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1088 Dooters - Last Updated September 27, 2024
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#80: September 27, 2024
Special guest Mark Richardson joins us from Bancor to discuss Carbon DeFi, an automation tool for onchain trading.
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fqg5x4/comment/lp52uhf/)Ethereum
$2645.30
0.04053 grandpas
90,891 hodlers subscribed! (+8)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fowp6i/comment/lox9j95/)Caroline got two,
Crypto market bumps into,
Sam is a crook too.
Shitpost of the week: u/KotMyNetchup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fowp6i/comment/louw7x3/)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 😔
u/Tricky_Troll celebrates being on the receiving end of the EthFinance community's incredible generosity
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1flvgzu/daily_general_discussion_september_21_2024/lo624a0/)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.
u/BuyETHorDAI reviews the Ethereum film
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1flvgzu/daily_general_discussion_september_21_2024/lo9bg72/)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.
u/haurog covers some big Pectra changes
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fncsy5/daily_general_discussion_september_23_2024/lohnj3l/)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
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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.
u/benido2030 starts a discussion about decentralised sequencers for L2s
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fo4r11/daily_general_discussion_september_24_2024/lonpou1/)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?
u/pa7x1 makes an observation about the supply and demand of blockspace
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fo4r11/daily_general_discussion_september_24_2024/loppxf9/)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.
u/PhiMarHal covers a bit of a brick wall for hobbyist developers
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fo4r11/daily_general_discussion_september_24_2024/loqy6yd/)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
-
"generate contract metadata" ticked on in Remix IDE
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get the giganormous hexadecimal .json in artifacts/build-info folder
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crop its contents to keep just the "language", "settings" and "sources" bits
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on the block explorer verification page, use Solidity Standard-Json-Input in the compiler type dropdown panel
-
It Just Works.
The world is saved. Praise Vitalik. Praise all of you. I love you all. Good night.
u/nick_badlands rambles about where we are this cycle
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fl4c68/daily_general_discussion_september_20_2024/lo4i1s5/)"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 :)
u/haurog brings a write up expanding on the disconnect of knowledge on a recent podcast
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fowp6i/comment/lotrw6t/)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.
u/superphiz says good bye to Danny Ryan(for now) through the help of POAPs
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fpojgj/comment/lp0pocq/)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.
u/LogrisTheBard has some thoughts on EigenLayer's security model
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fowp6i/comment/lox135m/)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.
#79: September 20, 2024
Special guests Nick, Wander, and Rhett join us from NodeSet, a node operator incentivization layer.
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fl4c68/comment/lo0924m/)Ethereum
$2539
0.03987
90,873 HODLERS SUBSCRIBED (+6)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fjkzpm/comment/lnsx49j/)Know where you belong,
Interest rates bang a gong,
Ether sings along.
Choda time!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fkd3pr/comment/lnwlwim/)༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Shitpost of the week: u/MinimalGravitas
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fhwp53/daily_general_discussion_september_16_2024/lndwkzz/)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.
u/benido2030 digs up a ZKSync delegate mystery
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ffmt2l/daily_general_discussion_september_13_2024/lmwbgz5/)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:
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Stani (from AAVE): 9M in August, 45M in September
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Baki Er: 12M in August, 61M in September
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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?
u/HSuke covers the SEC backpedalling
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fgelps/daily_general_discussion_september_14_2024/ln1uf9v/)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.
u/DoubtStarsAreFire has a Hodlercon 2 update
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fgelps/daily_general_discussion_september_14_2024/ln1t1sg/)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.
u/ethmaxitard shares u/domotheus's write-up on an alternative reality where we went all-in on L1 centric scaling
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fhwp53/daily_general_discussion_september_16_2024/lnddzuc/)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
u/hanniabu lists off the upcoming EthStaker community calls
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fhwp53/daily_general_discussion_september_16_2024/lngknef/)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
u/haurog covers the continuation of the trend of Google getting into crypto
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fjkzpm/daily_general_discussion_september_18_2024/lnpeo9y/)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.
u/LogrisTheBard does a deep dive on managing risk
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fjkzpm/daily_general_discussion_september_18_2024/lnt7p9q/)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.
u/vedran_ explains a new protocol which leverages ZK Proofs with identity
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fjkzpm/daily_general_discussion_september_18_2024/lnps1qu/)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.
u/benido2030 makes a good point about hardware wallets and u/haurog builds off their comment.
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fkd3pr/daily_general_discussion_september_19_2024/lnv4luq/)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.
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.
u/Ber10 explains why the ratio matters
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fjkzpm/daily_general_discussion_september_18_2024/lnr0t2r/)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.
u/Tricky_Troll made some cool new user flairs
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fhwp53/daily_general_discussion_september_16_2024/lnitff3/)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.
#78: September 13, 2024
Special guest Jason joins us from Puffer Finance, a liquid restaking protocol.
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ffmt2l/comment/lmvu2es/)Ethereum
$2347.90
0.04056
90,849 hodlers subscribed (-1)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1feun79/comment/lmtuzby/)Beating up the polls,
Not giving up owner roles,
ZK among goals.
Choda time!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1feun79/comment/lms19kz/)༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Shitpost of the week: u/Wurstgewitter
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fbq2nu/daily_general_discussion_september_8_2024/lm37s8b/)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.
u/Ethical-trade spots the theme in the EF Dev AMA questions and expresses caution
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f9ef5k/daily_general_discussion_september_5_2024/lllo8ra/)Most popular questions in the EF AMA right now:
- Value accrual thesis
- Lowering blob fee?
- Driving value to eth
- 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.
u/haurog introduces us to EVM Object Format or EOF
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f9ef5k/daily_general_discussion_september_5_2024/llleobx/)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.
u/nixorokish shares the next step in her crypto journey
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fcho6q/daily_general_discussion_september_9_2024/lmbwesp/)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
u/superphiz has been doing some thinking about fundamental constructs and u/LogrisTheBard also shares his thoughts on the matter
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fcho6q/daily_general_discussion_september_9_2024/lm9dlb6/)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.
