Saw this tweet from Jason, it says: everyone will have everything that the rich has. It is a pretty cool hook for thinking about next things to build.

Actually i saw this concept before ETHDenver, but cannot recall it, then asked AI. AI tells me it’s trickle-down theory, or diffusion of innovations theory. It’s actually Varian Rule in the original post.

Whatever you call it, it’s basically about the adoption of product from the rich to everyone.

Besides these examples, we can think of:

• Private driver -> autonomous cars

• Personal assistant -> AI agents

• Personal shopper - Food delivery apps

So how do we think about it in crypto sense?

Crypto Things Followed Varian Rule

Crypto culture is based on individual fighting against the “old money” rich, so a lot of the tech are built for everyone to use in the first place.

Some sectors that are born to be used by everyone:

• Private banking -> DeFi

• Private asset management -> Wallets

• Privacy protocols (money laundering services) -> Tornado Cash

Also, we can come up with the ones, that are used to be controlled by the rich, now everyone can do it.

• Asset creation -> Pump.Fun, flaunch.gg, Pump.AI (putting it here cause it’s ORA’s ecosystem project)

Launching a token and adding liquidity (this is the most troublesome part) are hard for normies, especially when you cannot take out thousands of dollars just to test out the LP pool creation.

Now you can just launch token on these meme launchpads then snipe, then become your own manipulator.

• Liquid staking

Setting up a node requires technical knowledge and 32 ETH.

Now you can just swap or deposit your ETH into liquid staking tokens, then enjoy auto yield and some extra restaking reward.

• Network creation -> Caldera, Conduit, Gelato

Once upon the time, to build a layer 2, you need to hire a 150 eng team. And what they do is they just fork the obsolete version of Optimism codebase…

Now, with all these rollup as a service companies, anyone can create a L2, or L3, or anything. Just need to enter your credit card info and pay for subscription of your chain.

Opportunities are still there, cause there’s no RaaS for SVM rollups or L1s (only framework)?

(for somehow, i think of Dune’s booth in ETHDenver. They will ask you what chain they do not support, and usually you get it wrong. So many chains right now..)

Crypto Things Will Follow Varian Rule

Let’s do some predictions now. What things rich crypto guys are using? List them all:

• Institutional investment / custody / VCs…

It’s hard for people to participate in primary market for a few years. Back to the very beginning, it’s actually easier with the booming ICOs.

Now we are seeing the trend that projects releasing NFTs and giving out primary market allocation thru echo.xyz, or even pump.fun is a kind of primary market opportunity.

• Assistant

Rich people or KOLs usually do those campaigns that you finish certain tasks to get a reward of something. Then their human assistant will help distribute tokens to wallet addresses in their dm.

This kind of bounty payout or personal tasks can definitely be managed by AI agents (like opAgent), intent-based systems (like intent engine) in for everyone. Or they can just use disperse.app, but they just don’t have that demand at the first place?

• Expensive NFTs & Exclusive DAOs

People definitely can not afford expensive CryptoPunks or some pass to exclusive DAOs (until they are still exclusive).

But this one’s tricky. If anyone can get it, are they still valuable?

• DeSci (like longevity)

Contributing to DeSci is likely to be the most vaporwave concept lol, since they are slow in progress and hard to build actual outcome. Everyone in crypto want quick incentive.

To make it accessible, a possible approach may be having a prediction market for them, cause it will be retaining DeSci’s science nature (not launching a shitcoin, but putting “prediction” into it), and make it a profitable market.

• Running Node

I know a lot of retails run node for farming airdrop, but it’s still a kind of high end thing. We need to enable more light nodes that can be run inside cell phone, so that everyone can get to use blockchains or networks more trustlessly.

• Bots (MEV bots, Market Making bots, …)

Running bots is also a very exclusive thing. Only devs, only people that risk their fund to test in production.

To adapt it, maybe instead of having people run them, have the access of Bots shared with TEE session just like teleport.best?

• Launch own Launchpad / protocol / strategy

Extending the concept of launchpad of everything, we may also need things like: launchpad launchpad, amm launchpad, defi launchpad…

For the strategy part, you can see now many open source AI quant strategy coming out (qlib, openbb). People can and will run it.

• ETF / stable coin

ETF and stable coin are also exclusive because people only buy in if they are launched by high profile entities.

Well right now, a lot of traders only do copy-trade to KOLs or smart money. These KOLs or smart money can launch their own ETF or stable coin that gives yield with their return to attract more people to enter permissionly (if they don’t do private group chats, or paid communities)..

• Crypto Cards

Previously, you need to stake to get crypto cards like crypto.com card. It takes around $400 of investment. It’s actually pretty strict.

I see now cards like bybit card basically allows anyone to get it. And one can get multiple with their different ID documents (id card, passport…)

Ending

These are the things i can think of.

Again, not as many as web2 world, because everything in web3 is built for everyone in the first place.

However, varian rule always work if ideas like liquid staking or rollup as a service is found.

As a former CSGO player who bought a few hundred dollars' worth of skins seven or eight years ago (wish I had bought more!), I started brainstorming about synergies between CSGO skins and blockchain.

CSGO Skins

Overview

CSGO skins are essentially similar to NFTs. Each weapon model has different skin styles, categorized by wear levels (kinda like NFT rarity) and specific randomized patterns (e.g., a fully blue "Case Hardened" AK-47 can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Broadly categorized:

• Weapon Skins: Most common, varying prices depending on models and styles.

• Knife Skins: Rare drops (default knives differ significantly from skinned ones), with a high baseline value. Expensive and considered "blue-chip" assets.

• Glove Skins: Rarer and pricier than knives. Luxury items, less ideal for small bag.

• Stickers: Highly speculative. Some limited-edition stickers (e.g., Titan Holo) can reach up to $60k.

Key purposes of skins:

1. Aesthetics: Randomly dropped crates (keys cost a few dollars) let players unlock skins. Most players quickly equip common guns with skins, avoiding the bad default looks.

2. Investment Value: Due to rarity (e.g., knives), prices rise with demand. Illiquid market allows easier manipulation (e.g., pump-and-dump schemes on obscure stickers). Unlike crypto, players are less savvy, making them easy targets.

3. General Currency: Used as prizes or collateral in gambling.

Trading

Like NFTs, skins are traded via order books. Classic strategies: accumulate, hype, pump, dump. Price charts even resemble TradingView. Watch this Top 5 CSGO Skin Market Manipulations.

The entire market thrives on new players and capital inflow, creating a giant game-themed Ponzi.

Key market participants:

• Players: Buy skins for gameplay.

• Investors: Profit-driven traders.

• Platforms: Facilitate trades (Steam’s official platform is illiquid for cashing out).

• Streamers/Pros: Act as KOLs, promoting specific skins (e.g., pro player donk buying opponents’ stickers mid-game).

(Further trading details omitted for brevity.)

CSGO Skins + Blockchain

Let’s explore potential integrations of CSGO skins with blockchain.

1) CSGO Skin AMM

Fun fact: AMMs were inspired by Minecraft’s HyperConomy (2012).

Currently CSGO skins are traded in order book, which is not very efficient, and has the same problem as NFT, where they hang around for days before anyone buys them, so when they are sold they are usually listed directly below the market price, which makes for an easy death spiral.

In order to solve the problem of trading experience, we can make an AMM.

AMM can be done either as a pure offchain trading platform, or mapped to onchain:

• In the case of pure trading, we may have to make an Aggregator-like protocol to accept buy and sell orders from all platforms in order to achieve AMM-like efficiency. Alternatively, a liquidity provider could build a separate pool like Sudoswap, which is not really convenient.

• If you insist on going to onchain these, you may have to use a price oracle like those in Tokenized RWA, mapped assets to onchain, then make pools. But the problem with this is that it becomes purely trading, and doesn't facilitate the actual exchange of skins.

2) Shorting & Leverage

If CSGO skins could be shorted and leveraged, then wouldn't they go up even more, and also bring the relatively worthless skins back to their own price.

CSGO skins have a rental model, and many people rent skins for 100 days just to short them, or the 7-day trading cooling-off period is essentially a 7-day expiration of a European-style option. Along these lines, we can naturally design a system based on the traditional shorting mechanism. The problem is that we need to add a liquidation mechanism, nowadays, many times the price goes up, the borrower of the skins just rug it, then the platform needs to pay out.

Referring to the perpetual contract, we can also design a cryptocurrency type of CSGO skins derivatives. Instead of delivering the skins directly, we can design a perpetual contract based on the market price of "AWP Dragon Lore". Long and short positions could be opened and traded with leverage, similar to existing cryptocurrency perpetual contracts, with the platform calculating funding fees at regular intervals, etc. etc. etc.

3) CSGO Skin Index Funds

One of the fun things about CSGO skins is that they are broken down into fixed categories by skin type. These categories can be used as index funds.

(pic says skin index, rental index, 10 dollars main weapon index, character skin index, native skin index)

I won't get into the traditional indexing approach. With blockchain, it's possible to do fun things like DAO voting to govern fund composition, fragmentation of super-expensive skins by holding them in an index fund, stake skin to get shares in an index fund, and other weird fun things.

4) Infrastructure

VC-friendly but low-ARR opportunities:

• Data Dashboard

Tools like gmgn.ai, which aggregates trading data and market data through an API, provides real-time quotes, historical trends and depth charts, or furthermore, provides a one-click ape and one-click sell function, which simplifies the complexity of the trading process (no need to log in Steam to confirm).

• Analytics

Analyze the insider positions of the skin, the KOL positions, and the positions of the pro players, to determine if buying this skin is a good idea or not.

• Custody and Security

Build a specialized CSGO skin custody platform, through multi-sig, cold wallet (cold Steam account lol) storage, to protect the user's skin security.

There are many others, such as providing just APIs, insurance platforms, security tools, "MEV", social platforms, community platforms...

But the current pain points such as low efficiency of orders are still essentially the lack of liquidity which comes from steam's limitations, to get these things onchain may theoretically solve those superficial problems (low transaction efficiency, etc.), but can not solve due to Steam.

Additional Points (via DeepSeek)

1. Centralization Risk: The article compares skins to NFT but does not emphasize the core difference - CSGO trinkets are actually owned by Steam, there is a risk of platform blocking/rule modification (Steam is officially resistant to NFT, after all, it's safe to be your own platform, steady cash flow).

2. Regulatory arbitrage: Chinese players circumvent foreign exchange controls by trading skins (this is actually feasible, but in practice the losses are too high, unless you really want to wash the money clean, you can't think of anyone who would do this).

3. Liquidity stratification: High-end skins (dragon snipers/gem blades) are traded on the OTC bulk market, with a price discovery mechanism highly similar to that of cryptocurrency OTCs (this is actually true, as high-end trinkets are basically played by a few big names, much like CryptoPunk holders like 6529).

4. Wear Economics: A "pseudo-metaphysical" premium exists in the 0.15-0.18 wear range (a small point on the rarity scale).

I’m signing off to play Valorant. So here’s the AI generated ending.

“So, dear agents, next time you dominate with your ‘Howl’ M4A4, remember—it might be the only time you can proudly say, ‘I owned noobs in-game and shorted the market!’ (๑>ᴗ<๑) Just manage your positions… because even the coolest skin can’t hide the pain of eco-round armor buys!”

But people just built out open-source alternatives of them in 2 days:

• openmanus

• camel’s owl

Also people found their system prompts in its cloud computer’s folder. Then all the toolchain and recipe are revealed. Also cursor’s prompt was revealed recently.

My thoughts:

• AI is even more transparent than blockchain data lol.

• People will eventually find out, so maybe just open-source at day 1 (like deepseek).

• Open sourcing everything keeps the space move faster.

• Building open-source copy (even with low quality) on day 1 is a good chance to farm attention.

• It’s not programming any more. All of it will be prompting.

To match with the title, here’s the list of leaked / revealed system prompts: https://github.com/jujumilk3/leaked-system-prompts.

Truly Onchain AI (not verifiable ones)

Onchain Verifiable == Onchain

It is always hard to put all computation onchain, because execution environments like EVM are with limited compute resources.

To enable all computation to be “onchain”, people adopted offchain computation to be verified onchain, and then rebranded “onchain verifiable” to “onchain”. For examples, layer 2s with zkEVM or optimistic fault proof vm.

But for these verifiable systems, there’s still gap between the onchain verification logic and offchain component + bugs introduced with such complex architecture.

