the Dark Forest inhabitants who regularly preys on normal users, getting eaten by an even bigger and darker denizen of the Forest. On that battleground, I think a lot of us assume that everything is fair game; if you play that game you’d better be ready to watch your back. But it would appear that the MEVers that got taken advantage of are both wealthy and pissed off, and that’s a recipe for lawsuits. We’ll see what happens. It will be a fascinating case from the “code is law” perspective - the MEV people will have to argue that this was a crime without also implicating their own entire business model in equivalent crimes haha.

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u/jaskidd05:

Hadn’t check for a while but… according to https://clientdiversity.org/ the dominance of fetch fall to 55%! That’s impressive! The huge worries of Geth and Lido are gone, which ones are the worries now?

Again, another great example of how the ethereum community got proactively started involved into keeping the health of the ethereum ecosystem.

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u/haurog:

The following is my current understanding

They have split up the staking into two tokens now. ETH and EIGEN. Before that the goal was to only use ETH. In my understanding, the problem with the old approach was that all the slashing would have happened on ETH, but most slashing conditions for the current round of AVSs are not verifiable on chain. This necessitates that one has to come to an agreement among AVS operators that one of them has to get slashed. Most of the time the conditions are pretty clear and they can come to an agreement. But in the case of malicious majority for a certain AVS, they can slash other operators, steal their ETH and there is nothing one can do, even though it is obvious that they are malicious actors. The only recourse is to make an irregular state transition, which means forking the ethereum chain like for the DAO hack reversal. It would be messy it would hurt Ethereum and is not something one would like to have again. This is in my understanding the issue with overloading the consensus layer.

In the new system these kind of not fully objective slashing conditions are moved to the EIGEN token. If AVS operators collude to take away EIGEN from one operator, the community will most probably see this as an attack and can just fork away into a new EIGEN token. If the social consensus is that it was a malicious attack, the forked away EIGEN tokens will retain the value and the ‘original’ EIGEN token will lose its value. This takes a lot of power away from AVS operators and especially allows forking the value and security of the Eigenlayer protocol without forking the underlying Ethereum chain.

This greatly reduces the amount of ETH that is needed in the Eigenlayer protocol which will also reduce the amount of ETH staked in it which again helps with the resilience of Ethereum. Before that change there was the concern that every single ETH will be restaked. I do not see this happening anymore.

As said before, this is my current understanding of Eigenlayer and I am sure I missed some issues the protocol still has. I am definitely happy to learn about them.

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Some bad news on Lido staked ETH dominance: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/05/14/lido-co-founders-paradigm-secretly-back-eigenlayer-competitor-as-defi-battle-lines-form/

Paradigm and Lido plan to ship a restaking competitor to Eigenlayer. As you can imagine, Lido stETH deposits would be heavily incentivised in Symbiotic (ironic new name for the product), which will likely shoot up dominance higher.

On a side note: Cobie was a Lido co-founder (dont ask me how or why). Lido obviously foresees the social layer being another cock block for their new product when it ships. Cobies tweets in the past 48h would make more sense with that context.

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A word of caution to everyone, old and new here:

Yes, this is one of the most bullish things that has ever happened in the Ethereum ecosystem and for crypto in general. The ramifications are huge. Legistlation was probably the biggest obstacle to the vision of Web 3.0, and now it seems like (and you feel like) the price is going to $5k, $10K, or $150K. I feel like that, too.

So you think to yourself: Why shouldn’t I leverage? Maybe just 2x? Or 3x… or 10x. Your eyes are flashing with dollar signs. This rocketship can only go straight up, right?

Well, no. We are going up, yes, but the longs are piling atop of longs. A small rumour could move the needle juuust enough for a liquidation cascade. Don’t let a sudden flash crash destroy what you have been patiently waiting for months, or years.

I can pretty much guarantee that this will happen as we go up. We are going to have 15%-25% red wicks. The volatility just demands it.

I have been burned by these crashes a lot when I didn’t know better, and I believe I have learned my lesson. Don’t do the same mistakes I did. You are not only going to lose money, you are going to fuck up your mental health and sleep, too.

Here, Bitcoiners have it right. The only thing you need to do is HODL. Don’t leverage. Don’t try to trade the tops and bottoms. You will only give your money to the same whales that made your life miserable this past year. You want to get back to them, and those that fucked with us? The crypto influencers on twitter? The miners that paid to FUD PoS? The haters and shitcoin peddlers? Deny them the chance to have your Ether. Make them beg for it. Make them FOMO like they’ve never FOMO’d for any coin. Make the market go crazy.

Fucking Hold On for Dear Life… spot only, preferably in self-custody!

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Yesterday, Toni Wahrstätter, an EF researcher, had an interesting talk at Dappcon about block sizes in Ethereum and how the size is distributed. Apparently some builders do not include as many blobs as others because including blobs gives little rewards, but could increase the risk of the block not propagating fast enough in the network and getting re-orged. As far as I understand beaverbuild, the largest builder, does include fewer blobs than Titan builder, the second largest one. Currently this is not a big deal as L2s can just increase the fee tip to make it more attractive to include the blob. But this generally hints at a mispriced resource within the Ethereum protocol. Similar with very large transactions that do not pay a high enough fee due to the very low priced calldata in the EVM.

As far as I see it, this needs to be fixed before increasing the number of blobs per block and probably also before increasing the block gas limit by a large amount.

And he also talks about how he broke sepolia with his super large transaction.

Definitely worth a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/live/bb7o1zVmYAA?t=16403

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List of Anti-crypto Senators to contact for FIT21

Tina Smith, Sheldon Whitehouse, Angus King Jr., Gary Peters, Jeanne Shaheen, Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, John Hickenlooper, Maggie Hassan, John Fetterman, Mark Warner, Debbie Stabenow, Mike Rounds, Elizabeth 💩 Warren

Possible crypto swing vote senators to contact for FIT21

Bob Casey Jr., Chuck Grassley, Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio

Source:

https://www.standwithcrypto.org/politicians

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https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1792143477163106787

I recently became an advisor to the EigenFoundation. I feel the community deserves transparency so here is an extended disclosure :)

(more in the tweet)

Response from EF

The Ethereum Foundation’s credible neutrality is critical for us to perform our role in the ecosystem. We are aware of the current conversation about potential conflicts of interest, and share the community’s concerns.

It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment has not been sufficient, and we have been working on a formal policy to address this problem for a while now. We will be accelerating this work, and will share an update soon.

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/usesbinkvideo

90,440 hodlers subscribed (+4)

u/Vinegar_Strokes__

$2949

u/the-A-word

0.044

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While you walk the walk,

Remember to talk the talk,

Blockchain needs no stock.

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It is late 2026, total crypto market cap reaches $50T after 10 consecutive memecoin seasons, all cyclical rotations in the cryptocurrency market have been replaced by memes.

Top 10 - all memes. Dogecoin and pepe replaced BTC and ETH, both receiving an ETF while the ETH ETF is still awaiting approval due to volatility and underlying utility concerns.

BTC and ETH linger at the low end of the top 25, just under recent newcomers: SkibbidyToiletInu69420XL, Kek, and Gamestop (unrelated coin, not the stock)

A soft hard recession that doesnt land is forecasted by JPow, whose forward guidance is expected to reduce some of the froth and risk seeking behaviour in the markets.

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Posting directly here, as I was informed people don’t like clicking through to Twitter links:

Building a fully onchain game is stupid, and you could just do it with existing infrastructure without needing the blockchain… at least that’s what I’m told.

After spending 3 years building a FOCG, here are some of the least known and most impactful reasons to build them:🧵

1. Peer-to-peer infrastructure for gaming

To create a player driven world, that enables play to flow between players without an intermediary requires significant infrastructure.

Traditionally this would be a set of servers that are rented/bought, maintained, and tooled by the gaming studio.

While possible it is exorbitantly expensive, time consuming, and requires engineers to maintain. For an indie studio it’s likely not a great use of resources, hence why we likely haven’t seen it in traditional gaming.

Building fully onchain significantly reduces cost and maintenance for teams which would otherwise make it prohibitive to build such games.

Cost down, efficiency up

2. Blockchains give us a world computer

Blockchains like Ethereum have revolutionized the development landscape by enabling the creation of decentralized, peer-to-peer systems without the burden of maintaining costly infrastructure.

Teams no longer need to find independent solutions to develop applications that are universally accessible online without acting as intermediaries in transactions.

This additionally helps eliminate many of the issues with “money exchanger” laws, as seen with platforms like Uniswap, where users transact directly, rather than something like Venmo that holds your funds.

Reduces operation cost and maintenance needs ✅ Helps avoid potential legal issues ✅

3. Free Market & Asset Exchange

Blockchains enable more efficient markets by allowing users to own and control their accounts and assets separate from the game itself.

While traditional companies can support the buying, selling, and trading of items within games, these activities are usually centralized and restricted.

By fostering open markets where players can freely transfer items without fear of bans or deletions by the game studio, we empower players to determine the value of their goods.

This model also supports asset trading across different games, enabling players to use their collected items to access new games through trading. Players can do this without needing to download new launchers, software, third-party applications, or create new accounts and spend additional money.

Free Markets ✅ Unrestricted trading ✅ Trading across game titles ✅

We could make cars powered by steam, but we don’t. We do this because it would be impractical.

Building fully onchain creates a new way to build games, and with recent advancements to scaling, blockchains have become incredible efficient in enabling this new way to build.

Lastly, these types of games whether built on traditional rails or with blockchain still need to be fun.

So even if one day we all believe building onchain games for specific game types is the best solution, it’s up to the studio to craft experiences players want to play.

Curious to get your thoughts :)

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There once was a famous interior designer who served many high value business clients. She noticed her clients always wanted to have a hand in the design - after she laid out their place, they would always want to change it a little. They’d want it to ”pop more”, or “feel more chill”, or “more cozy”. This slowed down the designer’s job significantly, as she had to make a costly and time consuming second design pass to appease the client.

After a pattern of this happening, the designer realized that her clients always felt like they needed to make at least one change to her designs, to convince their bosses that they added value and weren’t just standing around and letting a contractor make all the big decisions.

It was upon this realization that the designer had a brilliant idea. From then on she added a wooden statue of a duck to each of her new interior designs. Her new clients, when shown these designs, would say “that looks good, just remove the duck statue.” As this was an easy fix to make, it saved the interior designer a considerable amount of time and effort in redesigns. Her new designs were always approved, minus the duck, and she never had to do a second design pass again.

ETH ETFs are the design, staking is the duck, and the SEC is the manager who needs to feel like they had some input.

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I wanted to give a short update on the EigenLayer Aestus AVS Operator - especially since the $EIGEN “stakedrop” (lol) went live earlier today. Over the last 3 weeks or so we’ve attracted about ~3000ETH from ~100 participants. This is a pretty reasonable(!) start and we’re obviously tremendously grateful for the continued support from members of this and the wider solo-staker community. That said, we’re also keen to grow this significantly over the next 6 months.

u/AustonSt and I have been pretty focussed on onboarding with all the AVS that will have us. The vast majority require explicit whitelisting so communication is essential. Many of the teams have been very straightforward to deal with, but there are others who make contact very difficult, or will only accept KYC’d (institutional) capital. I’m not surprised by this, but it’s kind of depressing, and it’s important we push back against this as much as we can.

While slashing isn’t live (and it looks like it will be some time before it’s developed) - the risks to Operators and re-staked capital is pretty small. But it will grow, and we’ve been having conversations with a few neutral participants who are interested in figuring out how to manage this. The independent development of a risk framework seems important and we hope to be able to share some kind of plan in the near future.

For now, we’re publishing a table with an overview of our status and progress with various services. We’d eventually like to be able to share a proper dashboard with live data, but this is some way off. We’re also opening a Telegram channel for those of you who want to help us coordinate, receive updates or just want to ask us questions.

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Today I launched my first project built on Ethereum, this is the best day of my life. The name is AirdropScan, it’s basically Etherscan for airdrops 😊

What’s the airdrop you can’t wait for?

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This recent thread by Hasu has a lot of great points on what Lido has been doing to better align with the ethereum ecosystem this past year. One specific comment - which encourages Lido to participate in Ethereum roadmap research has received some negative comments from community members which makes me scratch my head

a) “a player with a financial interest should not take part in Ethereum research and governance”. Wut? We literally built a monetary coordination platform, Ethereum, where every single user has a financial incentive. And then we say that if you have a financial incentive, you can’t take part in governance? Makes no sense to me

b) “a large player should not be allowed to take part in Ethereum governance”. If that view is normalised, that large players - who are by definition successful players in the ecosystem - are discouraged from contributing to ethereum’s future, who does that leave? One could make the argument, via the process of elimination, that then we are encouraging unsuccessful players, people who never had the competency nor the courage to spin off their own project or to do it in a successful manner at scale - we instead encourage them to exert their voices. That is instilling a negative selection process which leads to a poorer quality of discussion within the Ethereum ecosystem. Besides that, large players have a wealth of information and experience pertinent to our ecosystem, and it’s unwise to exclude their voices.

The key point I think we should be mindful of, is that success isn’t a bad word, having financial motives isn’t a bad word. Using your protocol dominance to arm twist other players to get your preferred outcome, or using your financial competency to bribe other players to get your preferred outcome, outcomes which are at odds with the long term good of Ethereum - these are what needs to be focused on. But if a protocol isn’t engaging in such behaviour, they certainly should have a seat at the governance table.

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I saw auroras from mainland NZ last night. They weren’t exactly spectacular without a long exposure photo to bring out the colours, but it was still pretty incredible. Now before you say this is off-topic, yes, this is related to ETH.

It would seem to be something which doesn’t get much attention, but likely since it is a developing thing which may just be noise and not a sign of things to come. However, there is an increasingly alarming trend which started about 150 years ago which has gone exponential in the last 20-30 years. This is the shifting of Earth’s magnetic poles. Now this isn’t unprecedented. It has actually happened hundreds of times in Earth’s history, but it is the first time since we have had advanced technology. Now, if the trend continues and Earth’s magnetic poles shift, we could be in for a few hundred years of a reduction of Earth’s geomagnetic shield which protects us from the sun’s damaging radiation. What this means, and what we have already seen, is that the solar storms which have recently hit Earth are causing more electromagnetic disruption and auroras than storms of their size historically have because our shield is in a weakened state. This can result in localised blackout and infrastructure failures across the world. While a global outage is very unlikely, these localised impacts can be very disruptive to the global economy. This weekend alone dozens more platforms and services have had outages than usual and if any of these services are core infrastructure like banking or credit card services then the economy can grind to a halt.

This is yet another reason why we need Ethereum. We need resilient payment and settlement networks. Otherwise, our ever increasingly unstable world will perpetuate more instability. Especially as we constantly increase our reliance on a larger number of infrastructure systems from roads, to power, internet, AI and beyond. We have a unique chance to solidify one of the flimsy legs which hold up society and replace it with a rigid, decentralised and resilient system.

Edit: If you want to watch a good YouTube video on the ongoing pole shift and what it might mean for us, I highly recommend this one:

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ridb9olnqLc

Watch privately: https://invidious.fdn.fr/ridb9olnqLc

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All these years in crypto and still just barely avoided falling for a phishing scam toda

These guys are so incredibly good it’s scary - I had my Ledger in my hand to sign the fake transaction and there was juust enough friction to drop me out of autopilot and make me think “what is actually going on here”.

I have some liquidity in Reya Network - it’s a (legit) new trading optimized L2 with a “shared liquidity” model for all DEXes on the L2 and some major backers. It’s launching this week but liquidity deposits for points have been open for some weeks.

I went and checked my rank on the Leaderboard on the (real) reya.network site, and then I thought “Oh they are launching today - better go check their Twitter to see what’s going on”

So I checked their Twitter update, and at the bottom of their (real) thread about the new Session and points etc, there was a final tweet saying something like “check your position on the Trading Leaderboard for Session 1 here” and I thought “Oh, is this a separate leaderboard to the liquidity leaderboard I am on? Better check it out”

[NOTE: the final tweet was of course from a phishing account but I only noticed when I checked later - the language, wording, PFP etc, were all perfect except for a one-character difference in the username]

So I click over to the [FAKE - DO NOT CLICK - “Reya Labs” site].

• Cognitive Dissonance 1: I remember thinking “Huh? Reya Labs? I thought their site was Reya Network?” - but I did nothing and went ahead
• Cognitive Dissoance 2: The site looked like the real site, but it said the current “boost” for early depositors was 5x - but the actual boost is 2.5x I think and has not been 5x for weeks - again, I noticed but thought “oh well, maybe if you do some social media tasks they will bump it up to 5x” - that does actually happen on the real site so it was a reasonable thought.
• Cognitive Dissonance 3: There was some text, but not a lot of explanation - just something about “connect wallet to find out rank” - again, this is fairly normal so I did connect my wallet
• Cognitive Dissonance 4: It auto-switched me to Blast on Metamask and for the first time I was like “What? This is a new independent L2 and anyway it hasn’t fully launched yet - why is it switching me to Blast? What’s the connection?” But I still allowed it - we’re still running on autopilot at this point.
• Cognitive Dissonance 5: I hate it when dApps force you to sign a transaction just to sign in - it’s understandable when you want to do something but it annoys me when it is necessary to just view your dashboard or rank - but again, it is unfortunately common, so I wasn’t surprised when the popup came up and asked me to sign - but then I noticed that the text wasn’t the usual English text string you see in this kind of thing but some very long string of numbers and finally got a bit suspicious and thought “I’m not signing something I don’t understand especially just to see the Leaderboard and hit “Reject”
• Cognitive Dissonance 6: As soon as I hit “Reject”, the popup just came up again with the same transaction to sign, which is behaviour I have never seen before - to keep the popup repeating without me triggering it again, and I actually thought about it for a second, but by this point it had hit my conscious mind that something was “off” and I slowed down, and then the whole thing fell apart of course (with a sigh of relief about how close a call it had been - I’m farming Blast and had quite a lot of personal funds there and the signature may have been useable on L1 mainnet too).

But the psychology was really interesting to kind of think about how someone like me who should know a lot better can still get taken in and the brain smooths over all the cognitive dissonance “warning” moments until they piled up enough that I was forced to acknowledge it..