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.
u/imaybeslow explains the things they want to see Ethereum revolutionising
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fcho6q/daily_general_discussion_september_9_2024/lmckiov/)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.
u/imaybeslow explains the things they want to see Ethereum revolutionising
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fcho6q/daily_general_discussion_september_9_2024/lmckiov/)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.
u/696_eth rounds up the last weeks in EVMavericks
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fda31e/daily_general_discussion_september_10_2024/lmg0e2o/)EVMavericks Weekly Recap (Sept 2-8)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!
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Degen chat covers NFTs and what's worth buying, some airdrop potentials. Pooltogether and their insane APR are discussed.
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bbroad is leading the way in applying for grants. This time it's gitcoin+octant community round.
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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
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Farmers talk about blobs, Monad, elixyr, Eigen and more.
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A new member - moonie.eth - joined EVMavericks this last week.
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New EVM multisig election is on the horizon. We are in need of signers!
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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!
u/alexiskef covers a genius NFT heist
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fe29xd/daily_general_discussion_september_11_2024/lmomzq4/)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.
🔥
u/Tricky_Troll wants to keep it wholesome in here
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fe29xd/daily_general_discussion_september_11_2024/lmoqcvh/)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).
#77: September 6, 2024
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1fa76dn/comment/llr4mgm/)Ethereum
$2380.90
0.04217
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f8l3t3/comment/llj3q1u/)Go where you belong,
Knock your chest and sing along,
Apes together strong.
Shitpost of the week: u/NeedlerOP
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f4n4q0/daily_general_discussion_august_30_2024/lko8jdv/)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
u/CaptainLoud decided to build a cool little app
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f3uche/daily_general_discussion_august_29_2024/lkhqgln/)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!
u/696_eth started a new EVM series
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f4n4q0/daily_general_discussion_august_30_2024/lkriq80/)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.”
u/JebediahKholin highlights 3 issues for ETH this year
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f4n4q0/daily_general_discussion_august_30_2024/lkp52q3/)It seems like ETH has 3 big problems this year.
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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.
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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.
-
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.
u/HSuke recaps Vitalik's impromptu AMA
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f5fiqc/daily_general_discussion_august_31_2024/lkus89q/)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.
u/iscaacsi motivates us to do stuff while we're feeling down
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f5fiqc/daily_general_discussion_august_31_2024/lkxs0gz/)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 🐙
u/Ethical-trade explain why blobs are down but transactions are still up
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f66n0f/daily_general_discussion_september_1_2024/lkz7awh/)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.
u/cryptrd285 doesn't see much space for competition
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f66n0f/daily_general_discussion_september_1_2024/ll2qd0o/)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
u/696_eth brings us the EVMavericks weekly recap
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f6yl0k/daily_general_discussion_september_2_2024/ll7tsxu/)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.
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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!
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696 hosts a new series: get to know EVMavericks. First episode with Etheraider is out now.
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GreenGeorge starts a thread asking lions about one project that really excites them.
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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.
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Degen chat has a little bit of everything this week. Some base mints, some random stats, some talk about Maker, some memes ofc.
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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!
u/wolfparking reminds us of the upcoming Ethereum Foundation AMA
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f7rrbo/daily_general_discussion_september_3_2024/llcn0b7/)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
u/Kallukoras dodged a bullet and starts a conversation about risk
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f8l3t3/daily_general_discussion_september_4_2024/llgh79n/)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.
u/defewit also discusses risk taken on for a yield, but this time compares centralised vs decentralised yield
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f8l3t3/daily_general_discussion_september_4_2024/llgvbe0/)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.
#76: August 30, 2024
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f4n4q0/comment/lkmjc4s/)Ethereum
$2516.30
0.0425
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f29003/comment/lk8goc3/)Storage can't go bloat,
Blockchain should not be a moat,
Accept that banknote.
Shitpost of the week: u/
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1exh5g5/daily_general_discussion_august_21_2024/lj7lmtx/)Vitalik ETH bull post lol
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1826253901240431083
Edit: it will be hilarious if this marks the bottom
u/krokodilmannchen shares Vitalik's actual — not a shitpost — bullpost
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eyb1rd/daily_general_discussion_august_22_2024/ljcvok0/)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.
u/nagus 's Ethereum thesis has remained and strengthened since 2016
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ez4fxr/daily_general_discussion_august_23_2024/ljnmoik/)- 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.
- 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.
- Market liquidity from rate cuts and dxy tailwinds incoming - send it.
- Regulatory environment outlook in the world's largest economy is looking better than it has ever been.
- 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.
- 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.
u/18boro shares links to contribute to trials of Roman Storm and Aleksei Pertsev (tornado cash)
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ez4fxr/daily_general_discussion_august_23_2024/ljlefwk/)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
u/abcoathup Eight year anniversary of Week in Ethereum News
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ezxfho/daily_general_discussion_august_24_2024/ljo3p4t/)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.
u/Vinegar_Strokes__ Shares some critical moments in Ethereum's history
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f0opjz/daily_general_discussion_august_25_2024/ljx3saz/)I thought this article was a pretty good read.
Give it a click if you want some content.
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
u/Ethical-trade is fighting misinformation about Ethereum in other subs
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f0opjz/daily_general_discussion_august_25_2024/ljwn4nj/)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.
u/696_eth is brining back the EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 19-25) and encourages us to join in the vibes on discord
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f1g6p2/daily_general_discussion_august_26_2024/lk2lfpg/)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.
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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!
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If any mav is going to Permissionless and needs a place to stay - dm coco on discord.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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!
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Our creative lions ain't sleeping neither. TheBenMeadows dropped his first Gamma print.
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Our ETHFITNESS thread has been revived. That's for all the ETH heads who are trying to stay fit 💪
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We had a mini sweep and a total of 4 buys last week.