So natively onchain is still superior than verifiable onchain. Just like btc > wbtc in bridging terms.

Same for Onchain AI

Running AI models (the ones that you think of) is hard enough, so running them onchain inside EVM is much much much harder.

At ORA, we took the same approach to enable AI model (inference) onchain, with Optimistic Machine Learning (https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17555).

Also, other verifiable onchain AI approaches includes zkML and crypto-economic based AI (like restaking in eigenlayer).

You can check out Haseeb’s great explainer about all these: https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1773146428594090473.

Though they are “fixed” with verifiable AI, running AI directly inside smart contract / completely onchain is still a cool challenge.

Some Truly Onchain AIs

• evm neural network

The MNIST digit classifier runs entirely within a single smart contract, just EVM inference with 94% accuracy and 41 million gas per inference.

Small model but it works, and the deployment fee is afford. This is why I wrote this post today.

• Markov

Kind of like a language AI model. It is a contract you can run to get semi-coherent phrases, all entirely running on eth mainnet.

These two are the ones on my mind. Should be some more.

Wondering if parallelized evm will help something like this.

See also

• https://ethresear.ch/t/running-deep-learning-on-evm/899

tldr of dating in your 20s

Dating as a call option.

Subscribe now

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Out of the only 10 functional tools for securing ZK the Nubit team proudly invented 3

ZKAP, Coda, and Picus.

"Lurk is now the fastest zkVM"

BTW Lurk Labs is now Argument Labs.

zkEVM Formal Verification Project

Three tracks: RISC-V zkVM, EVM, and Cryptography.

ronkathon

Cryptography Educational Foundations.

Why aren’t more DeFi protocols using ZK co processors?

Additional cost, async, not much new use cases, still in dev...

rsp

A minimal implementation of ZKPs of Ethereum block execution using Reth. Supports both Ethereum and OP Stack. Reth but with Succinct stacks.

ZK is not magic that replaces everything

"ZK isn't going to replace economic security on the L1s, but significantly change what it will look like."

Proof of Twitter

Use

https://twitter.prove.email

to prove that you own a Twitter username, on-chain.

txtx.sh

Looks like it's essential based on SP1?

zkLeeVM

A simple zk virtual machine (zk vm) in Circom.

Succinct Bootcamp Notes

Notes on ZK lectures.

Introducing the ZK Market Map! We’ve charted 250+ crypto projects advancing zero knowledge (ZK) tech.

250+ projects now.

anybody-problem

Anybody Problem simulates the 3-body problem in two dimensions using zk proofs written in circom.

A thread what a FHE coprocessor would be like

A brief definition of FHE coprocessor: A service that can help DApps do FHE computing, by generating key and decrypting data with the key for DApps on behalf.

is there a way to prove that a zk circuit is deterministic wrt public inputs (so no private inputs) without revealing the circuit itself?

This is for prisoner dilemma tournament or other similar cases. To do it, "You can prove the zk is undeterministic by providing the same public input at least 3 times".

🔍 🧠 AI

GPU Purses

gpupurses.com. 1k for this...

SuperPrompt

an attempt to engineer prompts that might help us understand AI agents.

Artificial Analysis

Independent analysis of AI models and API providers based on quality, speed and price.

ai-for-grant-writing

A curated list of resources for using LLMs to develop more competitive grant applications.

2024: Is AI art Art? 1971: Is Computer art Art?

"The poet Charles Baudelaire wrote, in a review of the Salon of 1859: “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.”"

OpenAI's o1

AI with reasoning and IQ of 120. "Mediocre but not completely incompetent graduate student". See also: 1, 2.

GPTsWorks

Third-party GPTs store.

nano-llama31

It is to Llama 3.1 what nanoGPT is to GPT-2.

NotebookLM

Convert content into a podcast.

LLaMA-Factory

Efficiently Fine-Tune 100+ LLMs in WebUI.

gpt-researcher

LLM based autonomous agent that does online comprehensive research on any given topic.

speech-to-speech

Speech To Speech: an effort for an open-sourced and modular GPT4-o.

cursor.directory

Find the best cursor rules for your framework and language.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

ETHRoadmap

With progress bar.

economic security is very very obviously not a meme.

"the severity of liveness failures that require social intervention to remedy should require no further explanation".

Interoperability can be classified in two different dimensions: temporal lag and trust assumption.

good games are not born out of piles of money they are born out of passion the pile of money can only help you scale and acquire new users

Today happened one of the biggest crypto punk heists of all time.

When NFT fractionalization goes wrong. See also: The problem with NFTs is that the "non" is a lie, eg. all BAYC gets same airdrop.

Three ways to build services

Coprocessors 1/ zk: need to pay for prover cost; 2/ optimistic: need to wait for settlement lag; 3/ Cryptoeconomic: need to pay for capital cost during settlement lag. But instant. what are cryptoeconomic systems that couldn't be better replaced with ZK? ZK can't prove non-equivocation like slashing or negative numbers.

Alt-DAs valuation straight to zero

Ethereum is building better DA.

The Fat App Thesis (a mini-essay)

1/ cycle; 2/ apps are like protocols now; 3/ users and incentives for them.

🔍 🪙 Bitcoin

SoK: Bitcoin Layer Two (L2)

"We present the first Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) on constructing Layer Two (L2) solutions for Bitcoin."

Block Template Similarities between Mining Pools

"AntPool and friends?"

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Decentralized sequencing is basically a conspiracy to get every rollups to be sequenced by the same group of people.

It's kinda like how RaaS controls all the multisig of rollups. Note that this decentralized is actually more like shared. If it's truly decentralized, then it should be permissionless.

a rollup can "theoretically" fork or do whatever as any blockchain

But it needs to update the contract, the bridge, and the nodes.

Fraud Proof Wars

Amazing long article on fraud proof.

The power of faster blocks

UX, better finance with more market efficiency. How Arbitrum does it? Sequencing and protocol. How to solve problems? Timeboost and decentralized sequencing. See also: Arbitrum's new Timeboost proposal is actually insane.

Disputify

A front-end for visualizing dispute games.

Gwyneth Technical Design

Taiko's based rollup Gwyneth design.

"I haven’t shared this publicly before but in the early days of building Arbitrum we were dangerously close to accepting a grant from another ecosystem to build Arbitrum there (in addition to Ethereum)."

Polkadot almost made it?..

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Pumpdotfun is the fastest growing application by revenue in the history of the cryptoeconomy — $100M in revenue in just 217 days.

However, "Very bearish if these are the kind of projects you encourage / support."

an IP backed stablecoin

instead of liquidations, the IP goes into the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

Sources of Defensibility for Crypto Apps

Medium of Exchange (Tether) > Social Network Effect (farcaster) > Validator Economics of Scale (Lido) > Team and Ability (Uniswap) > ...

what determines whether price discovery happens in the CEX or the DEX?

"Do CEXs always lead price discovery?"

Unpopular opinion: L2s like Linea are more secure than ethereum

"If its exploited on L2 and the bridge is slow enough, you can pause the sequencer and do a block reorg".

Is there evidence that when in the market cycle a token is launched affects its long-term value?

Probably because more money can be in the treasury at early stage. "Personal incentives can be skewed by OTC and secondary sales".

Lossless products are some of the most interesting in crypto

"Crypto is uniquely well-suited for lossless products - it offers the most frictionless path for new capital formation and low-cost payouts".

stablepulse

Get a clear, accurate, minimally filtered view of the stablecoin ecosystem.

🔍 🤖 MEV

loom

MEV Bot based on Alloy.

Vanity MEV person

Detailed breakdown.

Bribes explorer

"We track native token transfers to the block builder and aggregate them for leaderboards".

what if beaver ... is ... Jared?!

beaverbuild's new bot uses the exact same calldata as Jared! Txs: 1, 2.

Delay stateRoot Reference to Increase Throughput and Reduce Latency

delay stateRoot by a block so that it can be computed in parallel.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

imagine being able to choose a theme from your favorite games for your wallet

Final Fantasy themed wallet lol.

made Uniswap V2 resistant to sandwich attacks with only 19 lines of code

Based on "Credible Decentralized Exchange Design via Verifiable Sequencing Rules" (http://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.15569).

MEVScanner

Check if you've been MEV'd.

lextek

100% onchain Y Combinator SAFE and Escrow DEAL. Uses dynamic SVG to render a formatted legal template with standard clauses tailored to support wallet signatures and ENS.

LlamaFeed

designed to be your go-to landing page for up-to-date info across crypto.

How to call an untrusted external callback function from your Solidity code safely?

Key takeaway is that choose the limit based on block gas limit, so if it's a gigagas chain, the limit won't be the bottleneck.

compression

solidity compression utility.

mempool-listener

A mempool listener for contract specific transactions.

aggor

Oracle aggregator distributing trust among different oracle providers. Integrates Chainlink, Uniswap, Chronicle... Makes me think of panDA but it's for oracle.

LLEVM

Talk with EVM Bytecode using webLLM.

goomy-blob

a simple tool that can be used to generate random blob transactions for ethereum testnets.

Spelunking onchain: a short guide on identifying unknown smart contracts

On how to search for unverified smart contracts: labels, codeslaw, deployer, time since last tx...

🔍 🤭 Memes

i laughed my head off at the reaction of CT losers to celebs the last few days

Celebrity tokens are actually useful.

no one has invented more completely made up theoretical fights than cosmos people (now celestia)

You gotta speak up your narrative..

The 3rd Cycle Super Advisoooor

AI will replace developers the same way microwaves replaced cooking.

Startup 'Ideas Guy' Starter Pack

meowOS(version1.6)

"Sorry I was late for dinner I got stuck in a local minimum"

Carpet Diem.

Crypto twitter flying 20 hours to Singapore so they can stand around at events like this

This is literally me.

if web2 landing pages were like web3 companies

"Watch videos instantly, built on AWS Cloud".

Would be funny if the Y2K translucent hardware trend came back so people can be confident there aren’t explosives embedded in their nintendo switch or whatever

It's kinda cool anyways.

Someone launched a coin and rugged it instantly after one guy bought a dollar.

Brick by brick.

🔍 🕸️ Web

How One UX Researcher Ignited Sweeping Changes to YouTube

Chord diagram to visualize the page visit and user session movement.

Top 1 Million Domains

A collection of free and directly downloadable top 1M domain lists, a suitable alternative to the now-retired Alexa.com service.

Researchers placed 1000 AI agents in a Minecraft server and they developed their own civilization with government culture and economy.

Digital human.

Oops.js

Add powerful undo/redo capabilities to your app.

verso

A web browser that plays old world blues to build new world hope.

Google is actually a real estate company

"Collectively these data centers (like it or not) represents our history on the internet, so essentially they acquire lands to build more data centers (google is one of them, so does facebook, microsoft, etc.)".

various websites and how many trackers uBlock detected over time (with no site interactions)

More trackers appear over time.

🔍 📖 Others

Founder Mode

Run big corp like startup is hard.

just found out these scary math symbols are just while loops

12-legged 'Carpentopod' table project

Table wif legs.

Tech revenue per employee

OnlyFans: $30.1m; Craigslist: $13.9m.

awesome-investing

Curated list of investment & finance related resources.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

yes please tell me more about your zk ai oracle that sounds hilarious

I know this meme is not about ORA but we really worked on zkOracle before lol, and now we have AI Oracle.

Subscribe now

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Best crypto infra ELI5s for zk and FHE

Fast client side ZKVMs

The Privacy idea generator

http://ideas.web3privacy.info.

I have received word that TEEs are now back in style

Mostly due to Flashbots. bullish consensus<>secure hardware, TEEs are like handcuffs, and MPCs are like jails, TEEs are great, but some of the claims I hear from the proponents seem pretty wild, The strategy proof computing future we are building for has a need for ZK, MPC, FHE, and TEEs, a cheatsheet for you to understand TEE tweets, Gists of 4 key encryption tech: ZK, MPC, FHE, TEE, What apps are unlocked by the TEE stack?, Most people doing TEE research don’t seem to understand: A brand new Scanning Electron Microscope costs under $100,000, Everything you need to know about the most important three letter acronyms in crypto, ZK, MPC, FHE, TEE: no-BS guide to the buzzwords, A High-Level Technical Overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption, FHE is your new best friend.

zkML: Tradeoffs in accuracy vs. proving cost

In a nutshell, zkML should not be regarded as a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead of blindly porting a model into the zkML framework of choice, ML practitioners interested in verifiable inference should design their models with proving costs in mind from the beginning.

for any given project ZKVMs will fade and custom ZK will take over

"Here's why: ZKVMs have been crucial for widespread adoption by significantly reducing time to market. However, this comes at the cost of high resource demand for proof generation. While this cost is decreasing, custom ZK is likely to be more performant." See also: "Specialized" vs. "Generalized" ZK: Which One is the Future?