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u/coinanon:

Alexey Pertsev (Tornado Cash dev) is found guilty in the Netherlands and sentenced to 5 years in prison. That seems crazy! Someone please tell me that they proved he did more than just deploy open source code to mainnet.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/05/14/tornado-cash-developer-alexey-pertsev-found-guilty-of-money-laundering/

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u/eth2353:

Court statement in English available here - https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Rechtbank-Oost-Brabant/Nieuws/Paginas/Developer-of-Tornado-Cash-gets-jail-sentence-for-laundering-billions-of-dollars-in-cryptocurrency.aspx

Well, this is a sad day for crypto, privacy and building permissionless systems in general. Some excerpts:

Tornado Cash functions in the way the defendant and his cofounders developed Tornado Cash. So the operation is completely their responsibility. If the defendant had wanted to have the possibility to take action against abuse, then he should have built it in. But he did not. Tornado Cash does not pose any barrier for people with criminal assets who want to launder them. That is why the court regards the defendant guilty of the money laundering activities as charged.

Tornado Cash is not a legitimate tool that has unintentionally been abused by criminals, as the defendant presents. Tornado Cash suits criminal use.

He also behaved lazily when victims of hacks or investigative authorities reported to him, simply stating that he could not do anything for them. He continued the development and exploitation of Tornado Cash with blinders on. He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility.

The court follows the prosecutor’s demand and sentences the defendant to an imprisonment of 5 years and 4 months.

I don’t fully remember the technical details but IIRC the contracts, once deployed, were not upgradable, so him saying “he could not do anything for [victims of hacks or investigative authorities]” was the truth right?

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u/etheraider has mentioned sharding yesterday and when it will come. Sharding as a scaling solution been discarded at least 3 years ago. I first wanted to write a short reply but it got longer so I post it here.

Sharding was the idea, that the Ethereum chain will be split up into different shards with each shard being able execute transactions. The core of the idea was that nodes would only have to validate a subset of all the shards leading to an increase in throughput without pushing home stakers out of the network by increasing resource demand. The problem in this approach is that shards cannot easily communicate with each other which complicates transactions as one would have to make additional transactions to move from one shard to another. Overall it became a rather complex solution.

With the advent of rollups, people found that this allows for an easier and even more scalable solution. So in about 2021 the original sharding concept was abandoned and scaling through L2s is now considered the way to go. In my understanding there still is the concept of shards, but they were renamed to blobs and they cannot execute transactions. So the nodes do not have to run and validate the transactions which are stored in blobs. Rollups do this.

With the dencun upgrade we got the first iteration of this scaling plan with EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding). This allowed scaling of the Ethereum ecosystem by about a factor of 50 to 100. Currently the rollups do around 10 times as many transactions than Ethereum does, so they still have room to grow. At the moment, we allow to have 3 blobs per block on average for rollup transaction data, which seems to be like a good value. It increases the load on nodes, but not so much to compromise decentralization. I guess there will be more analysis done in the coming months to see if we can increase the number of blobs a bit.

The next step in the L2 scaling roadmap is danksharding, which will allow nodes to only store a subset of blobs for a limited time but still make sure that all the data has been published by the rollups using data availability sampling. This will increase the available blob space by at least another factor of 20 without increasing the load on nodes by the same amount. The details of this upgrade is very much being worked on and as far as I understand peerDAS (EIP-7594) is currently the best proposal to achieve that goal. Not sure if peerDAS is already the end goal or just a minimal implementation of data availability sampling.

I am not sure when this is planned to be implemented, but if it will not come in the next Ethereum upgrade. But maybe in the one after that. The good thing is that going from proto danksharding to full danksharding does mostly (or even only) involve changes in the consensus layer, which means there is less coordination necessary between the different teams.

In addition there will be improvements of the Execution layer as well (like verkle trees, statelessness, history expiry and snarkifying the base chain). Those improvements will allow to increase transaction throughput on mainnet while keeping the resource demand for node operators in check. None of these will 100x increase throughput over night, but together they will massively scale Ethereum in the coming years. If you want to catch up on the current roadmap the bankless podcast from February does an amazing job explaining the different steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqVaycBINdc

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Tweet by Crypto Cred

Part of the reason there’s so much disagreement regarding where we are cyclically is because returns have been so unevenly distributed

Additionally, a lot of previous cycle signposts have been absent and/or entirely invalid

The conventional ‘risk curve’ trade of BTC —> ETH —> large caps —> mid caps —> shitters has been unprofitable. Barbell portfolio of BTC + memes has dominated.

ETH/BTC has been remarkably weak, whereas historically it has benefitted from a risk on environment. This has also spilled over into ETH L1+L2 proxy trades being suboptimal. ‘Crypto as a casino’ thesis has been captured by memecoins on SOL (vs previous cycle’s casino was NFTs on ETH).

Memecoins have been consistently leading and rotating from that sector has been costly, whereas memes pumping has historically been an indicator of being late in the cycle.

BTC hasn’t offered a series of previously ‘standard’ bull market pullbacks of 30-40%. This has created a bunch of early sellers/sidelined traders. Also led to proliferation of left-truncated cycle discourse, shorter cycle, super cycle, and other heterodox variants.

There are so many new tokens (amplified by memecoins) that “crypto bull market” no longer means “everything that’s listed goes up for weeks/months” - the rising tide has not lifted all boats and there are very clear winners vs losers (and they’ve broadly stayed the same, no massive rotations e.g. ETH eco/L1+L2 trade been weak relative to SOL for ages, with exceptions).

Taking all this into account, it’s entirely plausible that you have Trader A who rode BTC, SOL, and memes and feels like stuff is hot and needs to cool off, whereas Trader B has barely made any money and feels like stuff hasn’t even picked up yet, and everything in between.

We all have different portfolios, trading styles, time horizons, risk appetite, volatility tolerance, and a bunch of other stuff.

Most of crypto Twitter thinks crypto will go up and to the right over time, we just disagree about the fine print.

Thoughts? This seems to me to be a pretty good summary of this cycle so far. What we have seen at the end of last cycle and in the bear market was that some stuff still pumped while other assets were down only –> micro cycles. Is this cycle the one where things really are (more) uncorrelated, both from stocks etc. but also within the crypto ecosystem?

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u/Set1Less:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/two-brothers-arrested-attacking-ethereum-blockchain-and-stealing-25-million

Two Brothers Arrested For Attacking The Ethereum Blockchain And Stealing $25 Million In Cryptocurrency

First MEV related bust.

Wild. Sharing some snippets from the indictment as Im reading

90% of ETH validators use MEV boost

These guys basically stole $25m by attacking MEV bots, they ran their own validators and when it was their turn to validate, they meddled and tampered proposed blocks with false signatures

Juicy parts Daddy Gensler may not like

The conduct described herein relates to the Ethereum Network. Among other things, Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain that is used by millions of people across the world. Since at least 2023, on average, there are more than one million daily transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. No central actor runs the Ethereum Network. Instead, the Ethereum Network is run through a decentralized network of participants across the world that operate based on a set of rules and protocols. These rules and protocols are typically executed through “smart contracts”-self- executing computer protocols with if/then conditions-which enable transactions to take place on the Ethereum blockchain without the need for a trusted intermediary. Ether or “ETH” is the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum Network.

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u/PhiMarHal:

The MEV situation worries me much more than any price action.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1351996/dl

Those guys who outsmarted MEVbots about a year ago, baiting them to extract $25M of their money?

They’re now on trial for “conspiracy to commit wire fraud”.

Steal billions from small users through automated sandwiches -> A-OK.

Steal millions from extremely wealthy sandwichers through a clever exploit -> straight to jail.

It has been clear for a long time the MEV landscape is filled with well-connected, well-capitalized tradfi individuals looking to extract maximum rent out of our ecosystem. Conspiracy to commit fraud, you say? I would love to have full transparency on every MEV actor out there and their doings. Would not be surprised if it turned out some of them pushed pro MEV sentiment through various means over the years. For the acceptance of robbing users as an unavoidable fact, or even worse, a desirable property, seems absurd at face value.

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u/LifelongHODL

Ethereum

u/AuspiciousEther

€2812

u/Zeebrasurfer

0.048

u/usesbinkvideo

90,430 hodlers subscribed (+5)

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Feel the blockchain beat,

The protocol is complete,

Rest is obsolete.

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Idk man. I doubt that Blackrock, Van Eck, Franklin Templeton, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, JPM Chase etc. being interested in ETH is important.

We probably won’t even see ATHs again, or even appreciate in price from here.

When Larry Fink talks about instantaneous guaranteed settlement and the tokenization of securities I’m sure he’s talking about Cardano or Solana.

I’m sure Base deploying as a layer 2 on ETH instead of as an alt Layer 1 that’s just noise.

The United States Federal Government being concerned about DeFi as a national security threat is obviously not the most bullish thing imaginable. They totally always embrace technological innovation quickly and without question. If ETH was truly as disruptive (and lucrative) as we’ve all been suspecting the United States Federal Government certainly wouldn’t be raising an eyebrow at it. No sir.

Sell it all. ETH isn’t just a security. It a mega-doodoo scary evil security that is also a shitcoin of no importance and will clearly go to 0.

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After the EIGEN token announcement (and subsequent backlash) I’ve been thinking a lot more about how so much in the world of crypto right now seems to be the product web2 thinking i.e. VC money, financialized governance, etc etc.

One big plot hole with this web2 thinking, as I see it, is that it’s really hard if not impossible to create a moat in crypto. Liquidity is never truly locked, vampire attacks are a thing, etc. etc. I personally believe that the crypto future that we were promised is not built on the back of for-profit, but rather autonomous public goods that are built and then kind’ve just put out into the world. Therefore this is a misalignment.

Adding to this rift is the fact that it seems VCs have figured out the crypto equivalent of the traditional attract->extract model. Since it is so hard to “turn a profit” in crypto, the main way to get paid is via this charade we call governance tokens. The attract cycle is building up TVL and hype, and the extract cycle is a user-hostile TGE and exit. This would explain…

1. Tiny and arbitrary allocations (5-10% for the community, airdrops for random NFT projects, etc.)
2. Opaque snapshot and TGE dates that of course insiders know beforehand
3. No withdrawal functionality until after TGE as a way of inflating TVL numbers (looking at you Renzo)
4. Non-transferable tokens (that is, until VCs are vested)
5. Arbitrarily limiting regions and putting serious effort into blocking VPNs

The EIGEN announcement is of course disappointing, but in retrospect it’s obvious that it would go this way.

The silver linining in all this is that once the dust settles we’ll find that some things did get built with all this VC money after all. Those interested in creating public goods can take what’s been built, clone it, and undercut it. Since I don’t see a shift in how we fund crypto projects anytime soon, this is what I rest my optimism on.

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The other day, one of us asked if depositing assets into Swell L2 was safe.

I took a look today!

Swell L2 isn’t live, so currently you’re depositing into a staking contract. The code looks clean and intuitive.

If you deposit rebasing assets like eETH or stETH or plain ETH, your deposit is first routed through a zapper contract to convert it to weETH, wstETH or wETH.

The zapping contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xbd9fc4fdb07e46a69349101e862e82aa002ade0d#code

There’s no issue with this contract. It’s immutable, no access control, everything is clearly defined.

Then in either case, your assets end up in the proper staking contract.

The staking contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x38d43a6cb8da0e855a42fb6b0733a0498531d774#code

It’s a simple contract with a couple functions. When your assets are inside this contract, they are dormant, not used for anything and not exposed to extra risk.

Only you can deposit and withdraw your assets.

EDIT: relevant update -> u/ennui85 points out the emergency function can’t actually touch your deposits. That was a misread on my part.

This means the contract is 100% safe, much better than my “fairly safe” assessment.

– end of original post below –

Save for one emergency function: the “owner” of this contract can withdraw the full balance of any allowed token inside the contract.

This “owner” leads to a Timelock: https://etherscan.io/address/0xCa2DF225ba3c4743E02611EC423FaAC311dEEEd4#readContract

The Timelock delay is set to 259200 seconds (3 days).

The “admin” of this Timelock leads to a 4-of-6 multisig: https://etherscan.io/address/0x20fDF47509C5eFC0e1101e3CE443691781C17F90#readProxyContract

Overall I’d rank this as “fairly safe” = less safe than Uniswap, but safer than PT/YT on Pendle and safer than money markets like Aave/Compound.

The 3 days delay on owner withdrawals should be a guarantee against any wrongdoing, provided you assume between $500M of TVL some depositors will monitor the multisig (or do it yourself). The code is simple, in a good way, your assets simply sit in this contract. There is no upgrade function of any kind, presumably the bridging to Swell L2 will be an entirely manual process once it goes live (which is also a good thing).

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u/back_to_samadhi:

Invested in Ethereum in the 2014 ICO. I have been away for a long time. I’m currently unwell and do not have the energy to try to get up to date, I barely understood how POW worked.

Whatever Ethereum is today, does it still have promise of building a new financial ecosystem and being the backbone of finance? Mass adoption will come if the correct/needed applications are being built.

But at a quick glance the space seems to be slightly empty, and all I see are airdrops and yield farming, when Ethereum and in general crypto has (had?) the potential to create a real revolution and change humanity.

Can someone direct me to good sources of information I could read or watch to catch up with what has been happening since 2021? As I said, I’m very unwell and do not have the mental sharpness or strength to go in depth right now…even if I want to.

Ever since August 2015 I’ve been following the ETHBTC ratio, and although I’m not worried, I am starting to think perhaps my timeline for seeing a ratio bull market is farther away than I had hoped…perhaps this still needs a few years. Or perhaps this is a retest of the ratio breakout from 2021 before moving higher.

But we need a catalyst, and airdrops along with yield farming won’t cut it. Ethereum needs to prove that a new financial system is on the way before a bubble similar to the dot com bubble is possible. Perhaps that’s here, hence I’m asking for information to help me build an objective narrative. Thanks, and bless you all with good health…its much more important than any of this.

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u/pa7x1:

After the latest update that made rollups economically viable, Ethereum is ready for primetime. The vision for a new, efficient and transparent backbone for finance that dis-intermediates middlemen is finally possible technically. Before we were limited to 10-20 transactions per second which is clearly insufficient to meet global settlement needs. Right now we have room for around 300-500 tps and the scalability roadmap will keep pushing it further to the order of 100K tps.

The most significant roadblock right now is regulatory, the SEC and current US administration is very antagonistic of crypto and Ethereum in particular. But technology is unstoppable, once the genie is out it cannot be put back in. These hurdles will be overcome too.

If you have not been following you can hear it from the mouth of Blackrock’s (biggest asset manager in the world) CEO himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTveRlW7QPo

Wish you the best, take care of yourself.

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u/hblask:

I think people always look to the consumer/retail side to see if Ethereum is living up to its potential, but I think that is a mistake. I think the real potential is in the commercial side of things, such as the stuff Paul Brody is doing with EY. Just google “Paul Brody EY Nightfall”. There are tons of videos.

The tl;dr is: EY is working on a set of business tools for supply chain tracking, so that companies can track every input and output of the supply chain from raw materials to consumer. Additionally, companies can ask for bids over the blockchain, award contracts, track performance, and do all the necessary accounting and payments.

They thought it would take about a decade to really build momentum – like turning a battleship, you need a lot of lead time. I believe we are about halfway through that, and many companies are trying it and starting the transition.

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u/issac_hunt1:

The “regulation by enforcement” is so frustrating. You cant seriously tell me Coinbase, Uniswap and Metamask are the bad guys in crypto.. when so much blatant insider trading, pump and dumps every single day. It suggests that there is just some ulterior motive

Robinhood is one of the largest non-crypto companies to get into crypto in a big way (I mean for retail they have wallet/dex, and please the BTC ETF doesn really count in this), and now they are being sued. This is just intimidation and send a message to rest of the companies that if you get into crypto, you will be sued

Its no wonder no other big company has even tried. Last cycle there was genuine hope that companies will push into crypto. Nike, Coke, many played around with NFTs. Reddit came up with tokens. This cycle many more were gonna experiment….but now do you think a big company like Apple or Google will launch even a crypto wallet? If they dont know they are going to be charged as a “broker dealer” or “clearing agent” or “unregistered security” or whatever

Its just to kill crypto …. Its all part of the agenda to stifle any growth of crypto

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u/cryptrd285:

SEC sues $COIN and claims SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, SAND, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH and NEXO are securities

$HOOD gets sued and only list BTC, ETH, DOGE, SHIB, AVAX, LTC, UNI, ETC, LINK, XLM, and AAVE

So either SEC is making it up as they go or they missed a lot of “securities” when they sued coinbase

https://twitter.com/UncleRewards/status/1787493240767140087

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Completely offtopic but she said yes today. :) 🌟

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Infinite Jungle podcast by Christine Kim (she used to do the tweetstorms after each ACD call back in the day) is easily my top podcast on the Ethereum ecosystem lately. Beats out the Daily Gwei which was my previous must-listen

There’s two 30min episodes a week, the first which covers what the core devs decided in the previous week’s ACDC/ACDE call, and the second which interviews someone from the Ethereum ecosystem.

The best part is she has a way of explaining hard to understand concepts almost like a school teacher - I’ve learned so much about account abstraction, Verkle tries, the EVM, EOF etc, even despite having a rough understanding of these areas already.

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EthDenver follow up regarding Exponential.Fi, which was one of the stalls in the hall and had an offer for those that signed up during EthDenver. The offer was for those that verified by the end of the gathering, deposited and held the investment for 60 days, those that deposited 1,000 USDC got 100, and a 10,000 deposit got 1,000. Just got passed the 60 day mark and got the offer paid out, so that’s neat.

The Exponential product, in my view, is trying to make defi appear through a more traditional investment bank wrapped. You login, do the KYC and all, and can either deposit from your Bank through Bridge or send via an Eth wallet, on mainnet, Arb, Polygon, and others, and you can send Eth or usdc. Once deposited you are presented with a variety of portfolios and projected APRs to invest in, denominated in currencies like eth, BTC, stables or some alts. They have pretty charts and stuff, and easy to understand descriptions of what’s being invested in and the risk (and I just found you can click on “Full Report” to get a detailed breakdown, like quality of code, usage, reliability and more, and links to the actual defi site and a discord to discuss), like USDC-Across bridging, the Arb TriCrypto, etc . Pretty easy to invest into something, isn’t instant like defi, I suspect they delay a day or two to try and batch transactions. Once invested it shows your average return and projected, again with charts and percentages. Pretty slick overall.

I like the product for a couple reasons. First, it keeps (and kept) me from doing wilder defi things because I knew I had to invest for the 60 days. It also allows automatic reinvesting of profits, like a traditional investment fund. Will probably keep my investments there since it pretty much was funded with eth profit taking. It’s a very nice site and I don’t need to be doing lots of wallet approvals and transactions to do anything. I’m assuming the tax report will be pretty nice when the time comes. And hey, they followed through on their 60 day promise of a USDC reward and I can’t be sad with free USDC.