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!
u/eth2353 shares some exciting new validator client news
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f29003/daily_general_discussion_august_27_2024/lk523rf/)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!
u/haurog covers the Maker rebranding and u/Stobie discusses the controversial part
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f29003/daily_general_discussion_august_27_2024/lk6hqhi/)Makerdao rebrands as sky. The protocol is now sky protocol. You can swap MKR to SKY tokens, but you can keep your MKR if you want.
A new stablecoin called USDS is created it can be swapped from/to DAI 1:1. Not sure how long this is possible. DAI can still be used. The protocol gets officially launched on September 18.
USDS seems to have built in SKY rewards. SKY tokens will be distributed to USDS holders/protocol users.
More info on: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/sky-has-arrived/24959
Really curious how this relaunch will turn out in the coming years.
EDIT: As announced, the new USDS has a freeze function which makes it similar to USDC adn USDT: https://xcancel.com/functi0nZer0/status/1828432650152935605
Seems strong negative initial reaction to makerdao and dai upcoming upgrade, largely because it has a "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.
u/Detroitlions81 reflects on the Ethereum experience
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f29003/daily_general_discussion_august_27_2024/lkaaqjs/)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.
u/pa7x1 speculates on future blob demand
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1f31zal/daily_general_discussion_august_28_2024/lkbmqp8/)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.
u/superphiz shares the Guardians of the Ether upgradable NFTfor solo and home stakers
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ez4fxr/daily_general_discussion_august_23_2024/ljjmocf/)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.
Huge shout out to u/equal-jellyfish1 for filling the gaps as our Substidooter! It truly allows this amazing service to maintain longevity and much deserved breaks for our resident troll
#75: August 23, 2024
No Livestream | No POAP
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ez4fxr/comment/ljhzqpy/)Ethereum
$2651
0.0438
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eu9s49/daily_general_discussion_august_17_2024/limjxod/)Ether atmosphere,
Validators stand to steer,
No trust paint to smear.
Choda time!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1exh5g5/comment/ljb1q1g/)༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Shitpost of the week: u/15kisFUD
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1esmtac/daily_general_discussion_august_15_2024/liaylfi/)ETH price getting you down? Want to channel your inner Reno007? Post about it here in the daily of my new sub /r/ethwhinance!
u/eth2353 has the latest on Ethereum consensus timing games
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1esmtac/daily_general_discussion_august_15_2024/li7xbe2/)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”.
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. )
u/HSuke reminds us to stay on our toes
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1etgdqq/daily_general_discussion_august_16_2024/lidbjc3/)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.
u/Dreth educates us on wallet security
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1etgdqq/daily_general_discussion_august_16_2024/lidnkcl/)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.
u/HauntedJockStrap88 is convinced that ETH's fundamental advantages will play out in time
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1etgdqq/daily_general_discussion_august_16_2024/lienfys/)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.
u/smidge explains why the new EZPZ crypto ETF is actually good for Europe
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eu9s49/daily_general_discussion_august_17_2024/lij61y5/)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!
u/696_eth recaps the week for the EVMavericks
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1evtl8k/daily_general_discussion_august_19_2024/liy2xto/)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.
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Some EVMavericks were onboarded to participate in Octant's rounds and help select various projects, thus contributing to public goods indirectly.
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Our farmers discuss what's hot, what's cold. Orderly (TGE is on 26th), Debrdige, Tari, Hyperliquid.
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Our quality chat is filled with talks about stocks and gold, what's underrated and why.
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Degen chat is not so degen nowadays. Discussions revolve around forms of money and the differences between real money and memes.
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And from the Twitter land, Batz shows his bullishness on ETH by referencing RatioGang website which is built by our very own InsideTheSimulation.
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We see a few nice sales as 930.eth picks up these cool looking lions!
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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!
u/MerkleChainsaw brainstorms a possible way to fight MEV and u/cryptOwOcurrency builds off this by drawing parallels to email
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1evtl8k/daily_general_discussion_august_19_2024/liwdb4d/)Would it be possible to defeat MEV with no protocol changes with smarter wallets?
- Validators could choose to flag that they will avoid MEV and randomize transaction order in their block.
- Their adherence could be observed by third parties and wallet providers to create a list of validators using and not using MEV.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
u/haurog educates us on staking with RISC-V chip architecture
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ewn8dw/daily_general_discussion_august_20_2024/lj2anr4/)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.
u/Bob-Rossi reminds us of the purpose of EIP-1559
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ewn8dw/daily_general_discussion_august_20_2024/lj2uzn0/)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.
u/Tricky_Troll covers the pragmatic approach to privacy which many apathetic people may miss
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1exh5g5/daily_general_discussion_august_21_2024/lj693g9/)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.
#74: August 9, 2024
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1enrae5/comment/lh89w8l/)Ethereum
$2662.54
0.043
90,771 hodlers subscribed (+2)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ejnbk4/comment/lgingg8/)It's a scarry chart,
Fundamentals outsmart,
It's merely a fart.
Choda time!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1emxgi7/comment/lh4exoe/)༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Shitpost of the week: u/EmpireStake
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ekfjb6/daily_general_discussion_august_5_2024/lgm77mw/)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.
u/PhiMarHal shares their experience at EDCON
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ei1pba/daily_general_discussion_august_2_2024/lg5jqfg/)(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.
u/pa7x1 speculates on future blobspace price and demand
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ei1pba/daily_general_discussion_august_2_2024/lg4xqgc/)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.
u/SeaMonkey82 has a warning for all validators
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ejnbk4/daily_general_discussion_august_4_2024/lgjezl6/)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.
u/MrCatFace13 shares a memo from Bitwise
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ekfjb6/daily_general_discussion_august_5_2024/lgnetn9/)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.
u/Dreth fact checks their own comment from a few days ago and u/pa7x1 also has some great input on the macro topic at hand
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1el99as/daily_general_discussion_august_6_2024/lgqvde3/)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.