You can't have fully private finance!

"Finance relies on selective disclosure for supply and demand to match", "But finance does partition private state". Public state: federal reserve rate; private state: individual user balances, public aggregations of private state: LIBOR.

VIMz: Verifiable Image Manipulation via Folding-based zkSNARKs

ZK proofs for image authenticity.

Dark Skippy

new method for a malicious signing device to leak secret keys. With a modified signing function, a device can efficiently and covertly exfiltrate a master secret seed by embedding it within transaction signatures.

Paper: Analyzing and Benchmarking ZK-Rollups

analysis on concrete vs provable security for FRI

What is the current overhead of zk-proving some execution vs just computing it?

On ZK overhead.

zk-sgx-attester

verify SGX attestation quote on-chain by moving DCAP verification to off-chain zkVM.

zkTLS is being discussed

Basically it's MPC TLS? See: 1, 2, 3, 4.

🔍 🧠 AI

model collapse as successive model generations models are recursively trained on synthetic data

Decentralized training is much closer to reality than broadly thought. The popular narrative here is wrong

Myths about decentralized training.

the closed-source vs. open-weight models figure for this moment

gpu.cpp

Portable C++ GPU compute using WebGPU.

New paper in Nature shows model collapse as successive model generations models are recursively trained on synthetic data.

forky

A git-style way of managing LLM chats.

Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online

"essentially the premise of zero knowledge plus a credentialing intermediary".

Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines

Turn TPU into GPU. And Predict the next frame is a UI framework.

Prediction market and AI?

It's ripe to become its own chain. And Wei DAi's thread on zkTLS.

AI "learned" to do less work over the holidays

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Thoughts on predictions markets (PM) TLDR - what matters is regularity (sports is by far the best example of this)

See also DWF's post.

Obviously I'm elated when people are excited by rainbow staking but I also want to give my own perspective on where it fits in a larger roadmap for staking.

"tldr: Reasons to be excited, reasons to be cautious, and no easy way out from hard trade-offs to be made".

Taxonomy of transaction sequencing mechanisms 2.0

Fairness-aware consensus-level sequencing algorithms, sequencer-level sequencing algorithms, on-chain application-level sequencing algorithms (auctions), off-chain application-level fair sequencing algorithms.

Prediction markets are capital markets for truth

prediction markets are actually job markets

Big blocks blobs and reorgs

with EIP-4844 increasing Ethereum's throughput, blobs now dominate block size and contribute significantly to reorgs, Comparing the percentage of reorged blocks with 0 and 6 blobs, we can see that the probability of a reorg is more than 3 times larger.

When will Ethereum have single slot finality?

It's just a poll, no answer...

Some interesting facts about USDC and USDT on mainnet

About blacklist, unblacklist, multi-sig, contract...

Alkimiya Mainnet

The market for Bitcoin blockspace.

web3 for all

ELI5s for any project.

Doesn't make sense when: stablecoin supply + non staked TVL in DeFi > ETH staked

Repeated arguments over economic security + issuance are a reminder Proof of Stake's threat model is completely and utterly broken — BFT models assume the worst economic attack is a double spend.

How parallelizable is the EVM?

par.tryghost.xyz for visualizing the transaction dependency graph for any ethereum block.

Every day a professional investor asks me how bitcoin can have value when it doesn't produce cash flows.

More demand, more value; less demand, less value; no demand, no value.

Is anyone building a prediction market for purely on-chain data?

"Will the balance of smart contract go down by 90% within a period of 1000 blocks? Will an account be inactive for the next 1 million blocks? How many people will vote on that controversial DAO proposal?"

Trust-Minimized Bridging

ONLY L2s can get trust-minimized bridging with L1s, because bridge contracts can permissionlessly verify proofs.

Let's say you are given –– $10 million and 2 Months. You have to beat @pumpdotfun's huge network effects & become #1 memecoin launchpad. How would you do it?

Spend $100k on a clone; Spend $400k on infra; 9.5m on incentives for volume that only trigger on day 59; advisors, farming & TGE date announcement; CEX, cash for KOL...

1 like = 1 hopefully hot take trend by Mikerah

🔍 🪙 Bitcoin

The path to general computation on Bitcoin

Covenants, STARKs, Cairo, OP_CAT.

Hearing ‘Bitcoin L2’s’ are granting unbacked IOU’s to whales.

Shinigami: Bitcoin Script VM in Cairo

Bitcoin Heartbeats

Kinda like rollup.wtf for bitcoin L2s.

btc-nova-lc

validating Bitcoin headers using Nova.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Off chain compute: booster rollup => execution with l1 state and partitioned state; rollup => execution with partitioned state; ephemeral rollup => execution with ephemeral state; coprocessor => execution with no state

"think of a 5-day blockchain for coachella each year for ticketing and payments on the ground". Also Is someone working on something like an ephemeral rollup. See also Why do you think the concept of ephemeral rollups has not yet taken off at scale? and What are ephemeral rollups?.

A list of the top 10 L2s by market cap; a dystopian nightmare of centralization

"L2s are multi-sigs". L2s still have a ways to go before we can consider them fully decentralized.

Why developers are building modular not monolithic

TLDR we are all building the same thing out.

Layered Bitcoin

Bitcoin L2s... See also OP_CAT: The Purr-fect Solution for Covenants?.

exploring Rollups using Bitcoin L1 as a DA layer

Bitcoin blockspace simply cannot facilitate 4-8 Rollups posting 100KB-400KB proofs every 6-8 blocks; Rollups will explore off-chain DA layers that post attestation proofs to Bitcoin L1; Bitcoin Rollups might explore partnerships with Bitcoin miners to offer private deal flow for guaranteed block inclusion, locking in some fixed, lower transaction fee rate; Some Bitcoin L2s will explore L3 environments for transaction execution and use a combination of L2s and Bitcoin L1 for data availability.

App Specific Sequencing Infrastructure Tradeoffs

Vanilla Ethereum applications, Cosmos SDK, Astria, EIP-7727, Execution Abstraction, MCP with Priority Block Ordering...

OP stack is going from zero to 3 fraud proof systems!

Multi proof is always better.

wtf is settlement

In general, settlement refers to the reconciliation of ownership of assets. Aka verification.

custom gas tokens can unlock unique opportunities for rollups

Accounting with stable; DA drop so need to convert into ETH for L1 fees; native yield tokens as gas...

how L2s actually work

When L2s Fall

Downtime incidents of L2s.

What percentage of OP stack chains & Arbitrum Nitro chains deployed with RaaS providers use fraud proofs in production?

So Arbitrum Nitro chains will be able to set their own. See also quick findings of assumption, verifier dilemma, and resource exhaustion attack. And discussion around movement.

TRUSTLESS ROLLUP INTEROPERABILITY

Mostly shared sequencer and shared settlement. Full post. And also related project idea: A rollup that‘s simultaneously a L2 to Ethereum and L3 to all the other L2s.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Thoughts on predictions markets (PM) TLDR - what matters is regularity

A SANDWICH-RESISTANT AMM by Umbra Research

Potential governance attack on Compound seems to have passed.

So basically someone bribed for voting rights to transfer their money into their own pocket. See also 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Journey Towards Sustainable Yield Farming

Liquidity mining and DeFi summer, from Compound to Ethena and BounceBit.

Token listing strategy playbook

Founders especially, save this if you are planning to launch a token soon.

Pricing Gas Fee Derivatives

a subscription model for Ethereum.

On Token Migrations

When Tokens Pivot.

mathematically speaking. what are the characteristics of a good AMM?

Answers: maps the curve..

30 celebrity coins launched on Solana last month.

All zero now.

In two short tweets I'll explain two fundamental truths about equity investing and LPing on decentralized exchanges that will make you really popular at parties.

Past earnings predict future cash flows better than past cash flows, and past markout P&L predicts the future realized P&L better than a past realized P&L..

every single token is a memecoin and you know it

UNI, ARB, stocks.

The difference between the EF striving to be hands off credibly neutral etc vs the Solana foundation getting in the paint with ads marketing and organizing efforts has been interesting to see play out.

Nakamoto Dollar and The Math Behind Ethena

there's no real yield so the only yield available is via the injection of new capital onchain

this is via ethena (where you get funding paid by perp traders) and from airdrop (where you get vc capital injected onchain for growth).

Prediction markets aren’t predicting the news but rather just just reacting to it.

Insiders.

L2 that farms with deposits like blast but instead of distributing yield directly it just gives all yield to a random depositor like pooltogether's lottery

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ORACLES

Market Rate (price from dex and cex) and Exchange Rate (underlying value). See talk and restaking collateral health.

the world's first and only fully anonymous on-chain DAO with token-weighted voting

Memecoins are Tokenization of the INTANGIBLE Assets

why do people choose to use a DEX over a CEX?

UX? KYC?

Where's the capital in crypto? Mostly on Ethereum

complex uniswap v4 hook startups are mostly ngmi ?

See also HookRank.

🔍 🤖 MEV

wait until this guy hears about the members of a certain research collective (or was it pirate ship?) exploiting idiosyncrasies and zero-day exploits in their own public goods infrastructure for profit

Big bird saying Flashbots mates are doing this.

@Consensys acquired @specialmech and now they sell all your m*tamask orders to Titan and Beaver Builder your order gets value extracted mtamask gets paid 💸

Is it worth using MEV-Boost?

"Using MEV-Boost increases the APR from 2.93% to 3.24%.", "but if you compare within execution layer it is big (it increased validator’s revenue by 4x)".

Business of Block Space Pt. 2: Mevconomics

"Summary: MEV Plays a Lesser Role Today, but a Large One in the Future".

rbuilder

is a Rust-based, high-speed Ethereum MEV-Boost block builder that supports backtesting and live block creation.

Flashbots Protect Explorer

See what you've saved with Protect.

Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why?

a "chicken-and-egg" problem where builders need differentiated order flow to profit, but only receive such flow if they have a significant market share.

SolverScan: Explore Solvers and Intent Protocols

day-to-day basis in our MEV operation

indexing, database, mempool stream...

Hot take: centralization is ok if there's nothing really harmful that the centralized operator can do

"Centralized operators can 1) censor and, 2) extract MEV."

SolverFi is coming

and also "Welcome to the post-blockchain era, and the off-chain frontier where".

Apparently there’s a bot that buys $2 of 99% of the coins that launch and it out-trades most of CT

6vd8cGfnr46BWpR3JWSAMfytZuXDeWvi8hq2xVfzuoUU.

Mempool Dumpster

Archive of Ethereum mempool transactions.

Maximal Arbitrage Value in Starknet. Nostra V2 Arbitrage Quantification.

the value extracted from memes on solana

TOTAL: 518m extracted.

Brontes

A blockchain analytics pipeline based on Reth.

Sorella

"Angstrom, on the other hand, will launch as a Uniswap V4 hook, Srinivasan told The Block. It will use Sorella's off-chain network to run two auctions per block. The first auction determines who transacts first, and the second is a batch auction where all orders are executed at the same price, preventing common forms of arbitrage in decentralized exchanges, Srinivasan said." Their gud dashboard and its ASS.

MEV Reading Lists

Does multi-block MEV exist?

Not really. Also see Jonah's post.

Private Order Flows -The Sleeve Bidding of Crypto - Contribute 89% $642.5M of Builders' Income

The dominance of private order flows, contributing 90% of builder income.

Decoding Bitcoin MEV: Insights and Implications

Wrote about this last month or so. TBH since inscription is dead, Bitcoin MEV is not that sexy rn.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

mev-commit Validator Registry

ATLAS

L2beat for RPC providers.

evmrepl

txcity

Mempool visualized.

Polymarket Whales

Dashboard for Polymarket.

EVM (EOF) Taxonomy

One pager on EOF changes to the current EVM and its intersection with legacy bytecode.

evm.monster

one-stop shop for debugging EVM transactions, and see how the builder hacked a MEV bot with it.

Principles and Best Practices to Design Solidity Events in Ethereum and EVM

Dos and Do nots.

Blockchain size

What is total amount of data stored within a blockchain network?