Cons, though not super cons I guess. KYC with ID, so very tradfi. Also, for some reason you can only withdraw in the same amount as you deposited, you can’t divide it up, which is weird cause I can do that with stocks and the like. So I’ve got the ability to withdraw my whole initial deposit, or my profits. The fee page says they can take up to 1%, when I looked at mine it said 0.2%, so a positive in understanding the fees involved, but no variability for onchain gas or timing to make it cheaper.

Not shilling (the majority of my defi is still via wallets), but just think it’s a good way to take defi into the tradfi space.

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Good day EthFinance,

I would like to share a new initiative: The Ethereum Defense Alliance. So what is the Ethereum Defense Alliance or EDA?

We are a group of individuals and entities with the goal of protecting Ethereum against risk vectors and fostering a robust and sustainable network.

The EDA was initiated last year when the threat of Lido was even greater than it is today and as you all know it has evolved since then. Some EthFinance members like u/hanniabu, u/bob-rossi, u/minimalgravitas and myself are EDA Stewards and we are trying to coordinate people and ideas. There are already many more members and entities that have joint the EDA.

We saw the power of coordination and importance of governance to protect the network. The EDA’s mission is protect Ethereum from centralization and risk vectors in every shape of from through:

• Collaboration: As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child”. We aim to bring together individuals, projects, and organizations from across the ecosystem to promote positive change as a united front.
• Education: Knowledge about decentralization pitfalls and their common causes is important to prevent the community at large from falling into them. This is our first (and possibly best) defense against risk vectors.
• Governance: Project governance can have influential effects on the rest of the network. The EDA contains delegates from key projects who will prioritize and advocate for chain health.
• Monitoring: We are developing tools and resources to actively monitor threats to Ethereum’s decentralization to catch issues early.
• Change: Once a threat has been identified, we look to spread awareness to the broader Ethereum community for swift course correction.

We believe this community understands the risks as well. Basically the search for delegates is/ was already one of the EDA’s initiatives. But governance is only a means to an end and there is obviously more than that. We are looking forward to your input. The goal is to become even more proactive and drive changes before threats even show up. If you have any questions, you can post them here, contact one of us or use the contact form on the EDA homepage.

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https://x.com/CodyCarboneDC/status/1788263944034934964

Even if there are bipartisan pro-crypto agreements in congress, Biden is prepared to veto it according to a press release from the White House today on one such potential agreement that is being voted on later today. Is this how democracies should work?

Basically, the SEC issued guidelines (SAB 21) that banks, brokers-dealers, and many other entities can’t custody digital assets. They did so without first asking for comments or coordinating with other agencies.

See link below for full reasons given why they want to nullify the SEC SAB 21. It is a good brief read that makes sense to me. Risks are also bigger if all custody is concentrated to Coinbase.

https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=409242

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u/hehechibby

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3000

u/TimbukNine

0.05025

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Time to sue Gary,

It’s not even that scary,

The man can’t parry.

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As a marketing gimmick EL offers an F-35 fighter jet for some seemingly impossible amount of points. Rogue degen discovers a levered YT exploit - obtains required points. EL sued and forced to provide the jet -degen learns to fly it. F35 with ETH symbol appears over Ukraine - Russia requests cease fire. Jet appears again over Iran then Israel - both sides lay down arms. Same jet appears over San Francisco - solana headquarters hit by mysterious electronic warfare attack. Solana goes down for 17 days - SOL token does a 5x (it’s still in beta guys). Degen closes levered long and pockets 320 million - retires - two decades of world peace ensue.

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Guys, I am absolutely in favor of trying out new stuff, that’s perfectly fine and normal (and somehow incentivized). But please keep in mind: If you have no idea what the protocol or asset really does, you probably don’t understand the risks.

I am saying this today because of the liquidations yesterday and some questions in today’s daily, but I was already very surprised some months ago when some members here deposited (rather large sums of) ETH into Eigenlayer without understanding what it does, what this deposit does (or does not) do with your ETH, timelines, etc.

You all are obviously free to do stuff with your money, this is a permittionless industry, but I am a conservative boomer that cares for you. I don’t want you to lose money, because you fucked around and found out. You can lose money, we probably all do from time to time. But don’t risk too much of your stack in protocols and assets you don’t understand, for unclear upsides.

In a bull market you literally have one goal: Keep your ETH. The problem in a bull market. They all want your ETH. If you part with it, do so after spending some time really understanding what you’re doing and getting yourself into.

Boomer Bearnido out.

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This is a reminder that the latest Gitcoin Grants round is active. My picks for this round:

dApps & Apps

• rotki
• Revoke.cash
• growthepie
• Smold.app
• Smoothly
• ethstaker.tax

Web3 Infrastructure

• The Tor Project
• Lighthouse by Sigma Prime
• L2BEAT
• Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS)
• DefiLlama
• EthStaker

Developer Tooling

• Blockscout Block Explorer
• Web3.js
• Otterscan

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Let me ramble about my biggest disappointment from the last year which is Eigenlayer.

When I first heard about it, the concept was a bit difficult to grasp. Once I started grokking it my mind was blown. Decentralized trust, where validators can start to run various services along their nodes and they can make truth statements about the world. It would lead to a world where we would be getting independent of centralized truth brokers. Projects could easily and trustlessly tap into the decentralized Ethereum network and start, for example, a decentralized oracle without having to kick start such a network on their own. It could even encourage the decentralization of the Ethereum network by giving small home stakers a better revenue than centralized operators as decentralization would have a value. Rainbows and unicorns everywhere. Obviously, I filled some of the gaps in my understanding and Eigenlayers very minimal docs with the best possible outcome.

Last autumn when I first saw the requirements for running the first AVS which is EigenDA, I realized that is not something just any node operator will be able to run on their node. Their delegated stake requirements made the problem even worse such that only a selected few operators will be able to run the EigenDA AVS.

Now, with EigenDA mainnet release, we have a few powerful entities like etherfi and other LRT providers which are the king makers in the protocol apparently having bilateral agreements with AVSs to make sure they can get the most profitable deals. The AVS operators have pretty much nothing at stake. If they loose money, they loose the money of the restakers, and meat space legal agreements will be the only thing keeping them in compliance. Not sure this is enough to be honest. All in all it is not much better than if projects outsource running their services to a service provider which will run stuff on a data center somewhere. The restaked assets were historically meant to be ETH on the beacon chain, which would directly map operators to their stake. Now, a large part is just ‘restaked’ LSTs and as far as I understand it soon could be any token. This is a far cry from the original vision. Not sure if it is good enough to even be long term profitable for restakers considering the nothing at stake risk for AVS operators.

EDIT: I love all the different takes and nuances. Thank you.

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u/Fast_Contract:

“Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said Thursday that cryptocurrencies and intermediaries that allow holders to “stake” their coins might pass a key test used by courts to determine whether an asset is a security. Known as the Howey test, it examines whether investors expect to earn a return from the work of third parties.”

I wouldn’t say eth fits into that since you don’t gain anything from just holding it in a wallet, but Reth and steth certainly do.

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u/Set1Less:

I think that a court if presented with the right facts, will find that a pure proof of stake consensus mechanism like ETH 2.0 does not infact satisfy the howey test, because there is no demonstrable common enterprise that is built into the protocol. Solo stakers who earn rewards from staking do so, not because another party does the work and they earn their share from others work, but because they put in the effort themselves and whatever rewards they earn are the results of their own work

I remain pretty confident that if this matter goes before a court, the court will have no option but to rule that proof of stake consensus mechanism by itself does not violate howey’s rule.

If it comes to other staking mechanisms like delegated proof of stake or liquid staking, then there could be various entities playing the common enterprise role. But in a pure pos mechanism, there is none. The rewards are baked into the network - like new issuances to fund the staker rewards, sync committee rewards etc.

If SEC were to make this claim in a court, I would be ultra bullish on a highly likely defeat for the SEC. Crypto companies arent exactly fucking around either, both Coinbase and Consensys have got the best law firm in USA to represent them, the calibre of lawyers is 2 or 3 leagues better than the muppets at SEC

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New Etherscan feature launched called Cards, in a special section. One shows unclaimed airdrops. It seems to be a cooperation with Bankless. I found it still listed STRK despite me already claiming and it didn’t give the ETHFI airdrop so it might not be 100%, but still pretty nice. Especially if you have multiple wallets, you can check them easily.

It also shows blockchain messages and token approvals - pretty nifty. Anyone can apply to Etherscan in a form with their project and they might consider it as a card, if it’s useful enough.

How it looks on Vitalik’s address below:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045#cards

Edit:

Looks like Bankless hides a lot of the drops between a paywall. Not a fan of that.

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Tornado Cash case. Government’s response to motion to dismiss

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.604938/gov.uscourts.nysd.604938.53.0.pdf

The gov is basically arguing that smart contracts are money transmitter businesses and should KYC users and run a BSA program.

This is real bad. If this sticks ( most likely does unless the judge specifically over rules these arguments) it means DOJ can go after any company or person that created a wallet or a dapp (smart contract) or any crypto product claiming they are unregistered money transmitters - irrespective of the fact that the wallet or smart contract doesnt allow them to control customer funds

It opens up the potential for a 6 AM FBI Open the door and arrest for anyone working in crypto

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One Million Ethereum Validators Reached!!!

• 1,000,004 / 1,000,000
• Epoch - 280045 / 280042
• Current Slot - 8961440
• Active Validators - 1000004
• Pending Validators - 14387 / 0
• Staked ETH - 31999770 ETH
• Average Balance - 32.06 ETH

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u/Wulkingdead:

Damn reading yesterday’s reddit im feeling down…

Consensys complaint isn’t looking too good: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/s/Y0pWVVy3CM

Potential huge risk in the tornado cash case targeting smart contracts: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ce6bam/comment/l1j4tzk/

R/cc has 2 top posts about vitalik talking about centralization and it’s filled with Ethereum hate.

And with the SEC being on a war with crypto,… Yes they are losing a lot but they aren’t done yet.

I hope this all turns out ok. Why is crypto investing never relaxed, it’s always stressful lol.

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u/pa7x1:

I went over it quickly but I have a hard time to take them seriously when there are obviously in bad faith arguments. Let me pick the one that most quickly jumped to me while I was scrolling through.

At some point they make this argument:

And they go on a long tirade to argue against it as provably false. But the complete opposite is true. It’s a provably true argument. After EIP-1559, transacting on Ethereum necessitates ETH, this is completely unavoidable. The argument Consensys is using basically boils down to, to use the Ethereum network ETH is necessary. Going after ETH, kills the possibility to use the network. And this is true, even if you assume all the fancy goodies of account abstraction. Someone needs to pocket the ETH to transact on Ethereum, either the end-user or the wallet provider with account abstraction. Now let’s look at the arguments:

Can I install a fresh instance of MetaMask in my browser or as an app & generate a fresh Ethereum address with no ETH? ✅

Not a transaction settlement.

Can I go to EthCC or wherever & get a cool POAP dropped to this Ethereum address with no ETH? ✅

LOL, not a user transaction settlement. But someone is paying for that use of the network. If they kill ETH through regulatory maneuvers I can assure you, you will not be getting a POAP or anything in the US.

Can I login, check-in, connect to cool blockchain dapps, sites, friends, and spaces with my ETHless EOA that has my new POAPs on it, to maybe get more POAPs, or just to browse, or whatever? ✅

Not transactions on the network. And the POAP argument was just covered.

Can I sign messages & authorizations & authentications with my ETHless EOA? ✅

Not transactions on the network.

Heck, can I sign contracts with my ETHless EOA? ✅

I start to see a pattern here. 100 ways to say I can still sign stuff with my public key. Everything except actually using the network which is the argument Consensys was making.

Can I be served with legal process to my ETHless EOA? ✅

?

Do at least some of these interactions constitute “transactions on the blockchain”? ✅

Absolutely not. They are not transactions on the network. To transact on the network you must spend ETH, this is unavoidable after EIP-1559. EIP-1559 is what made ETH a commodity in the most literal sense. Is the commodity you consume to settle computation on a global settlement layer. Signing something with a public key is not using the Ethereum network. It’s not propagated nor settled on the network.

Do people do things like this onchain 🦊 and irl, even without ETH? ✅

?

Is this legally significant? ✅✅✅

Dunno if it’s legally significant but it is factually wrong.

EDIT: And to clarify why I think this article is written in bad faith. Whoever wrote it understands well enough the technology to very meticulously choose a niche use case of your public key (i.e. you can use it to sign messages) and conflate that with transacting on the network which is not. There is a lot of intent in whoever built this argument to confuse things, they are arguing for US-based users to not be able to use the Ethereum network, period. And they are willing to twist reality to get there.

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u/hanniabu:

It’s so frustrating seeing the marketing push happening right now with influencers on Twitter acting like Eigen Layer’s token is some amazing breakthrough.

They act like it’s some amazing new revelation that EL will have it’s own protocol rules and not affect Ethereum consensus. Like no shit, why would it have any bearing at all on Ethereum. And this is coming from people that I know are definitely smart enough to understand this, all using the same language, so the only reasonable conclusion is they’re getting paid to push this narrative.

When you have enough money you can create your own reality b/c there’ll always be people willing to bend their morals for payment.

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u/Tricky_Troll:

I’m slowly giving up on meaningful things coming from the space beyond what has already been or is being built. Most things from this point onwards feel like they’re increasingly more disconnected from the core values of this space. Instead it’s VCs building yet another level of financial engineering just because they can. So aside from some less hype-y DePIN projects, a small selection of aligned L2s, teams working on FHE and other core values related projects, I’m getting pretty over this all. I look forward to the day where I can cash out at my target price and just perpetually stake my only validator node to do my part in keeping the decentralised vision alive.

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I actually never put funds into any sort of EigenLayer restaking; while I was always interested in the concept, the points system and insane levels of hype for an unreleased protocol triggered some circuit breakers in my brain and I just couldn’t let myself participate materially. So congrats to those with access to a good amount of EIGEN, and my condolences to those who feel rugged by the distribution parameters and/or geographical/IP blocking.

The more interesting topic for me is the release of the EIGEN token whitepaper. The authors present EIGEN as having a critical role in restaking and I’d like to try to break it down a little.

Staking Faults

Restaking provides economic security to AVSs through the threat of slashing deposited collateral. If you (or more specifically, your delegated operator) follow the rules, you get paid. If you break the rules, you get slashed. But under the hood, slashing rules are encoded into smart contracts, and preferably the logic isn’t just “the AVS devs have complete power at any time to choose who to slash”. The contracts can be smarter than that.

Objective Faults

The paper looks at two different categories of faults, the bad things that would trigger slashing. These are objectively attributable and intersubjectively attributable faults. Objective faults are the more straightforward of the two. This is where the contract can directly verify that the fault occurred. Think of double signing: the contract can easily check that yes, the same private key did sign two different conflicting messages, and therefore committed a fault. Fraud and validity proofs can also fall under this category: someone does something malicious, someone else creates a SNARK proving it was wrong, the contract verifies it, and slashing occurs.

These are not always easy or possible to implement for an AVS, but detection and resolution of these faults is straightforward. EigenLayer with restaked ETH is perfect for this.

Intersubjective faults

Intersubjective faults occur when there is a generally agreed upon truth but it is not mathematically provable on-chain. The standard example is price oracles. The contract doesn’t know what’s happening in the real world. We can all agree that the current market price of ETH is ~$3200, but the contract has to find some way to get a price feed from a source it can trust. Maybe that would be an AVS with a decentralized group of validators casting votes about the current price. The majority vote wins, so if the validator set is sufficiently decentralized, the correct price becomes a Schelling point.

If everyone says ETH market price is $3k but I cast a vote saying it’s worth $10k, despite my number being much better, I’m not following the rules of the AVS. Anyone can look at actual market data and confirm that the price was actually $3k and that I’m in the wrong. But the contract itself can’t objectively confirm that $3k is correct and $10k is wrong. So it’s through agreement of the validator set, and my lone disagreement, that determines that I have committed an intersubjective fault. Other potential sources of intersubjective faults include censorship resistance/detection, data availability, and as a stepping stone in verifiable computation before proving can be fully SNARKified.

Tyranny of the Majority

Identifying intersubjective faults through majority votes works well… as long as the majority is honest and can all agree on the truth. There are a few ways this can break down. First is when a malicious attacker gains control of a majority of votes: they can trick the system into accepting an incorrect truth, and simultaneously slash any honest validators. Bribes make this possibility scarier. Second is when the truth itself is ambiguous, and honest voters may come to different conclusions. Maybe we’re giving Ethereum an oracle price feed of another chain’s native token, and that chain undergoes a contentious fork; which fork’s token price do we follow?

In the end, with the intersubjective on-chain voting mechanism having broken down, the system has to fall back on social consensus, usually implemented through forking. If a malicious majority is saying the market price of ETH is $1, the rest of the world knows that’s wrong, so we’ll come to off-chain social consensus to make a fork. The old system is abandoned, and at the social layer everyone agrees to move to the new fork, which likely introduces socially-agreed-upon state changes to slash the attacker and “unslash” any honest validators caught up in the attack. A forkable oracle could also do just that to mirror a fork in the tracked token.

Overloading Ethereum Consensus

So what happens in the case of EigenLayer when an attacker gains majority ETH control of an AVS with intersubjectively determined slashing conditions? We have actual honest Ethereum validators who could end up slashed and effectively (or literally, post-Pectra) booted from the Ethereum network. The social layer could come to the rescue again, but it would mean a hard fork of Ethereum itself to slash the malicious actors and restore the honest ones.

Vitalik wrote a well known blog post on this subject, referring to the issue as the overloading of Ethereum consensus. One of the greatest risks is that we get a repeat of The DAO, where disagreement on if/how the social layer should resolve an application issue caused the Ethereum chain as a whole to fork. It’s not too hard to imagine a situation where a large AVS gets intersubjectively attacked, an uncomfortable number of honest validators have their ETH slashed, and we once again have to decide between allowing some harm to the health of the network, or forking on behalf of a broken application. We really don’t want to find ourselves in a position where we have to seriously have that debate again, and EigenLayer needs to be careful to not enable that.

The EIGEN Token

The paper talks about social consensus from the perspective that tokens/projects have certain social conditions agreed upon during their initial setup phase that determine how to resolve intersubjective faults later on. Bitcoin’s community agreed on the longest chain rule for PoW consensus. Ethereum’s community agreed on its fork choice rule as well, but with a stipulation that the goal would be to move to PoS, an important decision during the “setup phase” that eased the social acceptance of the transition. Rollups and national governments also follow this paradigm. EigenLayer’s perspective is that allowing intersubjective restaking of ETH would be a violation of Ethereum’s setup phase–citing the same Vitalik post. They argue that intersubjective restaking in general requires a very specific setup phase where the entire community engages with the token with a very specific set of expectations around its principles and intended use.