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.
u/ProfessionalNoiseX opens up about their recent liquidation
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1el99as/daily_general_discussion_august_6_2024/lgqfz2w/)/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.
u/krokodilmannchen is getting flashbacks and shares his 2 wei
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1el99as/daily_general_discussion_august_6_2024/lgqobgg/)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.
u/NeedlerOP shares some reasons to be bullish
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1em3ca0/daily_general_discussion_august_7_2024/lgydx2j/)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
u/Tricky_Troll talks about mindsets after a setback
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1em3ca0/daily_general_discussion_august_7_2024/lgx301z/)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.
#73: August 2, 2024
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ei1pba/comment/lg3g000/)Ethereum
$3152
0.0489
90,748 hodlers subscribed (+1)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1egeu6r/comment/lg1dcv1/)Ignore politics,
Distrust their economics,
Store your mnemonics.
Shitpost of the week: u/Imelia29
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eer8s9/daily_general_discussion_july_29_2024/lfgd4ti/)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!
u/Itur_ad_Astra is strengthening their FUD busting skills
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ecfslx/daily_general_discussion_july_26_2024/lf17lnb/)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?
u/cryptrd285 thinks the ETF flows have been bullish so u/Caturday_Yet stopped by to see something big for themselves
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ecfslx/daily_general_discussion_july_26_2024/lf2bs7o/)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
u/LogrisTheBard has a warning for all Compound users
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eer8s9/daily_general_discussion_july_29_2024/lfjd5u5/)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.
u/HSuke brainstorms scam prevention techniques then like 2 peas in a pod u/Dreth shares a book chapter they wrote on avoiding scams
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eer8s9/daily_general_discussion_july_29_2024/lfigqox/)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:
- Be extremely careful with Google ad links.
- Also be careful with domain typo squatting. Entering "Umiswap" instead of "Uniswap" is all it takes to get drained.
- 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.
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
u/domotheus shares Song A Day Mann sticking it to the man
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eer8s9/daily_general_discussion_july_29_2024/lfiil3p/)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
u/AElowsson discusses the proper way to present home staker yield
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1efl096/daily_general_discussion_july_30_2024/lfo5bbt/)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.
u/ro-_-b has been on the Ethereum journey for a long time and is comfortable being here for a lot longer
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1egeu6r/daily_general_discussion_july_31_2024/lfsczq8/)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
u/MerkleChainsaw asks about the realities of tokenization and u/pa7x1 explains how they think tokenization will work
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1egeu6r/daily_general_discussion_july_31_2024/lfsuo87/)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.
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
u/SeaMonkey82 shares Erigon's ASCII art
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1egeu6r/daily_general_discussion_july_31_2024/lfvh0qk/)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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=@@@:....... @@ :+@#=. -@+ .......-@@@:
.:=++####*%@@%=--::::.. @@ %# %* :@* -@+ ...::---+@@@#*#*##+=-:
..--==::.. :%@@@- ..:::.. @@ +@*:.-#@@+-.-#@- -@+ ..:::.. .+@@@#. ..:-
.#@@@##-:. @@ :+#@%=.:+@@#=. -@+ .-=#@@@@+
-=+++=--+%@@%+=. @@ +%*=+#%- -@+ :=#@@@%+--++++=:
.=**=:. .=*@@@@@#=:. @@ :--. -@+ .-+#@@@@%+: .:=*+-.
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..=*#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@%%@@@@@@@@@@@@@@%#+-.
.:-==++*#######%######**+==-:
#72: July 26, 2024
Special guest Ryan McPeck joins us from Metamask.
Upcoming Guests
- August 2 - Amir & Jason from Puffer Finance
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ecfslx/comment/lezmdef/)Ethereum
$3247.62
0.0487
90,668 hodlers subscribed (+2)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e960uq/comment/lefsu3d/)Ether ten year old,
Outperform the bitcoins sold,
A story still told.
Shitpost of the week: u/etherbie
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e6vo0l/daily_general_discussion_july_19_2024/le12jxq/)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.
u/physalisx has a reminder for RocketPool operators
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e6vo0l/daily_general_discussion_july_19_2024/ldwdagp/)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).
u/Tricky_Troll needs some help brainstorming some flairs
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e7nt2y/daily_general_discussion_july_20_2024/le2sqzp/)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!
u/pa7x1 is out there fighting the good fight
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e8ely9/daily_general_discussion_july_21_2024/le7jj6c/)I have continued the "educational battle"/"fight the misinformation campaign" on /r/investing. It's really amazing how poorly Bitcoiners understand their own investment.
Here I explain that Bitcoin is, in fact, not unstoppable. On the contrary, it will stop itself in the year 2038 due to a time overflow bug. The fix to this requires a hard fork. The issue is that they have pinned themselves into a corner by making hard forks taboo. A hard fork is also what you need to change the issuance schedule of Bitcoin, if you fix this bug it would be implicit recognition that 21M is not a feature of Bitcoin code, but of social consensus and it can be changed through social consensus.
When you have been in this space long enough you understand that people that approached Bitcoin over a decade ago through an ideological lens, are not Bitcoiners anymore. Those that approached this space with the intent of removing the monopoly of money from the State and giving back the rights that governments had been eroding for decades from their citizens, have left and moved on to Ethereum. And likely this will remain the case for as long as Ethereum keeps fighting for those principles through math.
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.
u/HSuke teases their big post about blockchain resilience
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e8ely9/daily_general_discussion_july_21_2024/le96j60/)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:
- 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.
- 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.
u/betterluckythengood has a warning for ETHE holders and u/Brent_the_Adventurer educates us on how ETHE works
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e960uq/daily_general_discussion_july_22_2024/ledqmoy/)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.