Total Contracts deployed by chain versus Total Unique contracts deployed by chain huge difference

reward-streams

Reward Streams allows permissionless rewards distribution of multiple tokens in staking and staking-free manner. Implementation of billion-dollar algorithm.

The Ethereum Supermajority Risk

ethgas explorer

Solana Programs Verified Directory

I thought it's been there for a while.

Shadow Registry

Log.xyz. Basically public shadow events.

playground: AI design tool

🔍 🤭 Memes

the equity is meant to be held. the token is meant to be sold

three years later and this continues to be the greatest love story in crypto.

Economic security is not a meme.

The magic was lost shortly after those days.

Good old DeFi..

🔍 🕸️ Web

Button Stealer

A Chrome extension that “steals” a button from every website you open.

Early on art was hung "salon style" - pressed together and stacked floor to ceiling

Public.Work

an immersive search engine for public domain content.

HTML/DOM viewer in 3D

See how elements are stacked.

‘You are a helpful mail assistant’ and other Apple Intelligence instructions

Chart made in Germany in the 18th century describing the characters of European nations

why the phrase "chatGPT wrapper" makes no sense

they're saying it by typing into a mobile app wrapper of a phone wrapper of a chip wrapper connected to a cell network wrapper of a cell tower wrapper of ...

Figgy

Turn Figjam into a website.

🔍 📖 Others

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?

we are rapidly entering a world of infinite algorithmically-generated and hyper-personalized

most people are already in some mix of videogame/“likes”/chemtech/sugar/egirl/netflix replacing the neurochemical feedback loop that is designed for successful reproduction.

Jewel encrusted Persian dagger and sheath from the late 1700's

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Proofcast’s teeVM: The first universal teeVM is here

Wanna remove multisigs from validating bridges?

"Multi-provers + multi-verifiers + formal verification is your answer".

OH: "What's the TPS / TVL equivalent metric that zk people gonna game?"

Answers: Total value secured; Number of proofs; Kappa (complexity to compute and prove / complexity to compute); zkVM cycle count; total constraints number.

zk-kit.circom

A monorepo of reusable Circom circuits.

Expander

An open-source GKR prover designed for scaling large-scale parallel computing.

Beyond ZKML

The efforts for building a privacy-preserving machine learning model solution. Starting from the naive ML, to zkML, to zk+MPC ML.

Awesome TDX

a snapshot of Andrew Miller's current intro resources list for SGX/TDX.

I've had many crypto-but-not-ZK people ask me whether we will use Jolt Risc0 or SP1

If your project needs to be programmable, then zkVM.

has anyone run solc in SP1

"an onchain registery linking deployment address and/or bytecode hash to ipfs source link in a guaranteed correct way".

Co-SNARKs

Collaborative SNARKs work better with elliptic curves than hashing in MPC. ZKP inside MPC is efficient, showing only a 1x/2x slowdown due to optimized linear operations, suggesting benefits for other cryptographic primitives.

ronkathon

A comprehensive framework for running hackathons with streamlined workflows and robust participant management.

chip0

The first CHIP-8 zkvm. stark-based zkvm using plonky3 that proves execution of chip-8 roms. See also tweet.

zk-sudoku-ts

Updated zkSudoku App.

BattleZips-Circom

uses zero-knowledge proofs to bring the classic Battleship game on-chain with cryptographic verification for every move.

Air Fried Gyatt

A STARK backend for Noir. Enables people to write STARK circuits in a high-level zkDSL (Noir); Allows people who already know Noir to choose an alternative faster proving system based on their needs; Gives an example on how to build a Noir backend.

Gemstone Builders

A resource gathering type of game with a ZK rule engine and on-chain global economy.

Private UTXO Discovery

Allow discovery of UTXO (needed for private applications) without requiring the user to sync the application from scratch. This is done via Private information retrieval from an untrusted server.

CornHub

CornHub is an age-gated website for corn connoisseurs. Age verification via passport scan and the use of zero-knowledge proofs ensures access for adults only without compromising privacy.

homerolled-zk

simple zk implementations in python.

Food ML

ZKML for Culinary Categories, a deep neural net (DNN) to recognize combinations of ingredients as identifiers for a particular type of cuisine.

CornHub circuits

Noir code generate the proof of age in the mobile app.

A digestible overview of the state of FHE

The background of FHE, How FHE works?, The 5 landscapes in FHE ecosystem, Challenges and solutions of current FHE.

fancy-cryptography

Curated list of deployments of fancy cryptography.

zkSocial

"A zero-knowledge proof network to prove you liked your friends tweets. Who’s building this?".

Understanding Jolt: Clarifications and reflections

the relationship between the sum-check protocol and the Binius commitment scheme; the role of sum-check and lookups in Jolt; elliptic curves versus hashing; precompiles as they relate to zkVMs.

🔍 🧠 AI

Running Llama-3-70B at home with @exolabs_

recon

Gather background information to prompt LLMs.

web3-gpt

deploy smart contracts using natural language. w3gpt.ai.

L1B3RT45

J41LBR34K PR0MPT5 F0R 4LL M4J0R LLM5.

mlx-bitnet

1.58 Bit LLM on Apple Silicon using MLX.

benchmarks

Performance Comparison of MLOps Engines, Frameworks, and Languages on Mainstream AI Models.

AI 🤝 Crypto Tokenize everything

Tokenizing and tokenizing.

Just passed $1B in listings on gpulist

A market of idle GPUs.

Most people don't realize how many young people are extremely addicted to CharacterAI.

"they see ~2B queries a day, 20% of Google Search!!"

a very simple yet concise framework on crypto x AI from @balajis's talk

Difference: AI is top down, crypto is bottom up; AI is probabilistic, crypto is deterministic; AI is centralized, crypto is decentralized; AI is about prediction, crypto is about coordination.

delve

a ChatGPT interface for going down rabbit holes.

MidJourney Sref Codes and Style Reference

Make High-Quality Image Creation in Midjourney Easier.

LLM OS

LLM as the CPU.

what can you build with gpt4o that you couldn’t before?

Crowdsourced ideas, summarized.

Announcing: One Million Commits

a terabyte-scale dataset comprising a large variety of commits across GitHub for all languages and tasks.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Unpopular opinion (or maybe popular idk): for applications we need oracles different oracles very different oracles.

Multidimensional gas pricing

I cant stop thinking about the "event EIP" when reading this by Vitalik.

NascentSecurity

A thread about Security Budgets and The Bounty Flywheel.

The main Gnosis Github contains 249 open source repositories

IR is a goldmine. The oldest repo, "Gnosis exchange" from 2017, features the famous "k=xy" pricing mechanism but was never deployed due to a mindset of requiring immutability.

Finally a Bill That Helps Our Industry

An analysis of new legislation poised to support and regulate the burgeoning crypto industry.

Where's the capital in crypto?

based on Total App Capital (TAC) Mostly on Ethereum.

THE NEW WAVE OF BITCOIN L2S ARE SIDECHAINS

"So, yeah. These new chains aren’t L2s."

We need shared sequencing not intent

Vitalik argues for a decentralized protocol (operator-free, governance-free) for fast asset transfers between L2s, prioritizing basic infrastructure. Also things like "Basic Infrastructure GUild" covering High-level languages, Cross-L2 token bridging protocols, ZK-EVMs, Light clients, Portal network and extensions.

verbatim feedback from [redacted EVM devs] regarding building with Move on Aptos

offers speed and simplicity with superior documentation, an easy-to-understand SDK, and versatile smart-contract capabilities without vendor lock-in.

Cardano has "genesis keys"

Justin Bons criticizes Cardano for extreme centralization, where IOG controls 5 out of 7 keys, enabling unilateral changes without a hard fork.

What application can be brought onchain if smart contacts can access a DB asynchronously?

Kinda like trustless async oracle. Use cases can be cross-chain governance / staking, ai agents...

crypto team green flags

does have an actual product or testnet that can be used; shipping to announcement ratio is >= 1:1; doesn't spend time on twitter talking shit about competitors and instead is focused on own product; is not reactionary; is frugal.

Building Blocks - Closed Software Competitions

less on the technical aspects of block building and more on the high-level reasons why depending so much on closed-source and out-of-protocol block production software in L1 consensus is negative for the protocol.

Censorship eviction

proposes a system where validators reject blocks that don't include mandated transactions, enhancing censorship resistance on Ethereum. Tweet discussion.

10 rules for crypto marketing & community: a systems approach

community and quality.

Staking vocab

Offline penalty: penalty when a node is offline. Very minor. A few $/day; Inactivity leak: network-wide issue. Increasingly severe for affected validators. Has happened once; Slashing: penalty for malicious behavior or double signing. ~1 ETH if isolated incident.

Technical choices in L1 design if we could start from a clean slate.

Consensus: Mysticeti from Sui with CometBFT vote extensions; Epoch based proof of stake in a ZKVM with the logic written in Rust, Use recursion for extensibility for liquid staking , restaking etc.; Data availability sampling and do fast blocks/ slow squares from Celestia; Enshrine a VM but all full nodes and validator nodes are stateless and only do DA but then also have opaque blobs for rollup DA. Vaguely like the solana endgame.

How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?

"A layer-2-centric ecosystem is sharding in a very real technical sense, but it's sharding where you can go create your own shard with your own rules." See discussion here.

What did the blobs change?

a lot of helpful information about how blobs work and what exactly they change in the rollup workflow.

Ethereum Beacon Chain Explained

In summary: LMD GHOST (fork choice) Each block ends up with 1/32 of the validators (~31,250 in total) voting for it as head; Casper FFG (finalization) Each epoch receives a justification vote from every validator, and also finalization vote from every validator.

How StakeSure works

Note on StakeSure.

Preconfirmation & Based Resources

improving transaction execution, empowering users in the MEV dark forest, & fostering an efficient blockspace market. See also: preconf conference, based preconfs, But have we tried shorter block times on the L1?, "based XYZ" vs "restaked XYZ" is an under-discussed, Vanilla Based Sequencing, User-Defined Penalties: Ensuring Honest Preconf Behavior, Forced txs vs based sequencing, preconf-devnet-dashboard, have you heard about Based Rollups? by LimeChain, L1 preconfs will result in proposers+gateways+relays+builders+provers all merging, based preconfs vs L1 preconfs and tldr, L1 preconfs: where do you stand?, "based" vs "restaked" question, "Restaked" and "Based" are... the same thing? no, it's L1 validators if based, maybe external validators if restaked, Preconfs and shared sequencing are often talked about together, The only way based rollups will become potentially viable is if L1 block times are much lower..

Reading List Links for Crypto Intern

Assembled by brother bing.

🔍 🪙 Bitcoin

We just verified 100k bitcoin blocks using nova on optimism

Super low cost of 27,55$. See code that with folding (nova + cyclefold combo and verifying on L2). Also "not only do you get cheap verification with (CycleFold), you can choose the memory usage / prover speed that you want to match the users machines'."

Rebar Labs: MEV-aware products and infrastructure for Bitcoin

Finally see Bitcoin MEV research and products. Was going to write about it. See more: Rebar's thread, Rebar's blog.

"economic security is a meme"

Eg. You don't need to control the stake of the network to attack the network. You can attack by bribing someone controlling the node software. So it's kinda meme to look at economic security.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Introducing Gwyneth: Taiko’s Booster Rollup Initiative

L3 DegenChain 500K Block Reorg

On reorg "you can imagine L3s being twice as bad on avg, but the worst case can be much worse". See also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Rollkit the first sovereign rollup framework

Deploy any VM or application as your own sovereign blockchain in seconds.

Cursed Ticker of "ZK"

See also 1.

clear endgame of rollups

Vitalik: "IMO in 10 years, all rollups will be ZK and will commit blocks with finalized state roots to L1 every slot. It will take a lot of infrastructure and prover optimization to get there". Also Ye Zhang's comment: the cost will be ~zero, and design decisions (proof aggregation, prover market, prover overflow, blob integration, redesign of bridge) are needed to move from fraud-proof based rollup frameworks.

is Polygon's AggLayer roughly equivalent to Optimism's Superchain?

They're quite similar, the core idea is if you have a shared bridge where all tokens are locked then you can easily mint/burn those tokens on any connected chains. Difference: Superchain doing messaging with inboxes, while Agglayer is doing zkp aggregation. These services are non-competitive in nature. A SS set will retain its TEV from sequencer fees and MEV (no rent paid to AggLayer), and the AggLayer charges for the service of cross-stack interop + safety guarantees across those chains/stacks.