So the answer: Design the EIGEN token specifically for the purpose of universal intersubjective staking. Design all AVSs so that all objective faults are backed by ETH, and all intersubjective faults are covered by EIGEN. In case of a failure of the intersubjective systems that requires social intervention and forking, that will be handled through the EIGEN token’s own forking system rather than overloading Ethereum’s social consensus.

Two Token Model

EigenLayer actually envisions a system that contains two tokens, EIGEN and bEIGEN. I’m not going to go into full detail about the tokens and forking behavior, but I can provide an overview, specifically of their V1 design. bEIGEN (b is for “backing”) is what is used internally within EigenLayer; it is what is actually staked with an operator and may be forked into different versions over time to resolve issues at the social layer. EIGEN abstracts that complexity away for the purposes of DeFi, providing a token that can be used without worrying about the forks going on behind the scenes.

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bEIGEN

bEIGEN forking is pretty interesting. An intersubjective fault can still result in slashing, as usual, but each AVS must implement a system by which anyone can raise an alarm about a fault to suggest that there is a need for social consensus to resolve a dispute. If there is an issue, e.g. attacker controlling majority stake, a challenge can be raised in the form of an ERC20 contract fork of the bEIGEN token. So you end up with the old pre-forked bEIGEN1 and new post-fork bEIGEN2. bEIGEN1 holders can claim their bEIGEN2 for a limited time.

In order to raise a challenge, the challenger must burn a significant amount of bEIGEN1–this is the cost to them if their challenge turns out to be incorrect and bEIGEN1 remains canonical. The challenger must also tag a sufficient amount of bEIGEN2 tokens as malicious, these will be burned in bEIGEN2, and punish the attacker if the challenger is correct and bEIGEN2 becomes canonical. Once both tokens exist, the social layer takes over and through market price discovery, adoption of the tokens by AVSs and other protocols, etc, decides which token is correct and canonical.

Through this method, the need for a social layer to intervene in some intersubjective faults can be realized. Ideally, AVSs are designed to minimize ambiguity about which fork would be correct if you just check the real-world source of truth. So in most cases it should be obvious. But it’s probably unavoidable that some will be contentious, those will be more fun to watch play out and I’ll be glad Ethereum validators aren’t at risk.

Technical note: the reason why bEIGEN2 redemptions are limited-time is because it needs to be shorter than the withdrawal time in order to prevent an attacker from committing a fault, withdrawing, and claiming the bEIGEN2 tokens anyway. By having t_redeem < t_withdraw, the attacker has no way to get around their punishment. This carries the unfortunate design issue of putting a limit on redemption time. bEIGEN holders who delay may see all their value evaporate.

EIGEN

The EIGEN token is designed to be insulated from all that, because imagine what a nightmare that would be for DeFi integrations. Anyone with bEIGEN can wrap it to become EIGEN. The EIGEN contract provides its own governance to follow the various forks of bEIGEN and swap its contents to reflect its view of the canonical bEIGEN token. When unwrapping, it will only ever return the bEIGENx it considers canonical, not any other others. In short, if you hold EIGEN, you are trusting its governance system to accurately follow the canonical fork and in exchange don’t have to worry about the forks yourself. The obvious risk is that if governance is wrong or corrupt, you may end up holding junk.

V2 Tokens

The big change in their proposed V2 is that the EIGEN contracts become immutable, and so must also be forked to create a EIGENx to match each bEIGENx. This creates a sort of historical record of the fork history through the various contracts, which gives EIGENx holders the option to hold passively and later claim all the bEIGEN tokens along the fork history, while protecting them from malicious EIGEN governance.

This seems to hurt the DeFi usage of the token, as each EIGENx will remain its own tradeable token. I think only the most recent EIGENx will be used, as it’s the only one that could be actively wrapped from bEIGENx, so that would mean DeFi protocols would have to add each new EIGENx as they come out. But it’s still much more convenient than using bEIGEN in DeFi. At least with EIGEN there’s no pressure to redeem forks immediately; with bEIGEN if you don’t manage to untangle it from nested DeFi positions and redeem forks in time you’re screwed.

Conclusion and Thoughts

The big thing here is that ETH restaking will only be used as economic security for objective faults, while (b)EIGEN provides economic security for intersubjective faults. Intersubjective faults often require social consensus to resolve through a fork (e.g. The DAO) and can sometimes be contentious. So the biggest benefit of this system is that the Ethereum social consensus layer is not pressured to fork the chain in order to resolve issues with an AVS. Without this there’s a really good chance that a too-big-to-fail AVS would eventually get attacked and Ethereum would face a difficult decision about whether to fork to protect the honest stakers caught up in the incident, possibly bad enough to create an Ethereum Classic 2.0.

What is EigenLayer Actually?

The biggest downside to me is the breakdown of EigenLayer as an ETH REstaking platform. Anyone can deploy a smart contract through which you can stake an ERC20 token as collateral and earn rewards for computational services while taking on slashing risk in case of misbehavior. A general marketplace for buying and selling economic security, kinda neat.

EigenLayer is particularly interesting in that it uses ETH (which is possibly the world’s best collateral asset), and all of the ETH it has access to for security is also actively involved in regular ETH validator duties. For me it feels like there’s a fundamental difference there. That having your AVS’s economic security come from the same ETH that’s securing the network feels like you’re sharing in that same security, like you’re tapping into a particularly valuable, established set of actors. Ethereum validators are already committed to locking up their ETH to earn rewards, if EigenLayer makes it easy to access the same set of actors, you know you’re able to easily source high quality economic security for any project that’s willing to pay for it, rather than bootstrapping a validator set from scratch.

EIGEN isn’t “restaking”, it’s just… staking. To be fair, it’s a token designed to be the best universal intersubjective staking token, allows delegators to provide security to numerous shifting AVSs simultaneously, and will have tooling around it to make it easy for AVSs to adopt. So it’s the basis for a nice market for economic security for anyone who wants to buy or sell it. But in my mind it loses that critical edge that ETH has.

If EigenLayer dropped ETH altogether and EIGEN were used as the sole medium of exchange for economic security in their marketplace, I feel like I’d hesitate to use it. Wouldn’t you? To some extent I feel like EigenLayer gained a lot of prominence specifically because of the ETH restaking direction, and it’s a bit of a light rugpull to say “now that you’ve gotten on board, you have to buy our token in order to use half of our system”. Maybe it helps that the airdrop goes in part to ETH stakers who followed the incentives, making it easier for them to participate in both aspects? And maybe this is a necessary tradeoff to avoid overloading Ethereum consensus; there’s no other way?

Other Thoughts

Regardless of the above, I think it’s clear that EIGEN as a staking token is a riskier play for EigenLayer than ETH restaking. It means a notable increase in complexity and risk factors. The system described in the paper is in no way simple to design or implement. And this token’s close integration with critical staking systems means Ethereum as a whole has more risk exposure to Eigen Labs. Should we be putting more work into protocolizing EigenLayer in the same way that we’re working towards ePBS? In taking this step, EL further invite this discussion.

I have been a little frustrated with the rough state of AVSs at this point in EigenLayer’s launch, and how few of them have really described what slashing is going to look like (despite them being literally live on mainnet!). This announcement does explain it somewhat: AVSs are going to have to factor EIGEN and intersubjective faults into their designs, so it would have been unfair to expect them to develop their slashing mechanisms before this was described in detail. So cool, maybe they can work on their economics now finally. But at the same time… why the heck did EigenLayer deploy to mainnet before this info was released? Why?

I haven’t really done a deep dive on the theory of forking tokens, so I can’t really analyze that too deeply. But I have always thought it’s a cool idea, and enjoy reading about governance systems designed with forking as a central concept, e.g. The DAO, Nouns DAO. The paper draws comparisons to Augur’s REP token but doesn’t list others that really fork an application’s utility token. So this may actually be pretty novel, EigenLayer is huge and their forking system is very likely to be stress tested by malicious actors. I’m very curious to see how it plays out.

ty

And I guess that’s that. The paper is 43 pages, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad that this ended up so long. Always happy to explain more details from what I understood of the paper. And even happier to get corrections and different perspectives.

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One of the CT resident lawyers did a thread on all this yesterday. I’d suggest anyone having these questions to go through that

TLDR is that these are all legal issues. Its not that the project says lets take their money and defraud people or lets block US, that is a good idea for us.. No.

Its all down to legal constraints, and projects trying to waddle through unclear regulations, protecting them from potential government charges. Projects tell users, infact make it very clear from the very start not to expect airdrops for the same reason - they dont want to trick people into thinking they are going to airdrop, but end up not airdropping few countries or jurisdictions because of sanctions or regulations. So they make it very clear there isnt gonna be an airdrop. If someone files a lawsuit - they can just point to the message posted 12 months ago in discord #Wen-token channel that says dont expect an airdrop.

Similarly, the locked is also locked to make the token appear decentralized from the start. There is a belief that a locked token has less chances of being labelled a security (since it has no value), so the project is airdropping a locked token. And they will want the community to create proposals to unlock it, add value to it

No doubt, for end users its painful - you locked $50k for 6 months only to find out you arent eligible and the whole country is blocked. At that point you are mad, and dont want to hear “legal thingies”. But the bitter pill is that all of this is due to not just unclear regulations but potential regulatory actions against projects/founders. US users must consider that there is a high chance they will be ineligible for most airdrops. So either they should not farm airdrops or acquaint themselves with gud airdrop claim technology (VPNs that work)

Of course, one will say that XYZ project 2 years ago airdropped us, and didnt do all this, you guys suck. Again the fact is that now the times have changed, regulatory environment has worsened. If you follow what is going on for the last 24 months, its kinda obvious…

Coming to Ryan from Bankless - I really dont envy his job of trying to explain all this to a crowd of people who think they’ve been sold short.

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u/DayTraderBiH

Ethereum

u/FrenktheTank

$3142

u/Equal-Jellyfish1

0.04889

u/syzygy00778

3,966 validators to go till a million active validators.

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Kindly taking note,

Blockchain is no antidote,

It is a lifeboat.

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Ethereum: Undergoes infinity halvings. I SLEEP

Bitcoin: Undergoes one halving. REAL SHIT?

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Looking for a list or some comparison of safe Eigenlayer operators to delegate to. Any help?

I see Aestus mentioned here but not familiar with their background.

EigenYields seems sketchy upon further inspection.

Etherfi has like 8 different operators, but are they all the same?

I also see Staked.US and they seem to have a good track record, but they shut out Americans from airdrops so how would that work if you’re an American restaker?

Or, is it best to just wait until some of the larger exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken get in on the game?

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(Reposting since reddit deleted last post because of links.)

Few weeks ago when finding of Geth bug was posted here I decided to contact top 11 majority-Geth/undisclosed staking operators listed on supermajority info (having 1% and more network penetration)

I presented myself as a current/potential user, concerned about client supermajority issue, asking about their current setup and potential plans to improve client diversity status.

Contact was made through emails, customer support or Discord. Here are the summaries of respones I recieved:

• Binance: We understand the concerns around supermajority usage and its impacts on network security and user funds. While we are devoted to ensuring the highest level of security for our users, as a standard security practice, we do not disclose specifics about our internal infrastructure including Ethereum validator client details. This policy is in place to shield our operations and safeguard user assets. However, we take threats to network security seriously and continuously improve our infrastructure in response to evolving industry developments and security principles. Diversifying into minority clients is indeed a recognized method to spread risk and enhance security. Rest assured, we have expert teams constantly observing the ecosystem and shaping our approach.
• Kraken: We would be unable to discuss any exact details of how we manage Ethereum client diversity, one of which is indeed GETH. Kindly note however, we are acutely aware of the benefits to the chain and for our own risk mitigation that client diversity brings, as such we do have strategies in place to this effect.
• OKX: Kindly be informed that OKX uses supermajority execution clients and we are unable to provide any confirmation on plans to diversify to minority ones as this decision requires the approval of a significant majority of stakeholders or participants to proceed.
• Bitcoin Suisse: “At present, Bitcoin Suisse primarily employs GETH for our execution layer nodes, as you’ve noted. We’re in the process of evaluating the use of an additional node provider besides GETH. However, we’re proceeding cautiously to ensure a seamless transition, prioritizing stability and security considerations.” They are now listed with 90% Geth, 10% Besu.
• RockX: no response, Discord
• Blockdaemon: no response, sent inquiry on their site, got forwarded to email, then email forwarded me back to site
• Hash Key Cloud: no response, site form
• Prysmatic Labs: Yes we are in the process of testing Nethermind on our setups. This takes a while as we need to have reasonable confidence in testnets before moving on to mainnet.
• Chainsafe: “Almost there. We are doing some extended testing on a small group of mainnet validators right now and will roll out the rest of them later this week if there are no issues.” Also this tweet suggests that they are 30% Nethermind instead of 26% listed on supermajority: “The Lodestar and Infrastructure teams currently run 30% of our validators with and will continue to increase this alongside inclusion of .”
• Kukis Global: “We will update our stats on supermajority info soon, we are currently close to 60% Nethermind and 40% Geth and will go towards 0% Geth this year.” Indeed, they are listed at 50% now.
• Figment: no response, made contact as a potential user, still waiting

I think Binance, Kraken and OKX (8% combined) should be campaigned further through social media and other channels to ensure they make an action. It seemed to be effective with Coinbase, we saw Brian Armstrong responded personally to DC on twitter, it also worked with consensus clients.

Many smaller operators seem to be steadily working towards diversifying, but feel free to check up on them as well.

Community did bring awareness to the problem and it improved, we can get it to 50% or below.

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The Aestus MEV Relay is hiring a DevOps Engineer.

Frankly when u/austonst and I started this projected ~20 months ago, we both imagined (hoped?) it would have become irrelevant by now. However, ePBS is an unsolved research problem that even optimistically feels years away from any kind of resolution. So - we intend to set things up to play a long term game. We still think it’s crucial to the long term health of Ethereum that credibly neutral players occupy this space - because MEV is an incredible centralising force.

We’ve recently received some funding from an Optimism retro PGF round, which ethfinancers were instrumental in supporting. So, it’s because of the fine work from people like u/superphiz and u/bendido2030 that we are in a position to hire at all. It would be great to return that trust by sourcing someone close to this community.

The ad suggests this is a full-time role, but we’re very open to committed part-time contributions — and this could be a fun, albeit intense, side-gig for someone. Your primary role will be to help us improve the performance and stability of our existing architecture and develop a plan for the future. The right person will have very strong cloud and k8s experience in domains including observability and security. Generalist coding capability, a willingness to absorb new information and learn new skills are also essential. You’ll also be part of an on-call rota.

This work brings you very close to the core Ethereum protocol and part of your job will to be stay on top of research and developments in the MEV and ePBS space. While for me the most exciting part of this project has been in the constant adventure of working at the bleeding edge - there are many unknowns - and that also means that whoever we hire will have to accept a bit of insecurity. Having said that, the additional capacity will allow us to spend more time exploring new services and opportunities both in the relay ecosystem and beyond - restaking and shared-sequencing are both ecosystems where we think our ethos and experience can make a difference.

Worth also noting that unfortunately and for complicated reasons, we can’t hire anyone resident in the US. I hope i’m not breaking any rules by posting this here!

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Starknet’s foundation is well aware that mistakes were made in the initial round of provisions. There are numerous efforts underway to address those mistakes and find a more positive way to move forward. In that vein, I am hoping that some of you who feel they were unreasonably excluded from the first round will share a) why you feel that way, b) the account address (DM me if preferred), and c) what criteria you feel *should* have been applied. I am asking in my capacity as a Starknet delegate and member of the Starknet builder’s council to provide as much guidance as I can back to the foundation.

Edit: doesn’t have to be limited to *your* account. If you know of any accounts that are good examples, please forward them along.

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u/haurog:

A very good indication that we are in a bull market is the pick up of the various scam attempts I come across. A few weeks ago my cold wallet on Ethereum was getting spammed with address poisoning attacks. Cost the spammer several dollars for each poisoning. I cannot really believe that these kind of things are worth it for them, but apparently they are ready to spend real money to do it.

Then came a cold DM on telegram from someone wanting to borrow my github account for a day. I blocked them so I never found out what they actually wanted with it, but I guess they saw my github account in the list of some airdrops and they would have wanted to claim them.

Yesterday I got DMs on Discord and Telegram with freelance coding job opportunities. These are close to 100% a scam as well. At the moment I am talking to them to try to find out how they would want to scam me. The slightly worrying part about the DMs is that they feel a bit closer to me than address poisoning. Especially, when these messages have been sent on two different apps (discord and telegram) simultaneously. Seems like someone is adding my user name to their scamming database.

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u/austonst:

I’ve got an addition to /u/haurog ‘s scam watchlist from yesterday. My more valuable wallets have been getting hit with address poisoning attacks, which at this point I would hope most people here are familiar with. And this should really be addressed with better tools at the wallet/etherscan level.

But more interestingly, my personal cell phone was hit today with a text message:

COINBASE: An unauthorized device from Salt Lake City, Utah has logged into your Coinbase account. If this was not authorized by you, please reply with “N”. If this was authorized by you ignore this message.

I caught on immediately, in part because I wasn’t actually sure I have a Coinbase account (I checked, and I do, but I didn’t even really complete account setup, never set it up to receive fiat or crypto funds). But also because I had just recently read this article on Ars Technica, which describes the abilities of the CryptoChameleon phishing-as-a-service toolkit. It’s a really good read, would recommend. But the first step of one of CryptoChameleon’s techniques is described to be similar: a phone call telling the recipient that there was an unauthorized login and asking them to press “1” or “2” to accept or deny.

This is kind of tricky because there’s not really any immediate danger in replying “N” (or pressing “2” to deny). If it’s legit then you’ve done your part to prevent an attack. If it’s not legit, then all you’ve done is sent a pointless text message. And users have become increasingly used to dealing with these kinds of messages from all sorts of account logins, so it may not ring any alarm bells. Why not send a quick “N” and be done with it?

But my understanding is that the first step of a scam is by far the most important. On one hand, some scams deliberately use dubious sounding claims (Nigerian prince, anyone?) as an initial filter, so that the savvy users weed themselves out, and the people who actually respond are more likely to be duped by the subsequent requests. But that’s probably just a side-benefit here, maybe allowing the recipients without Coinbase accounts to filter themselves out. And it’s notable that this message asks for action to deny and a non-response to approve. The vast majority of legit messages of this kind are the other way around: silence means deny. And that’s smart, that’s the way it should be.