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.
u/Dangerous_Coast just had a massive wake up call
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e960uq/daily_general_discussion_july_22_2024/leerbxm/)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.
u/phigo50 celebrates 10 years since the ETH ICO
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e960uq/daily_general_discussion_july_22_2024/lecutu3/)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 🦇🔊 :)
u/decibels42 thinks that the clock is now ticking
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e9zgce/daily_general_discussion_july_23_2024/lel5o9p/)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.
u/Revanchist1 poses an important bigger picture question
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e9zgce/daily_general_discussion_july_23_2024/lejxx4k/)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.
u/superphiz shares the ETH ETF POAP with proceeds going to a great cause!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e9zgce/daily_general_discussion_july_23_2024/leladtc/)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 :)
u/Tricky_Troll bumps an important call to action
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1eat246/daily_general_discussion_july_24_2024/leo361j/)Don't mind me, just bumping u/stablecoin's post from the end of yesterday's daily.
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.
#71: July 12, 2024
Upcoming Guests
- July 26 - Mcoso.eth from Metamask
- August 2 - Amir & Jason from Puffer Finance
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e199nr/comment/lcsil9p/)Ethereim
$3085.73
0.054
Day 666 since the merge.
290tps
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dvpzvb/comment/lbt3d1m/)Markets wind the clock,
Use cases filling the block,
An EthCC talk.
Choda time!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e0gtdv/comment/lcoar8h/)༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Shitpost of the week: Double Decker
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dwhu31/daily_general_discussion_july_6_2024/lbvk2m9/)Life cycle of an ETH holder:
- Suffer for 2 years of bear market thinking you're an idiot (you are, should've sold some)
- Euphoria for 1 year thinking you are literally the wolf of wall street (you're not)
- Cope for a 1 year in the early stages of the bear 'but actually it's consolidation' (it's not)
- Return to 1)
Source : my poor decisions
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
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.
u/VbV3uBCxQB9b has a CDP question and u/nikola_j jumps in with a great answer
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1du681u/daily_general_discussion_july_3_2024/lbfo16x/)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?
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.
u/superphiz shares a tweet thread on the disconnect between sentiment and fundamentals
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1duyoim/daily_general_discussion_july_4_2024/lbk8xyt/)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)
u/Bob-Rossi has a delegate update
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1duyoim/daily_general_discussion_july_4_2024/lbm2kb6/)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)
u/Itur_ad_Astra discusses Bitcoin, Ethereum, altcoins and moneyness
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dvpzvb/daily_general_discussion_july_5_2024/lbs70hi/)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.
u/SeaMonkey82 recaps the execution layer all core dev call
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dwhu31/daily_general_discussion_july_6_2024/lbuvi6i/)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.
u/Atyzzze speaks of scaling and waiting for price to follow
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dx8nwu/daily_general_discussion_july_7_2024/lc2mpyx/)200 sustained tp/s and still only 1-2gwei gas fees
we are severely over capacity
the infrastructure currently in place is able to support so many more users
it will destroy all shred of doubt whether or not blockchain can scale to support the entire world as it was intended to
the next bull run will be like nothing 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.
u/Vinegar_Strokes__ starts a conversation about how we all made our way to EthFinance and is met with some great replies
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dyu2vs/daily_general_discussion_july_9_2024/lcdez98/)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.
u/baggygravy covers some assorted home staker stuff then u/TheHansGruber continues the discussion on the staking ecosystem
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dyu2vs/daily_general_discussion_july_9_2024/lcdwii7/)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.
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.
u/pocketwailord snags the Bonus Doot! For their comment on the staking survey from ethstaker
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1duyoim/comment/lbk9kbk/)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.
#69: June 21, 2024
Special guest Brendan Asselstine joins us from PoolTogether, a protocol to win while saving.
Announcements
- 🎉 u/superphiz surpasses 200 daily doots! 🎉
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dkvydm/comment/l9knzvs/)Äh...thereum?
90,560 hodlers suhh...ubscribed (+4)
$3509
0.0544
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ddymob/comment/l8c4z8m/)Bridge in and bridge out,
An habit we must ditch out,
Intents will switch out.
Shitpost of the week: u/MrCatFace13
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1djb287/comment/l9a68vh/)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)
u/stablecoin covers a concerning bill amendment in the states
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1deqzov/daily_general_discussion_june_13_2024/l8frolx/)[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:
- 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.”
- @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).
u/domotheus used a cool tool to prevent someone getting rugged by a honey pot
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ddymob/daily_general_discussion_june_12_2024/l8an1hx/)https://honeypot.is/?address=0xd52456e8a33718f72ba38469539c082eb761f78b
POPCAT (POPCAT)
Honeypot DetectedRun the fuck away.
execution reverted: TransferHelper: TRANSFER_FROM_FAILED
The taxes on this token are extremely high. You will get significantly less from a trade than expected, be careful!
A very high amount of users can not sell their tokens. This is likely a honeypot.
all_snipers_honeypot
u/suburbiton explains why the long tail of assets hasn't pumped yet
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dfiz4n/daily_general_discussion_june_14_2024/l8jlorf/)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.
u/Ethical-trade looks at the difference in usage between Ethereum and Solana
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dfiz4n/daily_general_discussion_june_14_2024/l8kpagn/)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.
u/barthib is making sure you didn't miss all of the bullish news
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dgacad/daily_general_discussion_june_15_2024/l8p8mya/)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.
u/696_eth reflects on the ZKSync airdrop from a farmer's perspective
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dh06hm/daily_general_discussion_june_16_2024/l8u6eh4/)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
u/benido2030 shares our ZKSync delegates while u/_WebOfTrust discusses his delegation experience
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1dh06hm/daily_general_discussion_june_16_2024/l8vple4/)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.