Two observations I've noticed post-Dencun/4844 for optimistic vs zk rollups

"Optimistic rollups have an urgency to post the L2 batch data to the DA layer for tx ordering guarantees" while zk rollups don't have to.

Following a transaction from L2 -> L1

An illustration of the lifecycle of a Polygon zkEVM tx.

Change my mind: L2s didn’t need tokens at all. ETH is the token they could have used conviction voting with ETH for governance.

Looks like the only token model that worked out is to use it as gas token.

Why are all the dominant rollups pursuing rollup frameworks?

"Cause there are always ppl who wanna do their own execution. And if so, you want them to remain using your own stack with Ecosystem alignment."

why are we using centralized L2s

"There's no such thing as “decentralized” L2s. They have metrics of trustlessness and security. Decentralization is L1’s".

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Pointenomics 101: Mastering the New Language of Crypto Incentives

A secretive trading firm got itself a crypto arm and a 25-year-old whiz kid to run it. Then came the $40 billion Terra disaster

HOT: An MEV Aware Intent-Centric AMM Design

Looks like AMM + RFQ.

Playing Fantasy on Blast

An intro to playing Fantasy, the social card game taking off on Blast. TBH Blast ecosystem is pretty good. Very degen, very different.

When sorted by total tokens user receives whats the correct order? Why? On AMM with fee that sell 100 / 70 / 50 / 30 then 0 / 30 / 50 / 70

A > B > D > C. Three notes: - addition of the fee makes the ‘k’ invariant increase more than liquidity; - splitting the trade 50:50 is the worst outcome; - B is slightly greater than D because of the extra liquidity from the fee.

Uniswap V2 V3 V4

Uniswap V2 = “spot” account for LPs, impermanent loss is a bug; Uniswap V3 = impermanent two-sided margin account for LPs, impermanent liquidation is a feature; Uniswap V4 = impermanent two-sided margin account for any use case.

Why are all these low float / high FDV coins down bad?

Haseeb explores theories about why recent Binance listings of low float, high FDV coins are struggling, debunking VC dumping and retail rage quitting, and suggesting market repricing as the core issue influenced by geopolitical tensions. Discussion: Unpopular opinion: it’s the founders that choose the cheap scam route. Also 0xngmi built compare-fdv tool at defillam. Also The current structure of token launches is feeding a 'down only' paradigm where prices will get rekt. Also New launches (part 1) - private capture, phantom pricing.

how much equity to give advisors is a hard question.

"If advisor, 0. Invest or rest."

imo this is gonna be the hardest issue for eigenlayer

"If you look at revenue earned by crypto apps, there's very few that generate enough revenue to maintain a high enough APR to maintain eigenlayer TVL. Even with huge success (replacing WBTC), that's only 0.015% APY." Detailed writeup about building a btc bridge with AVS. Discussion here. Sreeram's response: "you dont need the economic security to be greater than TVL (10B in the example). You only need the economic security greater than weekly-cross-bridge-transaction-volume (WTV). This is because the stake is only protecting all the transactions inside the fraud proof period."

my simplest way of explaining @berachain

imagine lido was enshrined into ethereum; now imagine when you staked tokens, these provided liquidity into ethereum apps; and imagine this was the only way to get governance tokens you can always sell.

How to Raise Your First Fund

A tactical playbook to kickstart your investing journey and set you up for success.

Crystal Clear Lattice

Inside the mind of a $100 million fund manager.

Optimizing Your Token Distribution 2023

"the most comprehensive report in the industry around how to optimize your token distribution". See also Bring ICO's Back: Distributed Token Launches (DTL's).

🔍 🤖 MEV

can someone eli5 how CoWswap works and why some people say it is the optimal way to trade on dexes? And why is there no MEV

"It’s “no MEV” because the MEV searcher bots are the ones providing the service. Cowswap forces the MEV bots into an auction, which transfers the MEV value back to the swapper"

how MetaMask smart transaction feature work under the hood

Using permissioned list of builders. See also.

Stop Calling It MEV

Bitcoin MEV resources.

Uri's thread on why MEV is negative-sum game

Too risky with possible hard fork for additionally 0.3% apy. Peter saying "MEV became an issue, so instead of trying to find solutions against it, we've glorified it". This is such a lazy take: Dankrad Feist argues that MEVboost was necessary to prevent big staking pools from monopolizing yield post-Merge, and calls for better solutions for toxic MEV without sacrificing chain success or solo stakers. So much MEV talk on the timeline...: Stephane implies reintroducing sharding to Ethereum to reduce MEV by prioritizing local consensus over global consensus, arguing that smaller networks lead to less contention and more decentralization.

Helius charges 0% fees on staking rewards

Helius uses revenue from its developer products to sustain operations, allowing it to offer staking without additional fees. See more about operational cost, additional rev stream from L2 in the discussion.

CEX/DEX arbitrage transaction fees block times and LP profits

"As the block time is decreased, an increased share of the nominal LVR is spent on transaction fees; Changes in Ethereum’s block time (either increase or decrease) are expected to affect the profitability of AMM LPs, but in many situations, other factors are more important, including the transaction fees".

pbs-snapshot

Take a simplistic snapshot of PBS on Ethereum.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

compiled a (partial) list of domains connected to square space that would be at risk of being hacked rn

if a swap is a tenth of a cent it's basically free and can be paid for by watching ads or waiting for yr PoS yield

evm

A Symbolic Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode interpreter, parser and decompiler, along with several other utils for programmatically extracting information from EVM bytecode.

raycast-eips

look up ethereum proposals and read them in raycast.

Betherscan

A chrome extension that adds more data to Etherscan. Dev data like transactions root, mix hash, logs bloom...

The contract with the longest name in ETH mainnet

A bug hunter's sideline - finding hilariously lengthy contract names.

fully P2P 5189 bundler

A fully P2P bundler executing any AA standard txns and open-sourced for all to join the mempool. See also Agusx1211's post.

betherscan

An open-source tool for exploring Ethereum's blockchain data efficiently and transparently.

stablecoin-fun

Really minimal stablecoin with ERC-4626.

The Art of Judging Bug Bounties

explores the complex role of judges in bug bounty contests, highlighting the challenges and techniques for fair assessment. "Ultimately, judging is one of the most demanding, stressful roles in web3 security".

TPS Counter of Bitcoin

tracks the TPS counts of the most recent 144 bitcoin blocks (roughly the past 24 hours).

Solcurity

an opinionated security and code quality standard for Solidity smart contracts.

cryptfolio-scripts

A collection of Google Apps Script custom functions for tracking crypto portfolios in Google Sheets. See discussion.

LilOrders

A nicely smol erc20 matching contract. Source.

blob-brrr

submits 10 blobs concurrently.

blob-transactions-the-hard-way

An explanation and a walkthrough to understand blob transactions in Ethereum.

blobbit

a simple script to submit blobs to Celestia.

u--1: EigenLayer directory

Live data for AVSs, Operators and LRTs on EigenLayer.

Ethereum engineering puzzle

Q: how do you cancel a pending transaction in Ethereum? A: "You can't. If you don't have anything meaningful you want to do, replace it with a no-op (e.g. 0 ETH self-transfer)"

🔍 🤭 Memes

How to become a Blockchain Researcher 101

Which way cryptographic man?

Crypto as casino, or crypto as computer?

badcryptobitch's MPC memes

Gold.

Tiers of founders

S tier: @cmsholdings, @fede_intern, @frogmonkee, @intern, @wassielawyer.

this is the future of gaming - every shot is on chain

Fully onchain lol.

crypto conference: the schedule

"Cope". See also crypto conference figures: girl with ambiguous job title, crypto conference figures: the multi-hyphenate DJ.

Me obviously.

Dankrad's answer when Peter asks who decides what is necessary on the Ethereum roadmap. "Ethereum alignment" was one singular Dankrad tweet. About their beef, discussion: Kobi thinks it's a deeper issue of lack of trust. Also more critics: 1.

The new project that got 100M+ funding

Looks fancy, but no pmf, no usage, no value.

degens mostly care about

Degens don't care about the tech, like security properties, training wheels, type 2 type 3...

the fundamental problem with restaking

Everybody want the yield, but nobody want to pay the rent for economic security.

L1 L2 L3

L1 is real; L2 is an illusion of the mind; L3 was invented by L2 companies to sell more L3s.

list of sovereign rollups that are using another protocol's currency for gas

equals to Countries that uses crypto as currency.

Paths to Altseason

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Large Caps, Altseason.

🔍 🕸️ Web

gameboy-fpga

A Game Boy / Game Boy Color emulator, written in Chisel, that can be run on an FPGA.

Apple Vision Pro’s Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3

"AVP covers its lower-than-human vision angular resolution by making everything bigger and bolder". Discussion here.

I've noticed that frameworks tend to be GPL/AGPL and that libraries are typically MIT/Apache.

Possible reason: AGPL, forget original intentions, is used to monetize a licensed version. No one can use them without opening everything it touches.

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

In the past, a lot of notable stuffs were done in a short time, like JavaScript...

🔍 📖 Others

Which sites are go-to for ordering within the US?

Just in case you wanna know.

All the storytelling frameworks together

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

Types of Crypto Papers

I will actually implement these if I gonna do a PhD.

Subscribe now

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Security of ZKP projects: same but different

Conclusion: Learn from hardware circuit synthesizers? 1) HDL-to-netlist ≈ Program-to-constraints – same, but different; 2) History of bugs and tooling; 3) Testing methodologies.

Ouragan a Tornado Cash offramp

Ouragan is designed to never directly interact with or be linkable to the TC contract, to avoid to be blacklisted.

Will ZK Eat The Modular Stack?

The most pressing issues to figure out are how value and information can flow safely between different modular components without sacrificing speed or cost, as well as abstracting it all away from the end-consumer so that they don't need to be concerned with bridging between different chains, switching wallets, etc.

powdr-brainfuck

different Brainfuck implementations as powdr VMs.

Quake II deathmatch on SGX server just to avoid doing any real work

"Just to break things".

Ligetron 1.0

A memory-efficient ZK system powered by Ligero Proofs. The first proof in the world for the Llama2 7b model, achieving a 1024x improvement in memory and 66x in speed performance compared to the previous best attempt by modulus. Wei Dai's comment.

How to fool your users with your deployed SNARK application?

1. Only publish the verification keys; 2) Not publishing the phase 2 setup transcript...

STARKs and @bitcoin a 3-part love story

STARK efficiency with OPCAT in the future.

ZK update conflict issue

The issue is when multiple parties update the same state. For most zk protocols, they just avoid conflict, by only computing over immutable data or sequencing data before updating.

a little note to explore the ZK-friendliness of Verkle proofs

“TLDR: Compared to binary Merkle proofs, it's hard to say which is more ZK-friendly; it will come down to a bunch of implementation details.”

zkML Bootcamp: Reproducibility in ML

Reproducibility / deterministic in ML.

How did you first discover zero knowledge?

Answers: devcon, Algorand talk, Mina, IC3...

Bonsol: Verifiable Compute for Solana

solana + risc0. Read blog here.

if anyone is using TEE for anything you should use an Xbox One

Cause never hacked, and tons of researchers have tried and failed over the years. Watch this.

Monadic DNA

Using R0. Privacy preserving personal genomics for health and ancestry.

zkLLM: Zero Knowledge Proofs for Large Language Models

Just ~15 minutes to generate a proof for LLM. probably highly quantized version of the model? See also anand's tweet.

BInius: highly efficient proofs over binary fields

"The core idea in Binius is treating the same data as a hypercube, and as a grid. Here's an example (using regular integers)". See also "Today someone invented a new ZK proof system that is several percentage points faster than the prior state of the art on a curated set of metrics.".

SNARKnado

Four-Round Verification of SNARKs on Bitcoin by Alpen Labs.

powdr-brainfuck

ZK proofs for Brainfuck execution using powdr.

circom101

Circom circuits explained in depth.

zkrollup_tutorial

Tutorial of ZKRollup written in circom.

StarkyX

A library for writing AIR constraints with composable and typed constraints.

Zero Knowledge Federated Learning is obscenely underrated.

"verify the execution of each participant's local machine learning model and protect the privacy of user data".

IMT-vs-SMT

An opensource project to compare the gas usage of Incremental Merkle Tree (IMT) and Sparse Merkle Tree (SMT) inside Circom zero knowledge circuits.

zkRust

CLI tool to prove your rust code easily using either SP1 or Jolt.