More relevant this time is a sort of a sunk cost fallacy. In the world of video games that are “free to play” but with microtransactions for additional bonuses, it’s well understood that getting the user to make their first payment is a massive step. Once someone has caved and paid once, they’re much more likely to continue to do so. And at some point you can ask me about the fascinating ways in which a scammer on the streets of Istanbul employed a bunch of tricks to make it really hard for me to disengage once we had started talking, but that’s a longer story. But in short: if a scammer can get you to take the first step, you’re much more likely to fall for the following steps. So in this case, having the first step be something so likely to get casual responses means a higher success rate as a whole.

If the CryptoChameleon playbook described by Ars is accurate, there would probably be a followup text or email with a link to a fake phishing Coinbase login page, ready to take my password. I would hope even if people fell for the first step, they’d catch the issue at this point, but the danger could be that the first step being fairly risk-free would cause people to let their guard down.

This turned out longer than I planned, hope it reads all right. tl;dr: Scams nowadays will likely start with “unauthorized device/login” messages, these kinds of messages should make you consider if the source could be a scammer.

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Can I accidentally sign something malicious and it then drains my wallet?

Yes, hackers can be very creative. You could lose all of a single token, or an NFT or even native ETH. Not more than one type or token per signature.

I didn’t think they could touch your ETH but just recently learned of a way. It uses eth_sign to have you sign a TX that the scammer generated in advance. It will only be valid for one nonce though. Basically, your private key has signed a TX that the scammer can create later, for example an ETH transfer. The wallets warn of those signature types heavily though.

It is also possible to lose many NFTs at once. I don’t completely understand it but I remember when some people lost multiple Apes/Punks a couple of years back in a signing scam. Below is an article on it.

“However, signing a message like the second or third image on a website that turns out to be a scam will grant the scammers contract (and linked wallet) the ability to literally just buy all your approved NFTs to the specified contract under the “exchange” for ETH” -https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-gasless-signature-scam-heiner-garcía-pérez-u0ice

It can be difficult to spot a scam because the UI in Metamask is often abysmal for signatures. It’s a lot better in Rabby but even there sometimes it doesn’t understand things. It can then look like, you are trading asset 0xCY45… for asset 0x567DF… at a price of 85000000 gwei. That’s just ridiculous and easy to make a mistake on any of the contracts or even the amount might be a zero too much/little. I have read of people getting scammed this way.

You should always be careful when signing. If you are some public crypto MVP with millions of USD, you should even be extra careful. Use a separate PC only for crypto. I read about someone at a crypto company that opened a job resume PDF, it had some kind of malware that affected his metamask to push a modified TX to his hardware wallet which drained the company of millions USD.

Separating wallets and having a multi-sig are good practices.

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Logris got me very interested in FHE for the past few days. Thank you for sharing! The tech is super interesting as someone who consistently takes the long and dull path while navigating the internet to preserve privacy and reduce data-mining (even though I know that it doesn’t change anything in the grand scheme). A bit surprised I didn’t know about this technology before. Running algorithms over data without knowing the true input/output, while still knowing the validity of the computation is preserved, is mind-blowing, but also makes sense when looking a bit closer.

In a utopian future, where this is the new standard for how the internet and its services work, I wonder how companies will keep serving you things like relevant ads and a personalized experience. Although I’d be more than happy to live in a world without these “features”, the incentives are just so strong that it doesn’t make sense for them to let them go willingly. Anyone have any thoughts about this?

It would be nice if it turned into a marketplace, where you get these things served blindly through the same mechanisms, and got compensated for doing so (Brave had a cool visionary idea like this, but didn’t work out that well in practice). A less cool approach would be design-patterns for applications to gate-keep certain features, like premium services or exclusive content in exchange for users opting in to give their data.

(Feel free to delete this if its too off-topic, mods)

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Howdy y’all!

So, I think most of us here watch The Daily Gwei everyday. For those of you who do watch, you’ll know that Sassal is taking a 2 week break from recording the show starting on Monday. During that time, I’m going to help fill in the gap by providing Ethereum news on top of Rocket Pool news on Rocket Fuel.

Sassal talks about it in today’s episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhI6OsMVZk8

For those of you who want to follow along, my YouTube channel is www.youtube.com/@RocketFuel-RPL and I also release episodes via podcast here:

• Podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/cd29a3d8/podcast/rss
• Anchor.fm: https://anchor.fm/rocket-fuel
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Mvta9d2MsKq2u62w8RSoo
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rocket-fuel/id1655014529

I won’t be able to match his knowledge and insights (or bullish rants), but it might be a useful stop gap while he’s away.

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Lodestar v1.18.0 released today

Our new release contains some noticeable facelifts! We recommend this update to all users of Lodestar.

Our documentation located at https://chainsafe.github.io/lodestar/ is now using Docusaurus for a better experience. We’ve attached Plausible metrics to further help improve the contents of our documentation with minimal intrusiveness and open-source analytics. We continue to do content additions and improve our documentation for the best user and builder experience possible.

This release addresses many compatibility issues discovered from cross-client testing with Lodestar and other consensus clients. This also includes fixes for compatibility with some external DVT platforms and remote signers.

Target peers by default has been increased from 50 to 100 peers. Many users have already set this for better validator effectiveness and now we have it set by default to become a better peer on the network.

builder.selection now has a default setting that gives slightly preferential treatment to locally produced blocks via builderBoostFactor=90 . This configurable setting is set to 90 instead of 100 by default, requiring builder blocks from relays to be above ~10% profit to be selected. The previous default setting was maxprofit. This can be changed in your local configuration.

Basic devcontainer support is now integrated for easier development setups such as Github Codespaces. For more information, see https://chainsafe.github.io/lodestar/contribution/getting-started#devcontainer.

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u/BazzRavish32

Ethereum

u/usesbinkvideo

89,856 hodlers subscribed (+7)

u/Vinegar_Strokes__

$3541

u/FrenktheTank

0.0499

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SEC focused,

Uniswap got Wells noticed,

Block anecdotist.

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Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t 80x leverage my entire stack then 80x that 80x then deposit all of that into a 980 day lockup of yxBgkLklyupyupYupfgCc-xETH to get frank points that can be exchanged for 200 yarn credits (at a rate of 649 Galaxy cones to 400 ant points I should have an apy of 49080%)?

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Let’s take a moment to talk about freedom. Here in the US there’s this point of national pride they try to imprint on you that the US was founded on principals of freedom and somehow spreads the torch of freedom around the world. There’s the bill of rights they trot out, right to free speech etc. A pedantic point I sometime raise with people is that if something is discretionally permitted by the government, it is not a true freedom. Right to free speech? Not if you yell fire in a crowded room, start a riot, libel, slander, etc. If a judge can issue a gag order, speech itself is not a freedom; it is permitted. Driving is not a right; it is permitted. Owning a firearm is not a right, it is permitted, despite what all the 2A folks want to believe.

In terms of true freedoms, you have very few true ones and even amongst your permitted rights they are often being deprecated by technology. For example you had the right to privacy, the government couldn’t open your USPS mail without a warrant. This is still technically true, but the vast majority of mail has instead become email and the US doesn’t need a warrant to scry that. You had the freedom to transact with cash, but increasingly every payment is digital and those rights don’t carry over. We hear frequently stories of people that go to deposit to a bank and have the deposit frozen. You have to report transactions over $10k, which practically means less and less expensive things in purchasing power each year due to inflation. Legislative inaction and judicial activism, in the face of technological progress, are eroding what few permitted freedoms we still have.

The notion that everything every citizen does should be permitted is attractive to those who wield power. They want you to have to ask their permission so they can say no and only permit actions that preserve or expand their position of power and at a time and place most convenient for them. The days tick by and the vice constraining what you are allowed to do silently tightens each day. The people who need freedoms the most are those with the most controversial ideas, the ones most likely to destabilize the status quo; for good or ill.

People like Warren fundamentally disagree with me on the freedom to transact. They want the freedom to transact to fully transition to a permitted freedom. They make arguments like “equal playing field” with the banks that are already wound in the straight jacket for them. They argue that the only people who need these freedoms are those with malicious intent. They reductively argue that blockchains are financing North Korea and child porn. Of course, they are only here to protect us. It’s very much analogous to the “nothing to hide” arguments you get from the surveillance state encroaching on your right to privacy and it’s every bit as ethically wrong. They couldn’t be further from the founding principals of this nation if they tried.

Your transactions are an expression of your values. You invest in things you believe in, you buy things that add value to your life, you donate to causes you hold dear. Limiting your transactions is fundamentally an attack on your ability to express your values and shape the world to align with them. The moral compass of crypto is a controversial one, precisely because it bucks the trend and creates true freedom; for good or ill. So yes, there are scammers abound, memecoins with deliberately hateful content, and rugs every day but there are also people escaping the oppressive inflation of their nation state, financing art and innovation, and eroding the role parasitic middlemen plaguing our society.

So, asking for permission simply won’t do. I’d rather just be free.

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approve() is part of the most common standard token interface, erc20. It has nothing to do with ethereum and is unrelated ethereum upgrades. Tokens can be any contract which implement any interface, or if you want they can all be from the same factory and you can check if they’re in that factories mapping of built tokens if you want to be sure what they are.

There have always been tokens which do it differently but erc20 isn’t going anywhere, you’ll stop noticing it when account abstraction becomes standard. For example on starknet ethereum rollup where account abstraction is default the approve and function call all take place within a single tx. Same can be true with dapps which use dsproxy.

ERC 4337 is going to win and become account abstraction standard. I hate it but it’ll be fine. Would rather hard fork and do it properly.

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ARB DAO updates:

• I voted “For” funding a team to work on a more user-friendly tool to bypass the sequencer when it is down. While admittedly the tech side is probably beyond my scope of knowledge, the broad concept I think is important enough to explore for decentralization purposes.
• I tentatively voted “For” the initial temp check of a $200M gaming fund to target gaming on Arbitrum. It seemed to have a lot of community support, although I indicated some changes I’d like to see if it went to a Tally vote. I’m torn… as I want to fund all types of projects to help Arbitrum grow, however I’m not super sold on blockchain gaming personally and I’d like to see more detail for a proposal of this size. We will see what the changes look like, but I’m probably leaning ‘against’ if unchanged and went to Tally today.
• I voted “For” Tally support to improve their governance page. All on-chain voting goes through Tally, so I look forward to their ideas and research into improving that process for both delegates but also people looking to delegate. The ideas presented should make it far easier to view delegate information, as well as increase transparency for those who vote. And I look forward to this one a lot!
• I voted “Against” a proposal to continue temporary funding of any project that passed and showed success in the initial STIP phase. This would occur alongside the 3 month LTIP window. This was contentious, with a 61% approval, 31% against vote. My main concern, echo’d by others, was that there was no real data to conclude what qualified as a successful grant round or not. As such, this moves the grantspace backwards as it doesn’t incorporate things we learned from the STIP / LTIP rounds. Additionally, I felt that the funds would be better used for a comprehensive and all-inclusive grant round after the 12 week LTIP has been completed. As at some point continually doing temporary, short grant rounds isn’t a sustainable option.

I’ll also update everyone here that the March delegate incentive program data is out - here. This is a trail program looking at ways to incentive delegates to participate more meaningfully in governance, rewarding active voting and discussion. I actually ended up being rank #1 out of all those who participated! Hopefully those who delegate to me here feel adequately represented :) and know that I try my best to make sure your voting power isn’t wasted.

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Quick HOP governance update.

I’ve spent the last few months working on applying to the ARB Long-Term grant program on behalf of Hop, heading up a team with a few other HOP delegates. Council voting results have been released (list of all passing projects here) and HOP has passed the first round! So now it goes to the ARB delegates for vote this week for final approval.

The grant is asking for 500k ARB tokens with the goal of making bridging to the ARB networks cheaper for users. This will be done through fee rebates and liquidity incentives (to reduce slippage), and if it goes live should hopefully help users switch between L2 networks to take advantage of the growing space.

I’ll also add, I worked as well to apply for a similar grant through Optimism. Hopefully with similar results.

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Like most of the rest of you, I sometimes ponder why Ethereum in recent years tends to perform so… differently… from many other cryptoassets out there.

I keep coming back to this one reason:

Most people today buy crypto to gamble, not to invest.

The market, broadly speaking, is not interested in fundamentals. It sees crypto as a giant casino, where if you’re lucky better and faster at reading the trends and moods and narratives, you can become rich overnight, and escape the increasingly dystopian financial state of society. Fundamentals are not the bedrock of deciding what is and isn’t a good deal, in this mentality - they are a ball and chain that keeps an asset tethered to reality, when what you actually want is one that is free to ascend into outer space with no pesky P/E ratios or highly technical upgrades to slow understanding and buzz. The more innocent an asset is of any practical use, the less beholden it therefore is to actually needing to support that use, to actually addressing that market, to actually working. If you’re not supposed to do anything, you can’t fail, and the market can’t fail to understand what you do!

By contrast, most of us here would consider ourselves investors. We do care about utility, and we do care about real yields, and we do watch each upgrade with bated breath, and we do follow the discourse on roadmaps and adoption. We care about those pesky fundamentals, because we understand that having a fundamentals-driven thesis is the difference between investing and gambling, and we are not here to gamble. Ethereum, which by this point is deeply embedded in the crypto and web3 ecosystems, and which has, by most metrics, already won the adoption war - that’s something we can sink our teeth into, and the fundamentals look pristine. Ethereum is bae for us because in buying it, we can feel secure that we are investing in something that has real underlying value beyond memes and narratives and the attention economy.

Consider the chasm between those two mentalities, and consider that we are in the incredibly distinct minority right now. We’re rocking up to a casino with spreadsheets and reams of research. And we’re shocked when the degenerates around us take one look at our stodgy “internet of value”, our “global settlement layer”, our “world computer”, and pass it by, because it has won a battle that memecoins are not even trying to fight.

Times are changing, of course. The gamblers that still make up the large majority of the market are soon going to be dwarfed by the massive capital that institutional investment can bring to bear, and make no mistake, those investors of size do do their homework, they do care about fundamentals. They know, like we do, that selling shovels during this gold rush is the best way to profit, and that Ethereum is that shovel, and moreover, that it will grow into the digital equivalent of Manhattan real estate in the fullness of time. How soon these more competent investors will arrive en masse is hard to say, of course - we’ve been crying out, “the institutions are coming, the institutions are coming” like some kind of latter-day Bilbo Baggins for years now. But I think most would agree that the ETF approvals, whenever they may come, will in many ways herald that advent. The time of fundamentals is not here yet, but it is coming.

So while we all sit here gnashing our teeth and pulling our hair while the markets happily ignore our precious Ethereum, keep in mind that while we’re a tiny component of those markets today, what we really are is forerunners.

We’re not the last of our kind in a world devoid of reason, raging against the dying of the light.

We’re the first.

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I have this idea for quite some time now and I’d like to share it with you.

I think that DeFi lacks it’s own high level script language. All major systems have SDKs (for advanced developers) and – on the other hand – UI, but nothing in between.

Take Uniswap as an example: you have low level SDK, where you have to deal directly with all the components (and bignumbers, various notations and so on) or pretty clumsy UI (try to move your position to a different range, even if it doesn’t require swapping tokens – it takes lot of clicking, waiting and it’s almost guaranteed that price will move while you’re doing all of this.

The solution would be high level language or set of scripts which would allow to execute all the most important functions of given Defi system by using simple commands. It should eg. understand token symbols, decimal numbers.

So instead of 100+ lines of code or using browser etc you could do:

`movePosition 29133 2000 3000` and after confirmation (which could be disabled) it’s done for you.

or, in interactive mode, you could do

`movePosition` and you’d be asked to select from list or type which position, then set range.

Those commands could be executed as scripts. There could be also an event watcher (eg. watching price on some pool) to which you could bind scripts, executed when some conditions are met. Eg. when APY on AAVE is lower than on sDAI, withdraw USDC, convert to DAI using Curve and stake on Spark. Even if not automated it’s much easier, faster to execute and probably cheaper.

What do you think about it?

EDIT: If there are some devs who’d like to do such project, please pm me.

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Yesterday, u/syzygy00778 posted a link to a comment discussing the identity of Satoshi. Buried in the comments is another link, to an EXCELLENT article titled “Len Sassaman and Satoshi: a Cypherpunk History”.

I’ll paste the first two paragraphs, and let you read the rest..

“We’ve lost too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?

Embedded on every single node of the Bitcoin network is an obituary. Hacked into the transaction data, it’s a memorial to Len Sassaman, a man essentially immortalized in the blockchain itself. A fitting tribute in more ways than one.

Len was a true Cypherpunk— equal parts brilliant, irreverent, and idealistic. He devoted his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working as a developer on PGP encryption and open-source privacy technology, as well as an academic cryptographer researching P2P networks under blockchain inventor David Chaum.”

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Any node operators / solo stakers!

EthStaker & Obol are putting out a survey to get to know the landscape of home stakers and solo stakers. The goal is to create publicly available data that accurately represents what home/solo stakers care about, what kind of software and services we mostly use, what we need, etc. The info can be used to advocate for stakers in ongoing research based on their own words. Some questions were contributed by EF researchers themselves

It shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes, most questions are optional, and no data collected can be tied back personally to people (the survey software is FOSS!). We aim to repeat the survey every 6-12 months to get an idea of how the landscape is changing. It’s available in English, Mandarin, Spanish & Italian. We’ll leave it open for 2-3 weeks depending on volume

The survey is primarily aimed at those running personal validators (anywhere! Cloud services, bare metal services, at home, with a staking-as-a-service provider), minipools, or DVT clusters. If folks have any feedback or suggestions for the next iteration of the survey, would love to hear them! Feel free to direct them to me or to the EthStaker team email (team at ethstaker dot cc)

Survey Link: https://stakinglandscape.limesurvey.net/748278

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u/KuDeTa:

The Aestus Relay team (that’s me, and /u/austonst) have decided to run an experiment in the EigenLayer AVS Operator space. I want to test whether our service and reputation in the MEV-Boost ecosystem as a credibly neutral and solo-staker focussed infrastructure provider, might be of benefit in other domains. I honestly don’t know how this is going to work out, but it’s an interesting sideline to pursue.

So, as EigenDA hits mainnet today, i’m announcing our intent, and hoping that you might support this by delegating your Native or Liquid Restaking Tokens to us here. Once we hit the required threshold of 320 ETH, we’ll begin operations. I expect this to take a few days.