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.
u/cryptrd285 shares the big W for the day
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1diimbq/daily_general_discussion_june_18_2024/l98r34t/)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.
u/haurog has a DevCon announcement
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1diimbq/daily_general_discussion_june_18_2024/l96k40y/)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$).
u/haurog summarises an article on why stakers sometimes miss attestations
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1djb287/daily_general_discussion_june_19_2024/l99u2wt/)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
#68: May 31, 2024
Special guest Chris, Jean-Paul, and Interweaver join us from Influence, a space-strategy MMO born from humanity's desperate quest for survival.
Upcoming Guests
- June 21 - Brendan Asselstine of PoolTogether
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d4nq7l/comment/l6fnp4q/)Ethereum
$3755.67
90,496 hodlers subscribed (no change)
0.0548
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d3w6lh/comment/l6e3pss/)One you can't ignore,
Gas burns like never before,
Still Ether candour.
Shitpost of the week: u/Tom_The_Moose
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cyksus/daily_general_discussion_may_23_2024/l5aupvn/)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 🍻
u/Ber10 shares some thoughts in light of the ETF approval
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cyksus/daily_general_discussion_may_23_2024/l5engzh/)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.
u/haurog stumbled upon a cool tool for some exploit victims
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cyksus/daily_general_discussion_may_23_2024/l5ag1w4/)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.
u/2peg2city speculates on proportional ETH ETF flows and u/15kisFUD has more on this in another thread
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1czcy7e/daily_general_discussion_may_24_2024/l5gnlco/)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:
Purpose Investmets:
Evolve ETFs:
3iq:
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
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.
- You lose staking yield.
- 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
u/unthinkablecryto shares an anecdote and personal project update
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1czcy7e/daily_general_discussion_may_24_2024/l5ft4h0/)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.
u/Dreth warns us about a scam going around
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d04f4i/daily_general_discussion_may_25_2024/l5n1j6h/)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.
u/barthib shares a post stating institutions will pick reality over narrative
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d0u05z/daily_general_discussion_may_26_2024/l5ps985/)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.
u/Sparta89 made an EthFinance appreciation post
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d1jvid/daily_general_discussion_may_27_2024/l5w66s8/)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.
u/Ethical-trade has a grounded take on the Mt Gox repayments
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d2bjkm/daily_general_discussion_may_28_2024/l61hrwl/)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.
u/domingo_mon introduces us to upcoming Ethereum upgrades, EOF and PeerDAS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d1jvid/daily_general_discussion_may_27_2024/l5wosh1/)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/
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.
u/mango_sake has been fixing their exit strategy app and will be in need of some alpha testers!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d2bjkm/daily_general_discussion_may_28_2024/l5zgxwq/)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!
u/labrav discusses how supportive policy makers need to of crypto to get funding from industry lobbyists
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d348qt/daily_general_discussion_may_29_2024/l6a1e4u/)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.
#67: May 24, 2024
Special guest Anthony Bertolino joins us from Obol, an ecosystem for trust minimized staking that enables people to create, test, run & co-ordinate distributed validators.
Announcements
Upcoming Guests
- May 31 - Chris/Jean-Paul/Interweaver of Influence
- June 21 - Brendan Asselstine of PoolTogether
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1czcy7e/comment/l5fi24y/)Ethereum
$3804.56
0.056
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cyksus/comment/l5dyfa0/)A commodity,
Programmable oddity,
Ether quality.
Choda time!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cyksus/comment/l5b9pmt/)༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Shitpost of the week: u/Tricky_Troll
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cwzy5i/daily_general_discussion_may_21_2024/l4zt4h8/)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.
u/Belligerent_Chocobo shares some reason for optimism
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ct57il/daily_general_discussion_may_16_2024/l4cjk33/)Okay you debbie downers, here's some small bits of optimism:
-
Article highlighting growing tokenization push by TradFi, this time in the form of a pilot project involving some TradFi heavyweights (bonus - in article, note the image referring to DTCC's Ethereum network... every time I read about tokenization, it always seems to be riding on Ethereum's rails)
-
Yesterday, BTC broke out of its downward trend since March, and is also just over its 50 day SMA. Yes yes, I know many here love to shit on TA, and Bitcoin for that matter, but a rising tide lifts all boats, and this could be telling us that the worst of the pain is over (which isn't to say we won't go sideways for months). Concurrent ATH's on the S&P and Nasdaq don't hurt, either.
-
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!
u/physalisx shares a research piece that's bullish on Ethereum
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ctx7h5/daily_general_discussion_may_17_2024/l4fydke/)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
u/eth2353 covers the appeal of the Alexey Pertsev Tornado Cash case and u/Defacticool shares their take as someone involved with European law
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ctx7h5/daily_general_discussion_may_17_2024/l4hbfdw/)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.
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.
u/barthib shares some must see charts on decentralization
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cupmmt/daily_general_discussion_may_18_2024/l4kh1be/)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
u/interweaver explains the 2022 MEV theft exploit
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cupmmt/daily_general_discussion_may_18_2024/l4m90l4/)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.
u/jaskidd05 celebrates a continuing decentralization trend and u/haurog explains why EigenLayer is also less of a centralization risk than it was
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cvghqb/daily_general_discussion_may_19_2024/l4qj2wm/)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.
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.
u/Syentist covers some bad news for keeping Lido dominance at bay
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cw7lio/daily_general_discussion_may_20_2024/l4uwj1h/)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.
u/Itur_ad_Astra reminds us not to get greedy
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cwzy5i/daily_general_discussion_may_21_2024/l508ks8/)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!
u/haurog dives into an interesting observation by an EF researcher
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cxsana/daily_general_discussion_may_22_2024/l54x11k/)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:
u/Sparta89 lists off all of the anti-crypto senators to contact
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:
u/SoNotYou gets a retroactive doot for a comment in another daily which covered some pretty significant news from Justin Drake
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cvghqb/daily_general_discussion_may_19_2024/l4q17kp/)https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1792143477163106787
I recently became an advisor to the EigenFoundation. I feel the community deserves transparency so here is an extended disclosure :)
(more in the tweet)
The Ethereum 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.