FHE split the decryption key

FHE teams How are they going to split the decryption key.

Jolt Skill Tree

"Milestones are mostly bifurcated into a Binius subtree and an elliptic curve subtree."

Introducing ZKBoost

The fastest available XGBoost implementation using ZKML, completely open-source and with comprehensive benchmarks.

verified-logs

Verify a log is present in a block.

how “ZK unfriendly” RISC-V is

TLDR: off by a factor of 2 naively.

🔍 🧠 AI

Payman

An AI Agent tool that gives Agents the ability to pay people for tasks they cannot do themselves.

Deepfake Issues

When AI models are getting better, they are also getting better in dangerous stuffs.

Open Source AI and Closed Source AI

You are HERE: open-source AI will outperform closed-source AI.

Verifiable AI compute

One of the core issue is floating point arithmetic which is very non-determinitic.

Llama 3 Open Sourced!

See also jailbreak.

Will we run out of data? An analysis of the limits of scaling datasets in Machine Learning

the stock of high-quality language data will be exhausted soon; likely before 2026.

LLaMA-Factory

Unify Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ LLMs.

LLM Pricing

Compare and calculate the latest prices for LLM (Large Language Models) APIs from leading providers.

gpt-researcher

GPT based autonomous agent that does online comprehensive research on any given topic.

BIG-AGI

the AI suite for professionals that need function, form, simplicity, and speed.

QLoRA

Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs.

LaVague

Large Action Model framework to develop AI Web Agents.

MLC LLM

Universal LLM Deployment Engine with ML Compilation.

jailbreak_llms

In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on LLMs.

llm-scraper

Turn any webpage into structured data using LLMs.

lm-hackers

Hackers' Guide to Language Models.

Can Language Models Solve Olympiad Programming?

Paper Link.

Fooocus

an image generating software (based on Gradio).

raspy

An interactive exploration of Transformer programming.

discovering_latent_knowledge

Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision.

gpt-engineer

Specify what you want it to build, the AI asks for clarification, and then builds it.

Llm aggregator

"a DeFiLlama for every industry loll... (or is it actually

http://pump.fun

or dexscreener lol)", by sui414.

generative-manim

GPT-4 for video generation.

Crypto x AI Flowchart

"Long term I think Crypto x AI wins because the most powerful technology of our generation can be owned, governed and iterated by an incentivized global community vs a centralized black box".

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

EIP-3074 && EIP-7702

The trend of account abstraction and smart contract wallet is back. See 3074: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. See 7702: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Also Notes on the Account Abstraction roadmap.

Anoma as the universal intent machine for Ethereum

"Anoma brings a universal intent machine to Ethereum, allowing developers to write applications in terms of intents, which can be ordered, solved, and settled anywhere in the Ethereum ecosystem."

Is there any reason why restaking is fundamentally more suitable for Ethereum than Solana?

"the most natural use case for restaking is extending the function of the base layer to do something that it should do, but isn't; so, eigenDA and roll ups; solana doesn't need either of those though".

Beyond Layers

Blockspace Is a Fuel; Blockspace as a Veblen Good; Blockspace as a Giffen Good; Jevons Blockspace.

what are the gas limits and block times of various high performance EVM L1s and L2s?

Avax C-Chain is 15m gas, 2sec block time; Pulsechain L1 is 10 second block interval and 30M gas limit; Polygon PoS 30M gas limit, 2s block time. Also opBNB. See final table. "TPS" must be removed from every scientific conversation about blockchain performance unless it refers to pure payment txs.

announcing world chain!

Hubble -> Polygon -> OP app -> OP chain.

WHAT THE HECK IS CATVM?

A breakdown of Taproot Wizard's recent CatVM proposal, what it actually is, and what it could be useful for. Scheduling > Scalability.

BITCOIN HISTORY

"Bitcoin didn't simply appear out of thin air - it was built upon decades of work and came after many failed digital currency projects."

is pooled security a good or bad thing?

"general purpose blockchains are pooled security for smart contracts".

State of light clients in 2024

Full table here.

The Untold Story of ditto-b

“The story of an anonymous developer who fixed a critical flaw in Bitcoin's code.”

how much txs would cost in an L2 that uses Bitcoin as it's DA layer

TLDR: it's very expensive, if L2 would achieve the same compression rate as Optimism; Sequencer would fit all the data in segwit space; uniswap trade would be as simple as they get, with one hop and no permits used.

Halving Fee Chaos

On more fees, Runes, Simplification vs Game Theory, and sniping asset issurance... Wen Bitcoin MEV.

ethereum community members privately expressing the wish that it had stuck with pow instead of transitioning to pos.

For "centralization risks" and "balance of power".

The cryptoeconomics of slashing

Cool thing I learned is: slashed funds can be used for security instead of just burning.

Slashing Proofoor

verifying a validator got slashed onchain. Code.

Griefing Bitcoin's Testnet

A deep dive into manipulation of block generation on testnet and a call to reset the network to fix several issues.

a timelapse of crypto / ct

Gud vid.

Fees generated by socialfi apps in last 7 days

1. Fantasy Top = $9.31M; 2) Friend Tech = $4.8M; 3) PumpDotFun = $3.14M.

Why did Satoshi choose an upper limit of 21000000 BTC?

Answers: half of 42; max value of 64 bit integer; unbeatable hand in 21 game, and also there's a poker client in the Bitcoin codebase.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Who wins the Data Availability race... if any?

Eigen DA, Celestia, Avail, NEAR DA...

DA Trap: When a DA Attack Becomes Significantly Easy

"The probability of attackability increases rapidly when the degree of redundancy of data holding nodes falls below a certain number like 200."

Introducing Ethereum Blobspace Derivatives

"financial markets for Ethereum blobspace, designed to increase efficiency around price discovery and improve the user and developer experience for data publication on Ethereum".

The @conduitxyz team is on fire - chains launched using their RaaS product now account for 49% of the total data posted to Celestia

RaaS launches most rollups now.

Arbitrum disclosed two serious vulnerabilities in the recently released OP Stack fraud proofs

Arbitrum is helping Optimism to fix their fraud proofs.

temporary chains

"think of a 5-day blockchain for coachella each year for ticketing and payments on the ground". Sounds like flash rollups to me.

Proposal for updated Bitcoin Layers risk framework

See also Bitcoin Layers and new policy for Bitcoin Magazine regarding their Bitcoin L2 coverage.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

framing of Terra

luna is insolvent because ust mcap > luna mcap; luna is solvent because luna "equity" value = enterprise value - debt; luna has always been insolvent because the market valued it as a ponzi not as a business.

“How do I approach a token launch?”

a16z's guide to token launches.

Mert's take on memecoins

"memecoins are not the reason founders don't find PMF; the lack of PMF in the industry is due to the perverse incentives normalized by literally everyone — not just VCs, not just memecoins, everyone; there are still plenty of crazy, mission-oriented founders interested in building the future of the internet — let's take more risk and support them".

Founders should be aware of the VC ponzi scheme.

Boost up the valuation number on paper, and milk the management fees.

ETH financial freedom

Stake with Lido -> Put stETH into Aave -> Borrow stables -> Make sure only borrow <10%, yield pays for some debt.

"Bitcoin is too complicated!"

However, modern financial system is a hopelessly archaic sprawl.

BlackRock will launch a Lending Protocol on Ethereum.

"You think you can play onchain without us? I'll soon knock on your door".

Cardano’s brilliance was having a high concentration of Japanese investors

"With a capital gains tax of up to 55% they are pretty much forced to diamond hand til there is no capital gains to tax".

In Web3 the amount of money raised and the amount of value created is highly uncorrelated.

"Bitcoin raised $0".

rebrand TVL

"to mean all the potential value that is wasted and inaccessible due to being stuck in an antiquated financial system". As "Total Value Lost". Read also "Total Value Redeemable".

CAC/CLV of airdrops

Airdrops are expensive, but they are also a great way to get users.

we live in a society

"the FBI calls crypto money so they can arrest you for money laundering; the IRS calls it property so they can tax you on capital gains; the SEC calls it a security so they can sue every exchange; the CFTC calls it a commodity so you can’t use it as a currency"

Tokenomics a few years ago vs now

Insiders are taking more and more of the pie. Token distribution is critical in determining the distribution of power in blockchains.

v2-on-v4

Uniswap v2 on Uniswap v4 implemented with hook.

"don't burn your hands" implementation of concentrated liquidity

The dangers of concentrated liquidity.

AMM Quiz: In which case is the user usually getting a better deal on their trade? (As measured by subsequent markouts of performance)

Under the condition that "Sometimes user trades are preceded by a top-of-block CEX-DEX arbitrage. That arb might be in the same direction of the trade, or the opposite." Answer: it's actually the same direction. See also discussion here.

Price Prophet

Trade against real historical price data across dozens of tokens in a risk free environment.

Vulnerability Report: Binance PoR Dummy User Attack

According to this attack, Binance has the ability to add dummy (non-existing) users to their userbase with an equity (positive) position in low-quality assets and a debt (negative) position in high-quality ones as long as, when converted to dollars, the net balance is greater than 0. Discussion here.

ReGOOSE: Updated goals for Lido in the light of MVI and restaking

"Support Ethereum-aligned validator services, starting with preconfirmations, without exposing stakers to additional risk."

🔍 🤖 MEV

Only motive I can think of is money laundering

Weird sandwich bot behavior, large sandwich that only they see with no bribe.

in retrospect MEV-boost was a mistake

"we'll likely need centralized block production, a builder, and more trustless exchanges between proposers and builders."

Anatomy of CEX/DEX Arbitrage

"CEX/DEX arbitrage transactions are not frictionless due to the EIP-1559 basefee and other factors."

Economics of the intent-based interop stack of ERC 7683

"Threw arbitrary numbers that intuitively will probably make sense and that can be argued looking at the dynamics seen at the tx-based MEV supply chain".

Surrogeth

Tricking frontrunners into doing good. Not harmful like salmonella, but tricking frontrunners to be the relayer of your tx.

Rolling in the Shadows: Analyzing the Extraction of MEV Across Layer-2 Rollups

The main question this paper asks is "Are sandwich attacks possible on L2?" Like: someone submits a L2 swap on its L1? Some cross chain DEXes do this.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

inkmate

a set of gas-efficient smart contracts written in Rust on Arbitrum Stylus.

GPU-EVM

The most performant parallel-EVM in the world by 100x.

Incredible Squaring AVS

a simple example on building an AVS.

the best swag I ever got at a crypto conference @ETHBerlin

"a book of all final EIPs and ERCs".

usdc.cool

Dashboard for USDC issued (native + bridged).

Uniswap Labs Metrics

See how many fee Uniswap Labs is accumulating.

Unconventional Functional Solidity

"While convention dictates contract object inheritance and internal libraries are the best way to modularize Solidity code, breaking conventions to try something new is a defining characteristic of the industry."

etheasy.xyz

a rust-powered toolkit that aims to help make ethereum development easier.

this transaction makes lots of crypto tools sad

"it emits 10,000 logs". Hash: 0xe46be63574f47b245cf6e8315e302449ccba5727fe2826e10abf8e8a75e64969. "~$1,072 in event gas for one tx".

How large is an Ethereum Archive node in May 2024?

Reth: 2.1T, Erigon: 2.6T, Besu: 17T (FOREST), Nethermind: 18T, Geth: 18T, Lighthouse: 269G (Tree-States, w/Blobs), Lighthouse: 592G (Vanilla, 2048 SPRP, w/Blobs), Teku: 636G (2048, w/Blobs).

CuEVM

Cuda implementation of EVM bytecode executor.

savvy

An interface for the EVM in the browser, to simulate and visualize your onchain activity.

GasliteDrop

Hyper Efficient Airdrops. Gas Bad.

ragequit

"Moloch DAO ragequit", make it so people can take tokens out of your account without a proposal by burning other tokens ("redemption", and those other tokens, "loot").

tx-coverage

Reveal unused code of a live smart contract by collecting coverage from historical transactions.

blob-preconfs

blob preconfirmations.

callthis

Build a transaction, send a link for someone else to execute it.

The ideal PR is 50 lines long

Based on researches, median PR size of 50 lines.

What's the best no-code solution for deploying ERC-20 token contracts?

Answers collected: ThirdWeb, DeFiBuilder, OpenZeppelin Wizard, OnThis, CreateMyToken...

Flare

Execution extension for reth to support indexing Arbitrum sequencer batches.

ERC-20 should have enforced 18 decimals.