I’ll write out a longer post that sets out our motivations and intent, soon. But in brief: it seems clear that the restaking and AVS ecosystem is in danger of rapid domination by staking pools. We hope to make a small difference by leveraging our existing infrastructure in pursuit of decentralisation.

The technology doesn’t appear to support it yet, but once it’s possible - we’ll figure out how to make sure native solo re-stakers don’t pay any fees to use our AVS services.

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u/superphiz:

I don’t encourage anyone to participate in Eigenlayer restaking because of their stated intention to onboard all validators (that’s a form of network capture), but if you DO use Eigenlayer and need to delegate your LSD tokens to a node operator, I’d really encourage you to choose Aestus.

Aestus is made up of two long time members of /r/ethfinance, /u/austonst and /u/KuDeTa. In all of my interactions with them I’ve found them to be working in the right directions.

https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator/0x30eafe8869a1528660a97b7a7e8e2d0037dcb922

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So on the EVM call last Friday I went on a rant for a few minutes after JT read my doot. It’s so good I’m literally just cleaning it up and transcribing it here:

FHE is complementary to zk-proofs. Zk-proofs say that I did the calculation honestly. We can prove something like I calculated 4+5 honestly and you don’t have to go and rerun it yourself to get the answer to that. FHE can be used for many things outside of AI but it’s especially valuable for things like DePin.

For example Biometric Authorization. When you want to take your thumbprint or eyeprint and use that as an authorization mechanism. You don’t want to give someone your decrypted eyeprint. Today, without FHE, we encrypt your data in transit so the people in the middle can’t get it, then we decrypt it on the receiving side, and then the person on the receiving side now has your decrypted eyeprint and can basically just impersonate you. There is fundamentally trust with whomever is the processor of your data.

With FHE, we can give you an encrypted eyeprint, they can check that your eyeprint is actually you, without knowing it’s you. They don’t have something that can be reused. So they can do authorization without you leaking your public data.

The same thing would be true if I was in healthcare and wanted to make health predictions about you. If I know it’s you and you give me all your health data what am I going to do? As a centralized provider I’m going to take that data, I’m going to jot it down, and then I’m going to sell it on the data market to some health insurance companies so they can jack up your rates.

As a user, I want the output of the LLM that tells me what might be wrong with me without the processor of the data being able to jot it down and sell it maliciously against me and add that extra monetization. The same thing would be true in a lot of places. It should be true throughout all of web2. This should explode and become mandatory in certain environments where privacy should be sacrosanct. But in DePin especially, because of permissionless compute, I can’t even just say I trust Amazon. I have no idea who the processor of the data is and due to market forces it is going to devolve into the most malicious operator who is able to extract the most monetization out of the data they steal.

So for DePin to be applicable to any area where there is the remotest sense of secrecy or privacy we need to be able to do calculation on an untrusted operator and both prove that they did the calculation honestly (zk-proof) and that they didn’t have access to the underlying data (FHE). So you put these two technologies together and you get something that can eat into the margins of centralized compute providers like AWS in a significant way.

To put their margins in perspective, a P5 instance on AWS right now is $92 an hour. I can buy that machine for about $350k. At $92 an hour that’s over $800k a year, Amazon is making over 200% APR on the investment of the machine. There is an extraordinarily huge margin there and the effect of that is that the highest grade of compute we have isn’t democratized and therefore the apps that require that grade of compute are increasingly being centralized into a few tech oligarchs.

Due to the compute requirements, this basically translates to AI. So we’re seeing brick wall around AI being built every time we add another parameter to the LLM. Chat GPT was 1.5B parameters; it takes about 13 gigs of video ram to hold and use the model. Chat GPT 4 is bigger. We’re going to go to a trillion parameters. We’re going to get to a point where you need to have hundreds of gigs of video ram just to serve on the model and that’s not going to be accessible to the average person. The average person isn’t going to buy a half million dollar machine from NVidia. We need to be able to provide that high end compute to them at a lower margin than AWS is charging.

That is both an opportunity and a moral imperative of Defi and Depin. We need to make the compute required to access the technologies we are pioneering more democratically accessible before they become permanently locked behind brick wall and only accessible to a few tech oligarchs and used in their most extractive possible way against humanity.

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Today’s Bankless discussion came at the perfect time. I had just finished reading u/AElowsson ‘s analysis and I think I understand more clearly what’s really at stake (heh) here. I have to admit my initial reaction when I read the proposal was pretty negative, so in order to help others make up their mind and also keep track of all the arguments that I see, I’ve made a list of the pros and cons as I’ve understood them, and explained them as simply as possible. If there are any more that you can think of and ELI5, I’ll be happy to add them to the list.

Pros of issuance change:

• The network stability benefits from an optimal number of validators, as it’s more difficult for a huge number of validators to effectively attest blocks fast enough.

• The ETH that remains in circulation is not superseded by LSTs, which apart from having smart contract, centralization and rugpull risks, make the LST a proxy for ETH. As a result, ETH does not lose its “moneyness” in the eyes of its users.

• Non-stakers benefit immensely from an issuance reduction. Currently, non-stakers benefit from the burn by having an effective ~0.5% APY, and at the same time, stakers get >3%. However, as more ETH is staked, non-stakers end up not benefiting at all as more and more rewards go to stakers, who at a minimum will be getting 2% at 100% ETH staked.

• The more ETH is staked, the harder it will be to implement this change. This is due to several reasons, most important of which is that big staking providers have a huge incentive to block it. Lido has already come out in favour of ALL ETH being staked and wanting as much of it to be stETH. What would happen in a post-staked ETH ETF world, when BlackRock lobbies against implementing a change to issuance?

Unclear if issuance change will be a pro or a con:

• It is not clear how this change will affect the dynamics between solo/hobby stakers and huge staking services. On one hand, there’s definitely a limit where solo stakers would exit, and if the staking pools manage to profit though other means, the APY could be very negative and drive all solo stakers out. On the other hand, a market optimized APY leaves less space for staking pools to get a cut of the profits, and if solo stakers eventually have all the ways to profit through other means as big pools, they might be more resistant to low APY. Personally, I would keep a validator up even at half a percent APY, but would not keep my validator up at, say, -5% APY.

• Fewer ETH staked means less economic security for a network that aims to secure trillions of dollars of assets. However, those fewer ETH can end up having more economic value in the long term due to a more robust and valuable network, so the end result is not immediately clear.

Cons of issuance change:

• Changing the issuance again will lead to huge amounts of FUD, and ETH losing some of its “moneyness” due to the belief that the EF can unilaterally change the monetary supply.

• It’s definitely not good optics at a time when the SEC is investigating and will be pretty bad for our hopes for an ETF.

• The issuance can and probably will need to be changed again. The main reason is that there are economics we simply do not understand, like the effect restaking will have on the amount of ETH staked. Also, the amount of validators might go down significantly with EIP-7251 (max-ETH per validator), leading the network to require more validators to be sufficiently decentralized. Finally, there are ideas for future updates that, if implemented, will significanly alter the economics of ETH. MEV-burn is one frequently discussed here, but the Anti-correlation Penalties for validator attestations, which in my understanding disincentivizes big staking providers by implementing heavier penalties when lots of validators lose an attestation at the same time, will most probably also affect the number of validators and the staking pool-solo staker dynamics.

—Personal opinion below—

So here is my view now: I am still mostly on the fence regarding the immediate (see:Pectra) issuance curve change, but at the same time I want to come out in support of an eventual change of the issuance curve towards one where staking much more than 50% of the supply is heavily disincentivized by negative issuance.

The main reason for this is that most of the disadvantages of changing the issuance are short-term troubles, and won’t have any effect on the long-term longevity of Ethereum. I’d rather see the project succeed and change the world, than make a bit more money for a year or five. “I’m in it for the tech” might be a meme, but it’s also the best way to analyze long-term investments, and it would be much easier for me to leave a project that has ossified before being finished, than it would be to leave because the price dumped. Changing Ethereum’s issuance will not only make it a more robust network, but also better money, especially for smaller holders that cannot stake.

ETH needs to keep changing for the better, so don’t sacrifice the future to the present. That’s what Bitcoin did, and apart from the fact that it will have huge issues eventually, it ended up being only a shadow of what it could be.

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u/nothingnotnever

Ethereum

u/Equal-Jellyfish1

0.04895

u/Zeebrasurfer

$3275

u/usesbinkvideo

89,835 hodlers subscribed (+13)

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The meme franchises,

Stupid games with stupid prizes,

Down turn surprises.

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You know the old saying: “Buy ETH on April Fool’s Day, $8000 by end of May”.

Don’t ignore it this time.

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So a couple of days I asked if the EF wants to kill or at least tame restaking. I relistened to the UCC episode and here’s my understanding.

Restaking is not restaking. At least in the case of Eigenlayer (and I think for now its fair to assume Eigen will be 80%+ of the restaking market) technically any asset could be used as collateral. Just because right now it’s validators via eigenpods or staked ETH via LSTs doesn’t mean that’s the endgame. Actually pure ETH, USD or even other tokens could be used to secure the AVS. This seems to play an important:

If the AVS really requires the restaker to be a validator then the plan is to “smoothen” rewards, which likely (!) means that MEV spikes will be captured and burned/ redistributed. Even though they didn’t mention this I guess something like based sequencing where the validator sequences the L2 could be one of these cases. The goal is to make sure big entities aren’t in a better position to capture value than solo stakers.

If the AVS is just secured by capital provided, but the security is not connected to a validator and could be done by someone with USD and a computer, then that’s a different story.

I still have many questions…

• How does the protocol even know restaking happens?
• Apparently rewards are streamed directly, how can it be captured?
• What is captured/ how is “MEV” defined?

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I’m a big fan of the work that /u/hanniabu and EthStaker (/u/nixorokish) have done with https://ethstaker.cc/incidents to document Beacon Chain incidents in a publicly aggregated way. I think this is awesome for transparency and accountability.

I was brainstorming ways that it might be improved, and I think it could be helpful to convert this page to a table and include a severity scale. Here’s an idea what that might look like, and I think it would be awesome for other people to take that apart.

I’m never good with these scales, I wonder if the most severe incidents should have higher or lower incidents. This example is ranked with lower severity = lower higher number. I also think it’s good to leave room for a 10 point scale and realize that there may be shuffling over time.

ALSO, I think it may be useful to indicate that different events can trigger the same level of severity, as I’ve tried to illustrate below.

Note that this is a very first draft and it would need a ton of editing by others to be useful.

Beacon chain incident severity scale:

Minor

Severity 10 - Minority client issue that caused that client to miss attestations, participation above 95%, no missed slot.

Severity 9 - A client or multi-client issue causes participation to drop between 85% and 95%, no more than 1 consecutive missed slot.

Severity 8 - A client or multi-client issue that causes participation to drop between 66% and 85%, no more than 1 consecutive missed slot.

Medium

Severity 7 - A beacon chain consensus or execution client becomes a majority client (greater than 66% use)

Severity 6 - more than 1 consecutive missed slot; or any entity exceeds 33% of validators

Severity 5 -

Major

Severity 4 - Any entity exceeds 50% of validators

Severity 3 -

Severity 2 - No transactions were processed on the beacon chain for < 1 hour

Extreme

Severity 1 - No transactions were processed on the beacon chain for > 1 hour; An entity exceeds 66% of validators

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To monetise their infrastructure, relays need a performance edge - which they can’t possibly maintain if everything is open source. So to some extent, competing at all necessitates competing in private. At the moment, ultrasound are running a fee delta / bid adjustment experiment in which they try to capture the difference between the highest and second highest bids - effectively depriving the validator of it. By doing so, they can take a fee - but also break some of the natural resilience of the mev-boost system - as bids are now unique to their relay. As i understand things, they also have a closed source rust implementation of the relay codebase, and have done some work with reth to try and improve bid simulation performance (vs geth). Those are the broad strokes, and you’ll see that they do open source some of their core thinking.

Frankly, it’s very difficult to work out exactly who is running what code, and what is clear is that none of the relays (including Aestus - though all our code is opensource) are vanilla MEV-Boost anymore, except Flashbots. /u/benido asked me elsewhere if this can’t also be seen as a “good” thing. Judge for yourselves based on the recent incidents. I would much rather find a way to incentivise relays (until we can get rid of them entirely) such that they want and need to work together. An upfront fee is probably more healthy. However, we should also face facts: the validator set is pretty mercenary and convincing Coinbase, LIDO and others to e.g. only use open source relays seems unlikely to happen.

To make matters even more interesting, we seem to be entering the early stages of a race to compete on timing. Bloxroute proudly boast they are making validators who sign up to their gateway an additional 6.4% of MEV income. Where does that come from? The next proposing validator (not using their service). I haven’t managed to get to the bottom of whether other relays (including US) are yet doing this, but i wouldn’t be surprised if they are.

I’ve spent time with people from across the MEV (relay/builder/searcher) ecosystem at various events, and i want to underline that while it’s somewhat tempting and human to try and reduce this to a question of individual/entity behaviour or ethics, threatening everyone with the ethereum police really misses the point entirely. The incentives are broken and the competition increases fragility. Don’t hate the player - hate the game.

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Another update!

After y’all crushed my app for planning your exit strategy, I used the weekend to get it on a proper hosting plan.

It’s live on kollit.ai now!

Thousands of people entered in a matter of a day, i utterly speechless and so greatful you guys found my app useful!

For the folks who missed it:

I made an exit strategy planner using game theory. It’s called Kollit - you call the prices, enter your risk tolerance and a few more optional things and the app will spit out an exit strategy that mathematically minimizing your total regret, be it regret of selling early or regret of waiting for a higher price that never comes. I think it’s really cool and im super excited to hear what you have to say! If you have any questions or suggestions please dont hesitate :)

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Here is a long-form “EIP research post” on my reward curve with tempered issuance.

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u/impliedpotential3497:

There shouldn’t be any significant issuance or monetary policy change unless the issue is something so obvious and objectively agreeable or existential already. The reasons for any significant changes to issuance now seem to be for highly subjective reasons. The threat to centralization comes much more from some central body trying to tweak monetary policy, not from the market, institutions, individual users, and the broader ecosystem naturally figuring itself out. Even if only a small percentage of ETH is in circulation in the future then so be it… Anyone drumming up ideas for changes to monetary policy right now should rather maybe consider simplying user experience for solo stakers or try to educate the masses on holding or using ETH the hard asset. Even advocating to LST’s and the like to follow some kind of better defined framework would be a better approach. There are so many other ways to address subjective issues like the ones being brought up imo. Monetary policy changes are like the absolute last resort.

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u/KuDeTa:

There are good arguments on both sides of the issuance debate. I don’t, however, believe consistency of monetary policy is a good argument in favour of doing nothing. It’s naive to imagine we could have ever designed the yield curve correctly the first time around, given MEV, LSTs and restaking had yet to appear. It would therefore be hubris to suggest that any changes we make now will ever be considered final, given all the unknown unknowns. Crypto just moves too quickly. The capacity for evolution and adaptation is a core strength of the ethereum community and we should embrace it to stay ahead of the competition.

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u/asdafari12:

Some things I believe are true. I could be wrong on some.

• The large validator size is growing quickly, in part thanks to Eigenlayer, and it is becoming a huge problem for the clients to handle. This is the main reason the EF wants to limit issuance.
• The current reward of 3% is not enough to encourage solo stakers, let alone half of that, which is what the new EF proposal would mean.
• Solo staking is too difficult. Since I started early 2020, not much has changed (officially). It’s still the same arcane terminal commands + you now “have” to run MEV boost too. Ethdocker seems awesome, I trust the guy that made it but would have liked to see something more “official” and ideally at staking release rather than two years later. I think it would have had better penetration.
• More should have been done to incentivize solo stakers financially. More could have been done as well. We have seen airdrops to solo stakers and even incentivized smoothing pools.
• The community is overall fine with how much ETH we pay to validators today and our issuance. We even have deflation.
• I mostly trust the EF to know better but I don’t want anything rushed, this shouldn’t come in the next fork imo. Earliest is like a year, but then it looks to be too late in regards to slowing the validator growth rate, we need something now.

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u/pa7x1:

For me this is the best take on the issuance reduction so far: https://warpcast.com/orangesamus.eth/0x7668549c

My thoughts on issuance reduction:

To target < 100% staked ETH you assume:

• There is some yield “x%” where the market finds it irrational to take on the risks/opportunity costs of even delegating to someone else to stake
• Issuance curve is chosen such that we cross below x% before we get to 100% staked ETH

The problem is that I think:

• There is also some nominal yield “y%” that makes it irrational to be a solo or home staker after you get any lower than y%

And until you find a way to make solo/home staking more competitive relative to centralized alternatives:

• y% will always be greater than x%

So I think the worst case scenario is the one that we get an issuance curve that leads to:

• crossing below y% (no longer rational to solo/home stake)
• And even worse: we are still > x% even at 100% ETH staked, meaning we didn’t accomplish our primary goal, and our validator set is highly centralized

Even if we choose a good x% and land at less than 100% staked ETH, we could still end well below y% and our validator set may end up highly centralized.

I’d rather Ethereum “over pay” for a robust validator set in the short term, than “under pay” and end up without a robust validator set

I think we should prioritize research to make decentralized staking more competitive, like ideas shown below:

• https://ethresear.ch/t/how-optional-non-kyc-validator-metadata-can-improve-staking-decentralization/17032
• https://ethresear.ch/t/supporting-decentralized-staking-through-more-anti-correlation-incentives/19116

If solo staking equilibrium yield is lower than pooled staking equilibrium yield. Then we must overpay issuance to ensure solo stakers can exist, otherwise the network will become strongly centralized.

Another argument on top of this one, whatever the optimal issuance curve is (if there is even one), we must approach it from above. Because if we overtighten we will end up having to raise issuance. And this creates a very bad precedent that will likely erode any monetary credibility Ethereum may have.

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A limitation of permissionless execution for as long as I’ve been around has been that everything is necessarily public. We use mixers on occasion to obfuscate fund movements but the underlying program and underlying data for smart contracts is always public. If there’s a chain adjacent service like an Oracle, everything about its function is public. If I wanted to use a smart contract or a keeper to serve some data for me conditionally on authorization I end up having to use a centralized service at some point to issue a decryption key. Otherwise whomever wants the data could simply join as a data provider, download everything, and then exit without paying for the data. The root problem is just that if a system is permissionless then it can’t be entrusted with secrets.

This has become an acute pain point for AI x crypto applications recently. We can’t use DePin to train on private data or to serve answers from private models. However, there’s some math magic just on the fringe of development at the moment that could blow this space open: zk-proofs + fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)1.