#66: May 17, 2024
Special guest Waq joins us from Rocket Fuel, a daily summary of all the happenings in the Rocket Pool community.
Upcoming Guests
- May 24 - Anthony Bertolino of Obol Network
- May 31 - Chris/Jean-Paul/Interweaver of Influence
- June 21 - Brendan Asselstine of PoolTogether
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ctx7h5/comment/l4ex01u/)Ethereum
90,440 hodlers subscribed (+4)
$2949
0.044
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cohjve/comment/l3hzyp0/)While you walk the walk,
Remember to talk the talk,
Blockchain needs no stock.
Shitpost of the week: u/NeedlerOP
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1crk4ou/daily_general_discussion_may_14_2024/l42ysky/)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.
u/eetherway thinks that fully on-chain games are now possible
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cnp6qx/daily_general_discussion_may_9_2024/l3cdmmd/)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 :)
u/cryptOwOcurrency tells a clever story to explain why Ark Invest may have intentionally put staking in their ETF only to remove again
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cohjve/daily_general_discussion_may_10_2024/l3jlr96/)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.
u/KuDeTa gives us an update on Aestus
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cohjve/daily_general_discussion_may_10_2024/l3h7ye1/)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.
u/DaW_ shares a cool new airdrop checking tool they just built!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cp9ldj/daily_general_discussion_may_11_2024/l3k2hih/)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?
u/Syentist shares some thoughts on a recent thread by hasu
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cp9ldj/daily_general_discussion_may_11_2024/l3joj4j/)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.
u/Tricky_Troll relates the recent auroras to Ethereum
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cq04yl/daily_general_discussion_may_12_2024/l3oo8k7/)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
u/TheCryptosAndBloods nearly fell for a phishing scam
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cqr9e8/daily_general_discussion_may_13_2024/l3u6uch/)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..
u/coinanon breaks some bleak news and u/eth2353 dives in deeper
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1crk4ou/daily_general_discussion_may_14_2024/l3zpfjv/)Alexey Pertsev (Tornado Cash dev) is found guilty in the Netherlands and sentenced to 5 years in prison. That seems crazy! Someone please tell me that they proved he did more than just deploy open source code to mainnet.
Court statement in English available here - https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Rechtbank-Oost-Brabant/Nieuws/Paginas/Developer-of-Tornado-Cash-gets-jail-sentence-for-laundering-billions-of-dollars-in-cryptocurrency.aspx
Well, this is a sad day for crypto, privacy and building permissionless systems in general. Some excerpts:
Tornado Cash functions in the way the defendant and his cofounders developed Tornado Cash. So the operation is completely their responsibility. If the defendant had wanted to have the possibility to take action against abuse, then he should have built it in. But he did not. Tornado Cash does not pose any barrier for people with criminal assets who want to launder them. That is why the court regards the defendant guilty of the money laundering activities as charged.
Tornado Cash is not a legitimate tool that has unintentionally been abused by criminals, as the defendant presents. Tornado Cash suits criminal use.
He also behaved lazily when victims of hacks or investigative authorities reported to him, simply stating that he could not do anything for them. He continued the development and exploitation of Tornado Cash with blinders on. He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility.
The court follows the 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?
u/haurog explains the evolution of Ethereum's sharding vision
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cscw1a/daily_general_discussion_may_15_2024/l44pd5s/)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
u/benido2030 shares a tweet which does a really good job at summarising the state of the crypto market
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cscw1a/daily_general_discussion_may_15_2024/l44mgnq/)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?
u/Set1Less shares a surprise new crypto court case which u/PhiMarHal has more on in another thread
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cscw1a/daily_general_discussion_may_15_2024/l46fklr/)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.
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.
#65: May 10, 2024
Special guest Prince Jindal joins us from Lantern Finance, a new liquid staking protocol.
Announcements
- Reminder: Mother's day is this Sunday (May 12th)
Upcoming Guests
- May 17 - Waq of Rocket Fuel
- May 24 - Anthony Bertolino of Obol Network
- May 31 - Chris/Jean-Paul/Interweaver of Influence
- June 21 - Brendan Asselstine of PoolTogether
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cohjve/comment/l3e4lbl/)Ethereum
€2812
0.048
90,430 hodlers subscribed (+5)
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ckjkf6/comment/l2qfzdn/)Feel the blockchain beat,
The protocol is complete,
Rest is obsolete.
Shitpost of the week: u/HauntedJockStrap88
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ckjkf6/daily_general_discussion_may_5_2024/l2qeoko/)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.
u/charitablechair sees web 2 thinking in airdrops
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ci7az9/daily_general_discussion_may_2_2024/l28airo/)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...
- Tiny and arbitrary allocations (5-10% for the community, airdrops for random NFT projects, etc.)
- Opaque snapshot and TGE dates that of course insiders know beforehand
- No withdrawal functionality until after TGE as a way of inflating TVL numbers (looking at you Renzo)
- Non-transferable tokens (that is, until VCs are vested)
- 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.
u/PhiMarHal does their due diligence on the Swell L2
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ckjkf6/daily_general_discussion_may_5_2024/l2piabr/)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).
u/back_to_samadhi returns from a long time off and wants to catch up with how Ethereum is tracking compared to its initial vision and u/pa7x1 and u/hblask share the important stuff.
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ckjkf6/daily_general_discussion_may_5_2024/l2ovthg/)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.
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.