Projects gain little value from setting a different number of decimals, but they impose technical debt on the ecosystem by forcing developers to handle multiple decimal systems.

🔍 🛸 Cosmos

🔍 🕸️ Web

building a GPU from scratch with no prior experience

A thread on building a GPU from scratch, including learning the fundamentals of GPU architectures, creating the GPU, writing custom assembly language, and writing matrix multiplication kernels...

MS-DOS

The original sources of MS-DOS 1.25, 2.0, and 4.0 for reference purposes.

Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

See also this bar chart version.

rem

An open source approach to locally record and enable searching everything you view on your Mac.

rpcs3

PS3 emulator/debugger.

Apple's new "Crush" ad (let's call it "2024") is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad.

1984: Monochome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colourful, vibrant human; 2024: Colourful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist industrial press.

Most and least common 4 digit PINs

Visualized as heatmap.

🔍 📖 Others

Silicon Valley aired 10 years ago this month. Here’s how I would write the 2024 reboot

It's the gem.

thoughts below on the journey of launching a fund (both the good and bad)

launching a fund is very hard; a good analyst does not convert to a good PM; starting a fund = starting a biz...

I hate to break it to y'all but Iron is never going to replace Bronze.

"Also, yeah yeah we’ve heard of these so-called “Sea Peoples”, but do you really think they would stand a chance against our mighty chariots and bronze weapons? Pfffft."

Tobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong

Before Shopify, the market is too small, so VCs thought even if it's successful, it's not worth it. However, after Shopify, the market just grows exponentially.

Daily showers are purely ‘performative’ and have no real health benefit experts insist

"Except for not smelling, and preventing: athletes foot, jock itch, dandruff, and reducing the likelihood of getting zits, blackheads, etc.".

returns from @elonmusk's companies

all companies' returns over 100x.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

ORA Onchain AI Oracle launched on L2s with their collaboration

Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Manta. More in the future.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

ZK is short for

Succinct proofs without ZK; Programmable crypto in addition to ZK; Sometimes, it even stands for ZK.

Overflow vulnerability in Polygon's zkEVM Storage machine

"discovered a vulnerability in Polygon's zkEVM which lets a malicious prover make false statements about the persistent storage in the zk-Rollup."

We found a way to verify your ZK-proofs on Ethereum for <8000 gas

Comment: "spoiler: it’s proof aggregation and the trade off is latency/finality". Also, Fede commented "this is called aggregation".

fhEVMs: How Do They Work?

Nice overview of fhEVM and how one combines FHE with ZK and MPC in blockchain applications.

Privacy/ZK technology

1) stealth address + stealth meta-address registry, 2) OIDC ZK Verifier for AA Account, 3) Proof of Solvency...

list of zkVMs in the market

Jolt, Nexus, Risc0, Sp1, Valida, zkOS, Miden, Ola, TritonVM, Cairo VM... We got more infras than apps.

🔍 🧠 AI

the impact of deep learning on tools for thought

AI Lifehack to record your thoughts with recording devices and LLM.

Midjourney Day 1 Day 637

"For every new tech demo, dunks on Day 1 results are always a dime a dozen."

open source model beats old version of GPT4

OpenAI lead: to closed source ~ 11 months, to open weight ~ 13 months.

Make Your Language Model Smarter by Arguing With Itself A Lot

TLDR: add more AI agents to make the result better.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

New theory on Satoshi Nakamoto

"Out of all the billions of people on the planet, all we know for sure is that it is not Craig." Archived version here.

an investment pitch for $ETH in front of institutional investors

By Nick of Rabbit Capital.

Eigenlayer's Slashing conditions are restricted to what's provable in the EVM

"effectively, it's an honest majority oracle", "Slashing conditions are restricted to what's provable in the EVM"...

ZK summit and got more Bitcoin pilled

"After a long dryspell, Bitcoin is getting interesting again."

If a protocol gets hacked is the hacker the bad guy?

In some sense "no". Cause: "hacker is most likely the bad guy indeed. But the protocol is ultimately responsible of the security of their systems."

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

In 3 years from now - how will the revenue of L1 block space and blob for L2 compare?

Ethereum offers two different “products” right now: Regular L1 block space and separately “blob space” tailored to L2s. What will be the revenue of these two in the future? See also Dankrad's take: L1s are massively overpaying for security.

Where's the Cosmos SDK for decentralized sequencing?

Answers: "Rollchains", "Cosmos SDK and Cometbft teams are working on it", "Sovereign SDK includes a based sequencing option".

the new modular stack is THICK

However, if we simplify all "modular stack", it's all "ordering (safety), storage (liveness), compute (info access)".

BASED ECOSYSTEM

We got Taiko, Aztec, RNS, Ultra Sound, Titan Builder, LimeChain, Nethermind, Espresso, Sorella, AggLayer...

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

OPINION: Staking rewards do not make ETH — or ETH staking — into a security

It's about decentralization.

Did you know that Pendle's APY calculation

"assumes you can compound at the same rate and frequency to show a larger number?" Also, As in compounding several maturation periods in series?

Uniswap Labs received a Wells notice from the SEC

Uniswap is fighting for the industry.

crypto fundraising data

"most VCs buy the tops and don't have capital to deploy at the bottom just like most people". I think it's more about "most people" and "LPs" deploy less capital when it's bear.

🔍 🤖 MEV

cex-dex mev bot pnl over 414k blocks (≈6 days)

"small caveat: this assumes perfect cex execution".

Why are block builders granting access to their end of block state for so cheap?!

"pretty much only for blind arbs. 53face isn't blind, they know exactly what's in the block".

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

new tabs vs spaces -- how do you get address(0)

Lotta good tooling in the comment section. Found this gem: Swiss Knife.

have a look at one of the AVSs - eOracle

Another analysis from the legendary bartek.

Sub Zero

a way to trustlessly tokenize, transfer and sell vanity addresses. Benefit: buy one instead of mining one to save time; also recoup some mining cost if you mined some semi-rare addresses. Also 1inch built it before.

🔍 🕸️ Web

iA-Fonts

It's Substack's Mono font.

Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

Lot of interesting projects here. Tiny codebase for most of them, but super powerful.

When u submit ur first git issue

Cat created a pr on catching mice. But Catching mice is no longer considered a best practice, Recommend upgrading to relying on humans, covered by "How to stalk birds." Marked as duplicate.

In GTA San Andreas small planes are periodically created near the player to perform a fly-by. Sometimes they crash

The dev explains why GTA SA is buggy.

🔍 📖 Others

Kinda wild that the sun and moon are so similar in diameter when viewed from Earth.

It's the reason, not the result.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

ORA: Ethereum’s Trustless AI

Onchain AI (zkML, opML, opp/ai), OAO (on mainnet and on L2s), IMO (Initial Model Offering), OpenLM IMO (the world's first IMO). Tweet thread here.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

a16z announced implementation and benchmark of Jolt

Kinda in response to this, RISC0 posted a feature comparison of zkVM, detailing why R0 is the most production-ready one.

explanation of zero knowledge proofs

Super easy to understand. By zooko and jessewldn.

Idea: prove validity of git rebase and squash in zk.

"It's more of a PCD-type proof proving existence previous commit signatures I had in mind. The goal is to prove authenticity of transformed (rebased, squashed) commits".

zkOpenFHE

A ZKP-augmented fork of the OpenFHE library.

starky_bls12_381

MVP implementation of bls12-381 in starky and plonky2.

Compiling to zkVMs: Parallelisation decoupling and abstractions

This has a nice list of zkVMs: STARKish zkVMs, IVC zkVMs, GKR zkVMs, Mangrove zkVMs, Jolt zkVMs...

honk-verifier

Honk Verifier in Solidity. See tweet.

circom-thfe-rs

TFHE-rs loader for circom-2-arithc.

Zeroing into zkVMs

talking about zkVMs.

Subscribe now

🔍 🧠 AI

FHEML (Fully Homomorphic Encryption based Machine Learning) for privacy preserving computation

Privacy preserving computation, now in ML.

The uselessness of $TAO is truly spectacular

ercwl's thoughts on TAO. Bittensor is very controversial. Some people think it's tokenizing and incentivizing AI (profound design, deep dive), some people think it's just a scam with stupid design (no AI expert backing, ponzi, no one cared). Well, listed on Binance, so problem solved...

GPT-2 (2019) vs. GPT-4 (2024)

"look how beautifully original gpt-2 is! it's like comparing gpt's poetic child drawings vs. corporate emails from middle age." it will also be related to the data it was trained on. But they grow up so fast!

chatgpt_system_prompt

A collection of GPT system prompts and various prompt injection/leaking knowledge.

Navigating the World of Large Language Models

BentoML's site has a lot of good contents btw.

One reason AI works for code

"most people are just writing the same programs over and over."

What prompts should I use for nsfw images?

Very permissionless, very censorship-resistant.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Monad raised 225M led by Paradigm

Haseeb posted (then deleted) something controversy and considered “shilling bags on ct”. Here’s a response by @jtriley_eth on pointing out some of the “offs”.

Issuance Issues — Initial Issue

Mike's post on Ethereum PoS issuance.

Definitions of staker

Solo staker, home staker, staker.

Crypto's Biggest Skeptics are EVM-pilled

collected data on 60+ G20 central bank blockchain projects and takeaways are "-Innovation happens at the edges and eventually gets adopted by incumbents, -Network effects matter, -OSS is battle-tested". See tweet.

Coinum Memeticus: A Taxonomy of Memecoins

Pure meme, productive meme, utility meme, native-token meme, meme in disguise, de facto meme, money meme.

Cradle-to-unicorn public goods funding

The end-to-end funding lifecycle for Ethereum public goods.

failed transactions on Solana

It's bots.

4 types of cross-chain activity

Cross-chain Limit Order, Gas abstraction, Reading Ln state for a transaction on Lm, Updating Ln state via a traction on Lm.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

EigenLayer announced mainnet of EigenDA

Now restakers can really “restake” into actual running AVS of EigenDA. A competitor to EigenLayer, Karak_Network raised 48M at 1B valuation. Difference is Karak can enable restaking for every chain every asset, but this may be a security risk. The most important question for EigenLayer: Wen Token? And actually EigenLayer can definitely don't do token. See whiteboard session.

Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

By Vitalik, and now fee on mainnet and especially l2s are super affordable thanks to blobs. Also blob flippening.

An Introduction to Modular Blockchains

A very beginner-friendly introduction to modular blockchains and its concepts.

How do challenge periods for fraud proof-based L3s work?

Add zk/different types of proof into it and achieve "fast finality optimistic rollups".

Do we need L3s?

"the L2s that interoperate frequently benefit if there is a canonical L2 on which these interactions happen. Now, depending on how much of value is routed though this central L2, we can think of this canonical L2 on which a bunch of other L2 interactions happen as really an L2 and the other L2s are really L3s." But some argued that "“L3”s are not a thing, there are only L1s (systems that provide settlement to other systems) and L2s (systems that settle to other systems)". See also this.

Rollups CAN be centralized AND still be censorship-resistant and secure.

Just shove the force transaction in!

Blake3 transaction has finally been mined

"One small opcode for BitVM, one giant script for Bitcoin."

Fraud Proofs Are Broken

TL;DR the fraud proof algorithms used by Arbitrum, Cartesi and Optimism all have issues.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Uniswap Received Wells Notice from the SEC

Uniswap is carrying the industry on its back. Respect!

what’s the bear case for Uniswap v4? is there one?

"hooks too permissionless so hard for retail to understand + they get rugged + aggregators have a hard time integrating them".... Let me tell you what the real bear case is: I made a os awesome-list, then someone from / related to uf just use these contents to make a new site (thanks for the recognition tho, tho it's given after I asked for it), and then uf rejected my grant apps twice.

A Brief History of Memecoins: Their Past and Future

"a meme’s only function is to spread into other people’s minds".

Layer 2 be or Layer not 2 be: Scaling on Uniswap v3

By Austin Adams. TLDR: many of the current drawbacks with AMMs may be due to chain dynamics and are vastly improved with cheaper and faster transactions.

introducing: the 30 min token

Really like the bgm.

If Ethena’s strategy is delta neutral why aren’t hedge funds already doing it?

Answers - hedge funds are doing it, but not with size; - Ethena's strategy only works in bull markets, when there are plenty other strategies with better R/R.

AL #52: Logical Token Design

"Starting a $MEMECOIN counter-movement".

what protocols out there are still offering 0% fee flash loans?