Here’s an ELI5: I want you to add two numbers for me but I don’t want you to know which numbers I’m adding. Let’s say I want the answer to 1+1. So I add a secret number known to me but not to you to each input, let’s say 3 and 4, and I give you the problem 4+5. You calculate 9. To get the decrypted answer I just subtract the sum of the secret numbers in my input from your answer: 9-(3+4)=2. This looks silly in the reductive case but makes a lot more sense as the number operators (+, -, *, /) and operations in the calculation grows. Today, there are workable FHE encodings that can support any combination of multiplication and addition on an encrypted space. This is promising because as it turns out neural nets are nothing but a very large combination of simple arithmetic operations…

Hence a FHE encoded neural net can potentially be run on DePin infrastructure while protecting property rights to the underlying model. Once we see some of the initial projects like zama, privasea, and based.ai prove out this concept and it becomes more widely understood the full applications of FHE in crypto are going to be huge. I highly suggest Rabbit Holing on this one for a few hours.

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The startup I work for just shipped https://www.rdatadao.org. Without sharing my own opinion or involvement, I’m curious what impression it leaves you all with…

Warning: It was realized this also exports your DMs.u/dondochaka is bringing this up with the team.

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u/fatsopiggy

Ethereum

u/2peg2city

$3570

u/2peg2city

0.07

u/bagogel12

561 days since The Merge

u/usesbinkvideo

89,770 hodlers subscribed (+4)

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Jailed FTX bro,

It’s six halving in a row,

Raise and fall below.

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

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Is “you don’t have enough points” the new “you don’t have enough ETH”?

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Hey guys. As a genesis solo validator, I would like to share with you the reasons why I oppose the increase in block size at the present time.

1. It is pointless. We are not going to attract new users or new use cases by simply reducing fees for a very limited time. No one is going to consider using Ethereum because a transaction costs $4 instead of $5. I understand it is annoying to hear the same complaints over high fees over and over again, but those complaints are not going to be tamed with a fee reduction that would anyway last very little. As an example, the last hard fork has indeed reduced fees on L1 more or less on the same scale that a block increase would do, but almost no one noticed.
2. It is not sufficiently tested and could be dangerous, especially for small validators. When reasons for increasing size are cited, reference is usually made to disk size, but other more important factors for small operations are bandwidth, data-rate limits, computational capacity or ram installed. Increasing the block size increases resources and could expose small validators to spam attacks that cause them to lose their turn and thus allow an attacker to steal rewards or MEV from them.
3. It could hurt L2 scaling plans. The last hard fork allowed Ethereum L2s to start competing with more centralized alternative L1s. However, even with 3 blobs per block the tps we are seeing are very low with respect to for example Solana, whose transactions per second are close to 1000. An increase in the number of blobs can be very significant to achieve equivalent capacity. This improvement, in contrast to a limited increase in block size, can indeed attract new users, developers and use cases, since the chosen L2 could offer the same tps as L1 alternatives, but with the added security provided by the Ethereum network, as well as compatibility with existing tools and ease of development. In short: the space we would lose by increasing the block size in a rush might be needed in the future to increase blob capacity.

Therefore, I think this is not the right time to increase the block size. I think we should wait until Ethereum L2s have reached a point where they can compete with alternative L1s in terms of capacity and the cases where complex blocks can cause small validators to miss blocks have been thoroughly tested and eliminated.

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I recently read Polynya’s latest blog, which reminded me of how grateful I am to be a part of this group. X is nothing but a shitshow; Farcaster looks promising, but the conversation is fragmented. The only place where the comment-to-quality ratio is high is here, with a wholesome bunch of strangers discussing the whole ecosystem and offering help without prejudice. It’s a rare find in the current market, especially now that meme mania seems to be leading the charge.

Even beyond this group, some fellow members have offered their guidance and support. MinimalGravitas, my dude, if it weren’t for your kind words, I would have left the DAO in ‘22. Do you know, a fellow member even offered me their NUC, its up and running. Every time I look at it, I forget the gloom I see elsewhere, it gives me hope. This motivation to run a node, even if it’s non-staking, was inspired by Nixo’s tweet. Not directly, but Logris has taught me valuable lessons through his well-explained comments. Whether on vacation or gone camping, no worries, Tricky got you covered with doots when you’re back. Benido and Hanni have written extensively on different topics, from DAO to LST to client diversity. And the list goes on… all that without an expectation of any financial return.

Sometime we take things for granted or we are unaware of impact of our action but not today, today I want to show my gratitude and thank you all for contributing to this forum. Even if I have nothing to say, I ready the daily and learn something from it and I am greatful for that.

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L2beat.com does an amazing job at explaining the trade-offs in detail. L2s are definitely not web2 technology. In fact, it’s so novel that they are still being built, that’s why they have some amount of training wheels and safety guards at the moment.

The first thing to observe is that you can give up decentralization for an L2 as long as some protections are guaranteed to the user programmatically. It’s OK for a rollup operator to run the rollup themselves, it may even be permissioned, it may even be censored. And that’s OK as long as you can always escape hatch with your assets to the L1. And the analogy I would use here is that this is the exact same thing that happens with private businesses. A restaurant doesn’t have to serve you, they may reserve the right to not have you as a customer sometimes for trivialities like dress-code. A web forum may ban you. And that’s fine because you can go anywhere else. If you are unhappy with the rollup you get your stuff and go somewhere else. Your fundamental rights are preserved in the public space, the L1 is the public space. And the L1 is permissionless and censorship-resistant so you can be sure there will be somewhere else to go.

Here is an example of how this works in Arbitrum: https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/arbitrum#risk-analysis

Sequencer failure Self sequence

In the event of a sequencer failure, users can force transactions to be included in the project’s chain by sending them to L1. There is a 1d delay on this operation. Proposer failure Self propose

Anyone can become a Proposer after 6d 8h of inactivity from the currently whitelisted Proposers.

Even if Arbitrum went for the ultimate censorship, turning off their rollup, you would be able to use the L1 and escape hatch.

Bitcoin maxis have been parroting a never ending stream of FUD arguments for years, systematically being proven wrong and when that happens instead of recognizing their mistake they move to new FUD arguments. Facts be damned. I would recommend updating your bayesian priors taking their track-record into account.

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I am dealing with internalizing the hate toward Ethereum, but am also trying to prevent myself being blinded by my own bias.

One trap that people often fall into is refusing to acknowledge any scenario where their beliefs, convictions, or ideals could ever be “wrong”.

As a result, I am compiling a list of things which would indicate to me that I was wrong about Ethereum. That Ethereum was a failed experiment doomed due to irreparable flaws. Of the 4 listed here, any one of the first 3 coming true I think would be enough for me to concede the “death of ETH”.

1. Unresolvable security vulnerabilities causing finanacial losses, undermining trust in Ethereum’s security model. This could include supermajority bugs causing a chain split, or repeated successful attacks against the network.
2. If Ethereum’s development or governance becomes heavily centralized, contradicting its ethos of decentralization.
3. A breakdown in the Ethereum community, whether due to internal conflicts, disillusionment with the project’s direction, or a mass migration to other projects, could severely impact the development and support of the platform.
4. To a lessor extent, I would also concede that regulatory actions against Ethereum specifically, or decentralized platforms in general, could be a huge blow to ethereum’s vision as the settlement layer for the world’s finance and uninteruptable web3. I say this would prove ethereum’s “failure” in my mind to a lessor extent than the other scenarios I listed here, because even if the governments of the world put aside their differences to all agree to attack ethereum or restrict it, ethereum would never truly die. It would simply go underground. It would be vastly less profitable, but it would not disappear entirely.

For myself, and hopefully some of you here who are deeply invested in Ethereum’s success, these scenarios would likely need to be demonstrable, systemic, and irreparable to convince us that Ethereum was a failed experiment.

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What you think about Vitalik 5 year time-frame for Ethereum to prove its ready for mainstream real world adoption?

https://thedefiant.io/vitalik-says-ethereum-must-achieve-mainstream-adoption-within-five-years

Despite the cc subreddit pushing a negative narrative, it seems like Vitalik is actually bullish.

“I expect Ethereum to be a very leading player in helping to make stablecoin accessible to people in a way that actually is open, actually is decentralized, and actually doesn’t require trusting fragile third-parties.”

Also, improvements to be able to run a node (not sure if validators but probably) without the need for a lot of storage space. zk-SNARKs would help us move from our staking rigs to just a phone/very light processing on a computer.

“With Verkle Trees, as a node, you would not have to store the state locally. And with EIP-4444: History Expiry, you would not have to store most of the history locally,” Buterin said. “The amount of data that you would need to be a node would decrease from multiple terabytes to… being able to run a node in RAM.”

“In the long term, running a node will feel like… a few very simple computations that will be very easy to do as a background process on any computer, maybe even a phone, even inside a browser,” Buterin said. “There’s a pre-existing technology roadmap to get to that point.”

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With EIP-7251/MaxEB coming I was curious why the beacon chain did not launch this way in the first place. It has an interesting backstory.

From the EIP itself:

The limit on the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE is technical debt from the original sharding design, in which subcommittees (not the attesting committee but the committee calculated in is_aggregator) needed to be majority honest. As a result, keeping the weights of subcommittee members approximately equal reduced the risk of a single large validator containing too much influence. Under the current design, these subcommittees are only used for attestation aggregation, and thus only have a 1/N honesty assumption.

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u/asdafari12:

maxeb is now planned for the next hard fork. This will remove the 32e max limit for validators, greatly reducing bandwidth consumption for stakers. - eric.eth https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1770836409848332554

Will maxeb really reduce bandwidth greatly? Only if the whales with thousands of validators actually consolidate to big validators instead of many small ones, something that is yet to be seen. You could argue that they don’t want to have 3200 ETH validators as the impact of a bug would be 100x bigger. It would lower Ethereum protocol risk though so should be in their best interest.

It seems unlikely to me that we will lower the number of validators by 50-75%, which is what I would consider greatly reducing consumption. More likely we will drop by some 10-30%, so not really making a big difference in terms of bandwidth.

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u/interweaver:

This is almost certainly referring to attestation subnets.

For each validator a solo staker has (up to 64), they have to subscribe to a new attestation subnet, with all the gossip and increased traffic that causes.

If that solo staker consolidates their validators under maxEB, they could go back down to a single attestation subnet, reducing bandwidth usage significantly.

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On my LinkedIn feed I saw that Paul Brody just got appointed as Chairman of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Curious as to what his plans are to speed up enterprise adopotion.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pbrody_enterprise-ethereum-alliance-announces-new-activity-7175838502155079680-idgW

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Just wanted to amplify u/_WebOfTrust post from 2 days ago… what an awesome community this is. I am a relatively late comer into the community.

Thank you all for consistency sharing your knowledge with internet anons like me. I’ve learnt more from this sub than any other place on the internet. I literally got a job offer because I dove into MEV because of the daily doots posts about it consistently throughout the past few years (I didn’t take the offer in the end).

Your selfless sharing has consequences, and I my career trajectory is one of them.

Other than that this year has been transformative for me career-wise (got back in the crypto industry after a stint in fintech) and personally as an artist (did my first solo exhibition yay!). Going to ETH Denver for the first time and meeting u/jtnichol and other folk was the most wholesome experience I’ve had in a long long time.

I work on consumer side of crypto, specifically in games and 99% of the ppl are talking about the casino/degen aspect of crypto, I think they are firmly in the camp of “it’s just how it is” , and perfectly captures what polyna’s sentiment that

“this evil in crypto is banal and normalized. This has become the identity of crypto - sure, some useful stuff, but mostly just infested with scams and absolute degeneracy.”

Despite the mis-aligned incentives, greed, grift in the space, I don’t see any other system that can even attempt to fix the problems we face at scale. I don’t know what the answer is, but I believe it starts with places like ethfinance, that can influence the culture of the ecosystem.

I also finally got my EVM today yay.

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It’s not a topic I look at much, or one that I plan to spend much more time on, but I spent my morning trying to fill in some knowledge gaps about execution layer clients this morning. Most of you guys rely on supermajority.info, but obviously there are some unknowns since not all proposer sets have publicly stated their client usage (Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bitcoin Suisse, etc.).

The idea is that even though most blocks are built through PBS, every proposer still has a small share of locally built blocks (min-bid reversions, network latency delaying payloads from relays, local blocks being more valuable than PBS if there isn’t much MEV during the block, etc.) and for those subsets of blocks we can look at the extra_data encoded on-chain to tag what clients proposers are using.

Part of the issue with this methodology is that besu and erigon don’t actually embed extra_data so the field is blank, and at the same time there are some MEV builders who try to stay anonymous and don’t embed data, so we can only cleanly tag geth and Nethermind, and then we need to check vs off-chain MEV data to see if the empty data blocks are from anonymous MEV builders or from one of besu/erigon.

On top of that, there’s occasionally been MEV builders using the Nethermind tag that briefly crop up. I think this is just from misconfigurations because they go away pretty quick, but it adds a bit of noise to the data. Basically the methodology is a bit of a mess.

As a quick summary:

• Binance is 100% geth.
• Kraken seems to use multiple execution clients but tagging what share is kind of hard. Could be 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 or maybe 1/2 geth, 1/4 nethermind, 1/4 besu or erigon.
• OKX is majority geth. They seem to use a bit of Nethermind (and maybe a little bit of besu/erigon), but the counts are really low. OKX is a pretty reliable proposer, so they don’t have many local blocks.
• Bitcoin Suisse is 100% geth.

The data is here for anyone that wants a peak:

https://hackmd.io/@dataalways/execution-layer-diversity

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The CFTC refers to ETH as a commodity in their KuCoin complaint.

On the same day, courts side with SEC on the staking issue in Coinbase case.

Meanwhile, Fidelity files S-1 form for spot Ethereum ETF with staking included.

Within 24hrs, Larry Fink says on Fox News that if ETH were designated as a security, that wouldn’t be deleterious to the approval of an ETF.

Perhaps spot ETH is a commodity (CFTC regulated), but staked ETH is a security (SEC regulated).

Prediction: Staked ETH ETF approved before spot ETH ETF.

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Where are people going to be the next few weeks? Is there some way to share where we will be?

I’m headed to:

• Bucharest - March 30/31 - EthBucharest/Romania
• London - April 16-18, EY Blockchain Summit
• Dubai - April 19,20 —> Token 2049
• Dubai - April 20th —> How To DAO
• Brussels - July 8-12 - EthCC
• New York - Sept 30-Oct 2 - Messari MainNet
• Bangkok - November 11-16 - DevCon

Who am I going to see where?

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u/FrenktheTank

Ethereum

u/usesbinkvideo

89,714 hodlers subscribed (+11)

u/TimbukNine

$3517

u/alexiskef

0.0528

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Good code for your peers,

Great discussions and some beers,

Blockchain pioneers.

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

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I wish the ETF passes and gets pushed down all the haters throats like bad medicine.

In May, when SEC nods in grace,
ETH ETF takes its rightful place.
Skeptics scowl, in disbelief they stare,
As Ethereum soars, slicing through despair.

“Impossible!” they cried, their words so cold,
Yet forward moves the future, bold.
Their doubts, like shadows, quickly flee,
As ETH ascends, for all to see.

The haters cope, their voices dim,
Against the tide, their chances slim.
For in this dance of digital fate,
Ethereum’s rise, they can’t abate.

So let them cope, let them despair,
While Ethereum’s light fills the air.
For in the end, it’s clear to see,
The SEC’s nod sets Ethereum free.

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It might have gone under in yesterdays daily, but u/KnowNoShade posted a very interesting link about the new fee structure on Optimism and why they had such a huge reduction in cost after the Dencun hardfork. Blobs alone could not have reduced the fees by that much. What optimism did in addition was that Optimism started to consider priority fees in their fee calculation. The base fee can be close to 0 and optimism still makes enough money through the priority fee. Optimism does not directly subsidize transactions, but the way they calculate the transactions and set average gas usage for the base fee to increase it essentially means that the actors which pay a high priority fee are indirectly subsidizing the fees for the other users. And apparently there are enough users paying a high priority fee which makes OP chains still profitable. Quite interesting to be honest. According Ryan Berckmans tweet OP Mainnet and Base still make enough money through priority fees. I am not sure if this is also true for Zora as I would expect not too many people pay a priority fee there, I might be wrong there though. Overall, I think it is quite interesting how Dencun now has kicked off a rollup fee competition. Apparently arbitrum will also improve their fees soon.

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Few more ARB DAO updates beyond what I brought up a few days ago, more personal to what I’ve been up to if anyone is curious. (As well as open to feedback before I go ‘live’ with one of these items).

Late to the party, but ARB did release their 2023 Transparency Reporting (https://docs.arbitrum.foundation/foundation-documents#transparency-reports). If anyone wants to give it a read there is some good things too look at, although I will note page 11 might be my favorite :). And please note that 100% of the work was done by Questbook, I was just there becase I posted it to Tally / Snapshot. Just having a “LeonardoDeCapriopointsatthetv” moment.

I’ll admit this sort of came up in January and then I got busy so it got pushed aside once Feb rolled around, but I’m probably going to start working towards it now that I have the time… I’m going to try to get some of ARB’s council election processes standardized. More info here (https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/rfc-create-a-standardized-guideline-for-non-security-council-elections/20915). Basically, these different councils have elections and the process isn’t very standard as different people are running the programs each time. I think that detracts from how effective these elections can be. My thought is that a minimum there is a lot of community support for “Shielded” voting (results hidden until completion). So I’m hoping at least that will get support, as I’m breaking it our into three categories:

- Mandating certain election types be used to avoid common pitfalls with less effective voting methods.

- Mandating “Shielded” voting, as there are too many ways to game the election if results are public as they go along.

- Mandating some type of minimum period for applicants to apply for roles to ensure we can get the best possible field possible.

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u/Sparta89:

Solana fees have spiked and are currently ~4X higher than most L2 fees. The Solana low fee narrative is dying.

Solana average fee (24 hours): ~$0.048

Optimism/Starknet average fee (24 hours): ~$0.01

Sources:

• https://solanacompass.com/statistics/fees
• https://l2fees.info/

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u/pa7x1:

And with some very rough numbers L2s may scale 3x their use of blobspace without even raising the blob fee. Currently the network is averaging 1 blob per block. So until it reaches 3 or more blobs per block there won’t be actual pressure on the blob fee. https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs

According to l2beat the L2s did yesterday 133 tps. A factor of x3 will place it around 400 tps. Solana seems to do around 500 tps. https://realtps.net/

With this rough numbers Ethereum seems to have beaten in scalability Solana. Can manage same order of magnitude tps but cheaper. But unlike Solana it has an actual roadmap to keep scaling:

• Blobspace can be increased trivially and it will be increased when demand is there.
• With some tweaks to calldata pricing we will likely increase gas space very soon because the current gas limit is very conservative.
• Blobs have already reduced around 33% the state growth rate. And stateless Ethereum is in the works.
• Full danksharding provides a credible roadmap to scale tps by multiple orders of magnitude.