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.
u/issac_hunt1 shares our biggest frustration right now and u/cryptrd285 shares news behind it
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1claz43/daily_general_discussion_may_6_2024/l2uigbh/)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
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
u/krokodilmannchen is now a mod of r/EthFiance
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1claz43/daily_general_discussion_may_6_2024/l2ttdat/)Completely offtopic but she said yes today. :) 🌟
u/Syentist covers their favourite recent Ethereum podcast series
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ckjkf6/daily_general_discussion_may_5_2024/l2o62mn/)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.
u/llamachef shares a cool product they have been using since ETHDenver
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cm3wej/daily_general_discussion_may_7_2024/l2z31wi/)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.
u/benido2030 introduces the Ethereum Defence Alliance
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cmwhiy/daily_general_discussion_may_8_2024/l33js7o/)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.
u/asdafari12 has the latest US regulatory shenanigans
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cmwhiy/daily_general_discussion_may_8_2024/l3650hy/)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
#64: May 3, 2024
Special guest Swagtimus joins us from Scroll, an EVM-compatible ZK rollup.
Upcoming Guests
- May 10 - Prince Jindal of Lantern Fi
- May 17 - Waq of Rocket Fuel
- May 24 - Anthony Bertolino of Obol Network
- May 31 - Chris/Jean-Paul/Interweaver of Influence
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cj0i2a/comment/l2cu7zo/)Ethereum
$3000
0.05025
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ccjko5/daily_general_discussion_april_25_2024/l198yvs/)Time to sue Gary,
It's not even that scary,
The man can't parry.
Shitpost of the week: u/doomfuzzslayer
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cfqsz4/daily_general_discussion_april_29_2024/l1symqm/)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.
u/benido2030 has an important warning to anyone taking on extra risk
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ccjko5/daily_general_discussion_april_25_2024/l17i846/)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.
u/coinanon shares some top picks for the latest Gitcoin Grants round
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ccjko5/daily_general_discussion_april_25_2024/l16espi/)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
u/haurog shares a big disappointment
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cdcy19/daily_general_discussion_april_26_2024/l1bzi7o/)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.
u/Fast_Contract has some more Gensler goss and u/Set1Less shares their thoughts
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cdcy19/daily_general_discussion_april_26_2024/l1cpbmf/)"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.
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
u/asdafari12 shares a new feature on Etherscan
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ce6bam/daily_general_discussion_april_27_2024/l1h5j6q/)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.
u/Set1Less covers some really bad legal precedents which may be set in the TornadoCash case
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ce6bam/daily_general_discussion_april_27_2024/l1j4tzk/)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
u/BazzRavish32 celebrates the one million active validators milestone
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ceybho/daily_general_discussion_april_28_2024/l1qka2y/)- 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
u/Wulkingdead is feeling a bit down about all the news and u/pa7x1 busts some of the FUD in a linkl they shared
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ceybho/daily_general_discussion_april_28_2024/l1m1sqr/)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.
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.
u/hanniabu is disappointed by some of the influencers takes on EigenLayer and u/Tricky_Troll relates this to a wider trend he has been noticing
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cfqsz4/daily_general_discussion_april_29_2024/l1v9awy/)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.
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.
u/austonst digs into the EigenLayer token whitepaper
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cgkmut/daily_general_discussion_april_30_2024/l1wf60r/)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.
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.
The paper looks at two different categories of faults, the bad things that would trigger slashing. These are objectively attributable and intersubjectively attributable faults. Objective faults are the more straightforward of the two. This is where the contract can directly verify that the fault occurred. Think of double signing: the contract can easily check that yes, the same private key did sign two different conflicting messages, and therefore committed a fault. Fraud and validity proofs can also fall under this category: someone does something malicious, someone else creates a SNARK proving it was wrong, the contract verifies it, and slashing occurs.
These are not always easy or possible to implement for an AVS, but detection and resolution of these faults is straightforward. EigenLayer with restaked ETH is perfect for this.
Intersubjective faults occur when there is a generally agreed upon truth but it is not mathematically provable on-chain. The standard example is price oracles. The contract 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
u/Set1Less sheds some light into why projects are geoblocking
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1chdtev/daily_general_discussion_may_1_2024/l249d29/)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.
#63: April 26, 2024
Upcoming Guests
- May 3 - SwagtimusPrime of Scroll
- May 10 - Prince Jindal of Lantern Finance
- May 17 - Waq of Rocket Fuel
The morning roundup
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cdcy19/daily_general_discussion_april_26_2024/l1b62r9/)Ethereum
$3142
0.04889
3,966 validators to go till a million active validators.
Weekly Haiku: u/Jey_s_TeArS
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c99qz0/daily_general_discussion_april_21_2024/l0nrwf2/)Kindly taking note,
Blockchain is no antidote,
It is a lifeboat.
Shitpost of the week: u/Itur_ad_Astra
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c6v2o5/daily_general_discussion_april_18_2024/l065y1a/)Ethereum: Undergoes infinity halvings. I SLEEP
Bitcoin: Undergoes one halving. REAL SHIT?
u/monkeyhold99 asks about which EigenLayer operators to delegate to and gets many great responses
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c6v2o5/daily_general_discussion_april_18_2024/l03ooit/)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?
u/STRTRD is doing the lord's work reaching out to large staking providers still using the (almost) supermajority client.
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c6v2o5/daily_general_discussion_april_18_2024/l06nlme/)(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.
u/KuDeTa is looking to hire an Ethfinancier as a DevOps engineer for Aestus!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c7okhx/daily_general_discussion_april_19_2024/l0af6kk/)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!
u/atleft is looking to help reach out to StarkNet about misallocated airdrop tokens.
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c7okhx/daily_general_discussion_april_19_2024/l09nsgw/)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.
u/haurog shares some scams targeting him lately and u/austonst educates us on the latest evolution
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1c7okhx/daily_general_discussion_april_19_2024/l09nkij/)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.
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.
u/asdafari12 educates us on malicious transactions
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ca2coe/daily_general_discussion_april_22_2024/l0s0dpr/)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.
u/evm_lion has caught the FHE bug
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cawa14/daily_general_discussion_april_23_2024/l0y1iq6/)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)
u/waqwaqattack will be filling in the Daily Gwei shortage!
[View on Reddit →](https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cbpygi/daily_general_discussion_april_24_2024/l11onv7/)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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhI6OsMVZ