All that without having to give up on decentralization.

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I saw a presentation at EthDenver that used a mock dapp from the future, showing what the UX would be like if we had the complete roadmap. In this case it was for buying and selling cars and had assumptions baked in like digital identity, smart wallet, etc.. I really like these types of demos and would be cool to see more. This is the video I’m talking about: https://youtu.be/TrLbTglwzXg

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“Decentralization” is a complicated term. In crypto we usually see the system as decentralized based on criteria like “how many nodes have to collude to censor the system” or “how many nodes need to be taken out for the system to fail” or “how difficult it is for a single entity to take over governance”. But there is a more traditional meaning for decentralization, a pre-digital one, which defines it not as a large system but many local ones and this is where blockchain has some shortcomings.

I am on this subreddit for the blockchain ideologies that resonate with me (and ma bags, of course). But I would also say that being “all in” is not great. Take Bitcoin maxis. The idea that all the complexity of expression and exchange of value should be scorched and replaced by a single system derived from a single limited resource (which at the onset has every uneven distribution) to me is nothing short of fascist. That idea is despotic and anti-human in the sense that it deprives us (you know, the people who are supposed to be benefitting) from the ability to decide how we want to express human relationships.

Now fans of smart contract chains (say Ethereum) are not Bitcoin maxis at all. Smart contracts are foundation for building any kind of system on top of it. In case of Ethereum experimentation and possibility of human expression (new forms of value, new forms of organization, new forms of interaction) are at the core of the ethos. Yet a blockchain network is still a single system, with one governance, with one limited-supply token, requiring electricity and internet, insecure and with potential middlemen. That said I think what is actually a corollary to Ethereum ethos is cherishing of the good meat-space things - not everything needs to be onchain, digital has security limitations, organization comes in many forms, non-digital governance is important.

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High level summary

1. We listened to our community and increased our token allocation by over 10M tokens, representing an additional 1% of total supply
2. For Season 1, in total we’re giving away 68M tokens, representing 6.8% of supply
3. The average size of airdrop each user received was 575 tokens, the median was 175 tokens
4. The largest allocation was for approximately 3M tokens, this individual deposited $480M during the Final Countdown campaign
5. Deposits during the Final Countdown campaign resulted in an increase of 7.7M tokens for everyone else!

Season 1 Token Allocation: 90% to stakers 6% to partners 4% to Early Adopters (fan NFT Holders and EAP participants) Stakers received a proportional share of the 90% (59M tokens), the distribution was linear but skewed in favor of smaller stakers Bottom 50% of wallets contributed 1.8% of TVL and received 18% of token allocation Top 10% of wallets contributed 88% of TVL, and received 65% of token allocation Eligibility Rules: What were the rules to be eligible? Anyone who earned more than 1000 points or more from staking 1,000 points was equivalent to staking 1 ETH for 1 day, or staking 0.1 ETH for 10 days Holders of fan NFTs received 430 tokens for each NFT Participating solo-stakers in Operation Solo Staker received 4200 tokens Badge holders and referrers received boosted allocation Specifically who wasn’t eligible? Users with less than 1000 points from staking activity, (i.e. if a users points came entirely from badges, they didn’t get an airdrop) Users who didn’t not transition out of the EAP

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Appears to be wallet running an “address poisoning” scam:

Scammer -> new wallet -> victim

The scammer sends a small amount of eth dust to a newly created wallet, which sends it to the victim. The new wallet W* is created to have the same first and last four characters in the address as an address W the victim transacted with recently.

The idea is that the victim in a future transaction copies the target address from the transaction history and because of the address similarity takes the scammer-controlled wallet W* instead of the legit wallet W.

Good catch!

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SEC absolutely got bodied here. It should help with ETH ETF filing, I would think. I am sure SEC doesn’t want another embrassment

https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1769835308559032608

“For the reasons explained below, the court imposes sanctions against the Commission for bad faith conduct in obtaining, maintaining, and defending the TRO, and denies the Commission’s Motion to Dismiss without prejudice to refile in accordance with the District of Utah’s Local Rules.The Commission’s above-discussed conduct constitutes a gross abuse of the power entrusted to it by Congress and substantially undermined the integrity of these proceedings and the judicial process.”

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A quick HOP governance update. Although honestly it’s a pretty light one as ultimately most votes over the last few months have been fairly standard DAO things. To run through a quick list (https://snapshot.org/#/hop.eth):

• Vote “For” operational items - Community Multisig Refill (3), retroactive pay for moderators and renewal of the delegative incentivization trails
• Vote “For” AMM Incentives to new pairs that came to the HOP DAO to align with incentives provided to other pools
• Vote “For” exploring treasury diversification. It’s been sort of a ‘everyone agrees, but not much has gone forward’ situation but I’m hoping as a broad concept for some diversification. As I don’t think DAOs should be expected to have their treasury 100% allocated in their specific token.
• And Voted “For” creating a new ‘head of the DAO’ role. The goal being to have someone who helps keep the DAO moving instead of relying specifically on the good will of delegates to take on projects. Such as running the bi-weekly calls, for example. I think this will help with some of the stagnation the DAO has seen of late.

I’ll also share that I’ve been heading HOP’s application for the upcoming 12 week ARB grant program. Me and two other delegates that assisted with this just submitted our finalized application located here. The goal is to subsize bridging fees to Arbitrum, as well as incentivize AMM pools, over those 12 weeks. Decision pending council / DAO vote, but I was really happy how it came out. So I have my fingers crossed.

Which, btw shout out to u/seamonkey82 as you’ll notice a link to a certain ARB forum actually works now :)

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Ya’ll we’re in before BlackRock 🥂

“JUST IN: BlackRock launches digital asset fund and deposits $100 million $USDC on the Ethereum network.”

https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1770177665099596282

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Eric and Mariano starting an awareness campaign to increase gas limit from 30 to 40mn.

Gas limit can be increased in a coordinated and rational manner by validators. It doesn’t need a hard fork.

This is the exact amount that Vitalik suggested during an AMA last year

How much gas limit can we safely increase now? and after Verkle?

Honestly, I think doing a modest gas limit increase even today is reasonable. The gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years, which is the longest time ever in the protocol’s history (that 2x bump in the chart in late 2021 is “fake”, in that it reflects the EIP-1559 transition, which increased the “limit” by 2x but only increased actual average usage by ~9%). And so splitting the post-2021 gains from Moore’s law 50/50 between increased capacity and increased ease of syncing/verification would imply an increase to around 40M or so.

Long overdue and Godspeed!

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If this drop bothers you, I potentially have bad news for you. Well, not really, but if we are really just at the start of a bull run, similar drops at higher USD values might make you sick… So prepare mentally for crazy stuff that will happen. Some random numbers to showcase the things we might be witnessing:

Disclaimer: Everything that follows is based on the assumption that your whole portfolio is in ETH and that we basically went from 4k to 3k (which, at least until now, we didn’t, but we also peaked slightly over 4k, so 25% is as good as it gets). You’re probably a little diversified, so your port value fluctuates a little differnet. Just pretend it is 100% ETH!

If you have:

• 25 ETH = 100k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 25k in a week
• 50 ETH = 200k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 50k in a week
• 100 ETH = 400k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 100k in a week
• 250 ETH = 1M USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 250k in a week

Good news: 1 ETH = 1 ETH, but from my experience from the last cycle it’s the USD value that hurts.

Bad news: If this is just the start of a bull we might 2.5x from 4k to 10k or even 4x to something like 15-16k. This is great, but a 25% drop will hurt even more. With ETH = 10k USD

• 25 ETH = 250k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 62.5k in a week
• 50 ETH = 500k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 125k in a week
• 100 ETH = 1M USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 250k in a week
• 250 ETH = 2.5M USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 625k in a week

or with ETH hitting 16kish

• 25 ETH = 400k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 100k in a week
• 50 ETH = 800k USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 200k in a week
• 100 ETH = 1.5M USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 375k in a week
• 250 ETH = 4M USD a 25% drop like this cut your USD portfolio by 1M in a week

Now why am I posting this? I know I can’t really prepare you for these scenarios. You probably will have to go through these to really understand what this means. Also let me tell you I have no idea how I will feel if we hit 10k or 16k and drop 25%. May 2021 (basically down only from 4k to 2k within 2 weeks and even below 2k within 2 months) killed a lot of emotions and changed me long term I think. But if you just joined in the last 2 years, you should try to play through some scenarios and get used to losing a lot (USD) value in a short amount of time.

And while I am at it… Think about how you would feel if we hit 15k and then the bear hits and we go down 75% :)

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u/ETHdude8686

Ethereum

u/HITMAN616

$3889

u/usesbinkvideo

89,573 hodlers subscribed (+11)

u/domotheus

0.058161

u/bagogel12

540 days since The Merge.

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There’s none his kin,

Tokens can’t do the talkin,

A dead man walkin.

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Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray that Wall St. will pump my ETH. But even if the ETFs should fail, I know and I trust in good ol’ retail.

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u/clamchoda:

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

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Finalization

I’ve just been learning more about finalization and had a few ah-ha moments that made me very happy. I figured I’d share them here and also ask anyone to check my thinking.

Finalization is not some magic 2/3 number, where an almost finalized block just needs to get over that hump of 2/3 of the validators attesting to it and then it’s safe. It’s just a line that we’ve chosen to define and say “here’s a good bar to meet and we can say the block is “finalized.”

So what is it and why does it matter?

The beacon chain chooses one validator at random to propose a block in each 12-second slot of the blockchain. That validator is the only one who can propose a block, and they can only propose one block. If they propose more than one block for the same slot, they get slashed and force-exited as a validator.

The interesting thing to note here is that an Ethereum block reorg only has two possible outcomes: the proposed block or an empty block. That differs from Bitcoin, in which reorged blocks contain different transactions and were proposed by different miners.

Anyway…blocks are only validated by a fraction of the existing validators, as each validator only attests to 1 out of every 32 blocks. This is a way to keep Ethereum nimble, as requiring each validator to attest to each block would bog down the network.

However, at the end of every 32 block section (32 blocks is an “epoch”), there is a block called a “checkpoint.” When a validator casts their 1-out-of-every-32 blocks vote, they also cast a vote attesting to the last checkpoint. When a checkpoint garners attestations from 2/3 of all validators in existence, that checkpoint (and every block before it) is considered “justified.”

And when two checkpoints in a row are justified (which naturally takes at minimum of two epochs or 12.8 minutes), the oldest of the two justified blocks is considered “finalized” along with every block that preceded it.

So why is this important? Because of the double vote slashing offense.

Each validator can only vote one way per block. They can’t change their vote, or a double vote slashing occurs. When a validator is slashed, they lose around .5 eth and are forced-exited after a certain amount of delayed time. This time delay allows the protocol to see who else is being penalized around the same time period. If there are many slashing offenses, the protocol assumes they were colluding to attack the network, and the slashing offenses start to get angry and impose an additional penalty. It’s important to understand the formula for this additional penalty. It’s:

validator_balance * 3 * fraction_of_validators_slashed

In other words, if you’re the only offender, your additional penalty is negligible. However, if at least 1/3 of the other validators were also slashed around the same time, you lose all of your stake. (This is one reason that it’s so stupid to be running a super majority client, but I digress).

So let’s look at this in terms of a justified block. Most conservative case:

A block is justified because exactly 2/3 validators have attested to it (and the other 1/3 haven’t voted yet). In order to get reorged, 2/3 + 1 validators need to attest to a different block in that slot. We’ll, 1/3 of validators are still free to vote, but to get the other 1/3 + 1 validators, 1/3 + 1 of all total validators will need to cast a second vote. They can do this, but they’ll get slashed. And a quick look at our handy formula above tells you this will result in a total slashing event of all of these validators’ shit.

And if it’s this costly to change a justified block, imagine how difficult it would be to reorg a finalized one. The details get a little tricky here for me, but I believe it would require over 2/3 of all validators losing all of their stake. Right now, that’s $73 billion dollars worth of security. Not only would the benefit of coordinating this attack have to be worth more than $73 billion, but the attacker would also have to corrupt over 2/3 of the decentralized validators of Ethereum. That last statement is the reason that decentralization matters in Ethereum, and why home stakers are soooooo important. Ethereum needs to be able to withstand a full on moloch attack worth all the money that will ever be settled on top of the chain. Since we like to think that’s the entire world’s economy, the value of the eth securing the network by validators will only take us so far. Decentralization does the rest.

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i made a ‘my bull case for Ethereum’ post in r/cc if any of you are interested, or have any corrections :D

somehow i spent 2 hours on making that post LOL! Also posted on eth subreddits but check out the r/cc one ;)

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To help validators with the upcoming hard fork, I improved my open source Validator Updater so everyone can easily update their validator in under a minute!

Detailed instructions can be found on the Ethstaker post, quick summary below.

Note: The updater is adapted from Somer Esat’s guides, and saves the updated binaries to /usr/local/bin. If you have a different setup, you can move the binaries to your desired location after download.

Validator Updater Summary:

1. Select Execution Client: (Besu, Geth, Nethermind)
2. Select Consensus Client: (Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku)
3. Update MEV-boost? (Yes/No)
4. Click “Update”

That’s it, updates process in the terminal and you can be back online before missing a single attestation!

Feel free to check out my other open source Ethereum projects:

Validator Install - Install a full validator from fresh Ubuntu in minutes
Client Switcher - Instantly switch execution clients to improve client diversity

All code is open source but has not been audited, so any testing/feedback is always appreciated.

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A Prysm dev forked my code!

I wanted to share my story in case anyone here is considering contributing to Ethereum and isn’t sure how to get started.

So to start, I’m not a programmer. I was the “Excel guy” at the office because I knew how to do vlookups. I started dabbling in VBA and eventually wrote a macro to take an Ethereum address and lookup the balance using Etherscan API.

One day while updating my validator, I decided to try a Python script rather than copy/paste the 10 commands. I ran the script and was shocked it actually worked. I slowly added more clients and eventually created the validator-updater.

I figured if I could write a script to update, maybe I could write a script that took commands from Somer Esat’s guides and create a full validator-install script.

It took a few months, but I finally got it working. I decided to create a Github account and share on Ethstaker. People responded positively, but no one actually wanted to run it (would you trust your 32 ETH to a random script on Github?)

It was pretty disappointing to know I created something that made staking 100x easier, but no one wanted to run it. I made updates, added clients, but in the end it felt like I was screaming into the void (props to u/superphiz for saying he liked my project and encouraging me to continue working on it).

Eventually u/nixorokish at Ethstaker reached out and said they liked my initiative and wanted to send some DAI as a thank you. Once that DAI hit my wallet I remember thinking I made it, I’m officially on the Ethereum payroll!

A few months later, I got a notification that someone created a pull request on my repository. I went to investigate and noticed it was Preston Van Loon (Prysm dev) fixing a typo in my validator install code. Pushing the merge button made me feel like an actual developer.

He also forked my repository, which means it’s now hosted on his Github. That was a major boost to my confidence and Github street cred.

u/hanniabu reached out and suggested adding a keystore import to the installer. I worked up a few changes and he graciously reviewed the code and provided valuable feedback.

As the client diversity stuff became popular, I created client-switcher to help people switch execution clients with a single click. It was well received and multiple people reached out saying they were able to successfully switch to a minority client.

Recently u/coincashew forked my code and created their own one line installer, mentioning that because of my code they were able to write the whole thing in a single day. People were actually building off my code, and the idea of open source started to make more sense.

So what’s the point in writing all this? I’m not really sure. I spent years as a silent observer of this sub, so decided it’s finally time to share my story and maybe inspire someone to start that project they’ve been thinking about.

This hasn’t been very lucrative financially, but it’s nice knowing I’ve contributed to Ethereum and made staking a bit more accessible. Not sure where it goes from here, but I’m cleaning up the code in hopes to eventually have it audited.

Thanks to everyone who provided guidance and encouragement. This really is a special corner of the internet, and I’m happy to be a part of it!

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Be careful, someone is address poisoning transactions pretty efficiently. I sent some ETH from wallet A to a new wallet B, and after the transaction went through, someone sent me a dust amount of ETH to wallet A. The scammer’s address has the same first 4 and last 4 characters as wallet B. Now I have to be really careful not to accidentally send anything to the scammer’s address.

Its alarming because of how quickly they did it, being able to brute force a vanity address with 8 matching characters, fund it, have the txs go through within a minute.

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Free idea: a few years ago, someone told me they’d like to see a Nobel Prize equivalent for Ethereum, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The chain will turn 10 years old in ~18 months, which seems like great timing for this! It gives enough time to make it happen properly, too 😄

- Tim Beiko

I really love this idea and could see it being something that EthFinance and/or the EVMaverick’s spearheaded.

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Hi guys, I am currently building a little website, mostly to improve my typescript and next.js skills. I am a backend dev trying to get more into frontends for a while, partly because of my job.

I wanted to come up with an educational page about ethereum gas and L2s. The main points I want to bring across are how gas cost is not the same for every transaction, but depends on the type of transaction and especially the gas limit. Also I wanted to cover L2s and have an interactive option to compare the gas prices between L1 <> L2 (so far only mainnet and arbitrum)

There is a lot of confusion among newcomers about these topics, and maybe a website like this will help someone. I know there are similar pages, but as I said I mostly needed an excuse to build something haha.

Check out my prototype here gashighdontcry.net

Mobile view works but is not optimized yet.

While working on it I noticed that the arbiscan api always returns 0.1GWei for the gas price, so that part is kinda static, but afaik there is no better way to estimate arbitrum gas.

When you have ideas for more content, or notice bugs or whatever let me know!

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Pretty incredible to be closing in on $4k again after 2 years. Cheers to the folks who stuck around in the daily, I wasn’t as active as I was in 2021/22 but I still read it almost every day.

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Rocket School now Live! EVMavericks ManeNet DAO + EthStaker + Rocket Pool - Class Is In Session!

💓♻️ https://twitter.com/ProDJKC/status/1765032313962811697

https://nitter.net/ProDJKC/status/1765032313962811697

📺 https://youtu.be/uue49JOSqjg

https://therocketschool.xyz/

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Reminder:

Dencun will activate on the Ethereum mainnet at epoch 269568, occuring on March 13, 2024 at 13:55 UTC. Node operators & stakers must upgrade their software to releases listed in this announcement.