Morpho Blue, Old dYdX, Uniswap v4, DODO, Maker, Balancer...

🔍 🤖 MEV

At what point will an MEV team acquire a well known wallet startup to get exclusive orderflow ?

Disclosed deals: Consensys bought SMG (reverse, but maybe same motivation). Undisclosed one: "MetaMask orderflow goes to titan, and zapier goes to badger build".

On OEV

Another great piece on MEV brought by oracle. "All About the Flow".

"Balance Abstraction"

"Balance Abstraction is a pooled inventory system with an integrated accounting layer and asynchronous clearing engine that empowers Users to redeem a balance "voucher" that is valid on any supported chain or rollup."

the recent Bloxroute/Lighthouse kerfuffle

TLDR, closed source MEV software matters about as much to Ethereum as open source client software and this isn’t good.

Just stumbled upon an EOA that collects all of the funds accidently sent to Optimism Portal contracts (e.g. Base Portal)

"The idea is simple. On Base or other OP stack L2s, pass a message from L2 to L1 with approve(Optimism Portal, Skimmer, uint(-1)) with the to address as a token contract."

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

girlfriend

Girl Friend <- Generate Foundry Fork Test from Attack Transaction.

Preconfirmations

Preconfirmations protocol for sub-second transaction confirmations on Ethereum. Powered by EigenLayer.

eigenlayer-rs

A rust port of https://github.com/Layr-Labs/eigensdk-go. But what's the right license here?

EIP-7671: Bitcoin Proof-of-Stake

Yeah this is an EIP.

why do junior solidity indies smoke institutions with unlimited budget?

"we're in the advantage position, we just have to make moves." We refers to "open-source communities".

BTCEden

Another Bitcoin Layer2 dashboard. BTC L2s. See also BitcoinLayers.

Trying to think of a way to make a view function return true if and only if it is called by a RPC but always return false if it is queryed onchain.

Not on point, but lol I saw "Up until eip3074 gets merged though."

a bug that could remotely crash Ethereum mainnet geth clients over RPC through eth_call

Disclosed by iosiro. Details.

Shadow Event Debate Round 2

Check my blog on round 1. And here's the round 2 discussions. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

🔍 🕸️ Web

xz backdoor

CN breakdown, Meme, Tip of the iceberg, give money to OSS maintainers.

CodeCrafters

Recreate Redis, Git, Docker — with your own hands.

How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

Love to see what will happen next.

archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet

The Internet Archive is a legitimate 501(c)(3) non-profit with a budget of $37 million and 169 full-time employees in 2019. archive.today, by contrast, is an opaque mystery. So who runs this and where did they come from?

if gmail launched today instead of 20 years ago

“what’s so special about this? it’s just a wrapper around XMLhttprequest()?”

🔍 📖 Others

It is with a heavy heart I announce the sale of my long term ape Salazar

Lol.

Hacker News Daily

Daily top stories from Hacker News.

The 2024 MAD (ML AI & Data) Landscape

The intern needs a raise.

Map of the Human Metabolic Pathways

Higher resolution.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

ORA’s on-chain AI oracle is now available on Ethereum mainnet

ORA’s OAOs are powered through optimistic machine learning (opML) on Ethereum.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Greco

Circuit for proving the correct encryption under BFV fully homomorphic encryption scheme. Better zk-fhe library. Code and Blog.

How to verify ZK proofs on Bitcoin?

"using efficient FRI (Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive) style ZK proofs for on-chain verification".

plonky2.5

verify plonky3 proofs in plonky2.

to this day this is my favorite explanation of zero knowledge proofs

Much better than explaining what SNARK stands for.

Subscribe now

🔍 🧠 AI

predictionprophet

An AI agent that can predict the future.

7B open-source model to play DOOM

Using Mistral with ASCII representation of the current frame in the game.

Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)

Implementing a ChatGPT-like LLM from scratch, step by step.

Sora for artists and filmmakers

"A glimpse of our early work with artists and filmmakers to see how Sora can help bring ideas into reality".

Blockchain plus ai is dumb

Call that a blockchn.

Don’t trust verify: An Overview of Decentralized AI Inference

Verifiable ML: ZKML - OPML - Cryptoeconomics ML. Mike from Talus' thoughts on their applications. And Akilesh's clarification on Ritual is modular.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Regarding the ParaSwap hack today

TL;DR: Part of the root cause is Solidity "gas golfing". But gas optimization is not evil, discussion. And how to avoid this.

2023 Crypto Compensation Report

TLDR. "I shall be using this document in my next pay review meeting".

rollups on bitcoin has reignited the MEV on bitcoin conversation because they go hand in hand

OEV is not a thing, but MEV on Bitcoin will definitely be a thing.

Seaport also has hooks now!

Now we got hooks on (if I remember correctly) OpenSea, Uniswap, Sushiswap, Cowswap, Story, and Safe.

short and incomplete list of some of the prominent Ethereum builders

Aligned people.

gas was built with the evm as the unit if we native-ify contracts a la jitevm how do we price execution?

"guesstimate" based on "each ARM/x86 opcode".

After the first inscription block was mined how many blocks did it take before porn was inscribed into a Bitcoin block?

291 blocks..

Ya'll realize Blobs expire right?

"Why would you ever inscribe to blobs, considering they expire?", but actually the historical ones are replayable.

a way for BitVM to do permissionless verification

BitVM2.

the seed from which Arbitrum grew

The journey of Arbitrum and interactive fraud proof.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Why build an Ethereum L2?

Why "Ethereum" L2, not other L1. Because it's all about "ETH". See also: Solana L2s. Discuss, and for dedicated throughput and Chihuahua chain.

why would an L2 opt in for based sequencing?

Full decentralization, and fast block time of base layer if L1 is fast like Solana.

How much gas per second L2s needs to get to similar adoption and transaction volume levels as Solana while having as low or lower fees

* Ethereum making a great progress towards the 10m tps/s goal. * L2s needs to step up their execution game. * We're almost ready to onboard billions onchain.

One Protocol on Blast hacked and people are mocking their centralized cope

Their takes and statuses, and related resources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.

open source devs should NOT be held criminally liable for the crimes of foreign terrorists

"Why tornado cash dev should be free".

A blockchain's transaction capacity is equal to the capacity of its L1 plus the capacity of all L2s under its security.

Ethereum L2 are serving 10x txs.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

what's currently the best DeFi oriented wallet explorer which shows swaps etc. in easy to read format with L2 support?

onceupongg and rabby.

BidDog

an open source am-AMM implementation.

coinvestooor

VC Investment Network Visualization.

When did it become standard practice for newly launched tokens to allocate >50% to team + investors?

MORE team MORE investor allocations!

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

Native Restaking Dashboard for EigenLayer

By Rated Network.

nft pulse

Explore NFT Data By Marketplace.

Preconfirmations

A promise that some data will become finalized on the L1.

does anyone know of some good address label datasets for very old ethereum contracts? (pre-2018)

There's a big database in @trueblocks.

Ethereum Reorg Dashboard

I didn't know that is that many reorgs.

🔍 🕸️ Web

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

Accessible web is important.

🔍 📖 Others

Miraculous Staircase

A beautiful staircase in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "The staircase has two 360-degree turns and no visible means of support.

Taxonomy of bank failure

Suddenly they are good now.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

Can someone explain to me why LLMs need to be onchain?

why not.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Email2Ether

Email Onboarding Powered by ZK, built during ETHDenver.

The Cathedral and Bazaar of Zero Knowledge

More on decentralized proving network for zk. Also see here.

The cryptographic security v.s. crypto-economic security debate

ZK cannot do liveness and distribution of incentives. ZK coprocessors will only carve a niche in privacy preserving applications.

ZK age check

A project for verifying user's age in websites using Mina circuits.

awesome-zk-verifer

A curated list of awesome onchain zkp verifiers.

layouter-v3-zkevm

simple layouting algorithm that merges advice columns tested on the zkevm-circuits.

A ZK Hacker Guide: Analysis of Leading ZKML Frameworks on Neural Networks

Ethereum Foundation granted benchmark on zkML frameworks. ORA's circomlib-ml is still leading.

zk-nintendo

prove the execution of a modified, headless, NES emulator with Succinct's SP1 zkVM. Something similar with dappicom.

nexus-zkvm

Another zkVM.

proven-zk

A support library for working with zero knowledge cryptography in Lean 4.

Parallel Zero-knowledge Virtual Machine

GKR again~

BrainBench

benchmark for on-chain inference (zkML only).

Experiments and Evaluation of ZK Backends

Pi Squared's benchmark on cairo, lurk, risc0, zkllvm... Direct comparison graph.

Notes on efficient polynomial commitment schemes and fflonk

"The application of the BDFG strategy in fflonK crucially shifts the dependency from the number of points at which polynomials are evaluated to the number of polynomials themselves."

So do people use “STARK” to refer to any SNARK without a trusted setup procedure or is that a specific brand name for the Starkware FRI proofs?

The most preferred answer is "Anything that uses FRI".

bitvm-zk-verifier

BitVM Groth16 Verifier Toolkit by Chainway. See tweet.

ZK Fraud Proof with ZK State Channel

We can use the zk state channel to provide a zk fraud proof to resolve the disputes swiftly in the optimistic systems.

Client-side proof generation is a must for Aztec's privacy zk-rollup

Why? There are user transactions that need to remain truly private.

mini-snark

A simple SNARK implementation in Python.

zknft

tlsnotary e2e demo.

powdr-revme

powdr application running Ethereum tests via revm.

Subscribe now

🔍 🧠 AI

Open Sora

This project aim to reproduce Sora (Open AI T2V model) by PKU.

WebGPU will change ML

With the recent release of ONNX Runtime with WebGPU, in-browser ML is about to change.

Suddenly GPT4 has four competitors

Gemini 1.5, Mistral Large, Claude 3 Opus, Inflection-2.

Extropic

thermodynamic computing paradigm that can enable faster & more energy-efficient AI accelerators.

The Internet of Agents

"the integration of blockchain infrastructure and AI agents is desirable and that it will give rise to an Internet of Agents". Also see tweet for more discussion.

TownWorld

a 3D simulation of a small town populated by fully autonomous AI agents.

awesome-llm-json

Resource list for generating JSON using LLMs via function calling, tools, CFG. Libraries, Models, Notebooks, etc.

ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots

"LLMs are trained to block harmful responses. Old-school images can override those rules."

If you were a neural network which one would you be and why?

"Humans kind of are already".

The HN folks have discovered Devin the AI software engineer.

"And suddenly they’re all Marxists."

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

VeriFido

verifiable Ethereum indexing with Cartesi.

New year same ETH denial syndrome

..2021 PoS won't launch! 2022 No withdrawals! 2023 No scale! 2024 No ETF!

Wen Dutch Auction?

A mindflow on why you always want to use Dutch Auction, ...and enjoy the nobel prize.

Solo stakers are missing their slots mainly

"because they don't show up (=are offline) and are not reorged significantly more often than other (arguably bad) validators. Same applies to Rocketpool. The actual surprise is Coinbase, though." Whales spotted in the pic lol.

the first fully uncollateralized lending system in crypto

For smolrefuel, "my assumption is that if ppl have 50k$ in tokens they aren't gonna be so cheap to default on a 10$ loan, we'll see llamao".

#Bitcoin was 40 years of work.

Bitcoin and the rise of Cypherpunks.

Send Blobs

70% of the total calldata comes from rollups publishing data. (also Bur how much is calldata from all the gas cost? >10% and 90% for evm ops). Also Data Availability Post 4844 by Scroll. FYI, if you want to send your own EIP-4844 tx see here. And blob-club. And excited to see where blob market stabilizes at. And Blob Contention. And Some day the total number of blobs posted onchain will be higher than the number of blocks!. And the first BEE MOVIE. And One of the first transaction with a blob on Ethereum posted for - virtually - zero cost (for now). And posting Blobs now. And absolutely nailed the messaging and content for 4844. And One more lane will fix it. And if there's strong congestion on L1, L2s could just withhold data and post it later, resulting in way lower fees. And Tldr: both "blobs are free" and "builders will ignore blobs" views are overblown. And A quick view on the State of the Blob. And yes BlobScriptions. And "merged in the blob {en,de}coder tooling". And mblob (basically blob merger back in the days).

Someone out there is mining blocks for the zero address like there's no tomorrow

Check your setup for the node. "fee-recipient should be mandatory, even if it's then set to the zero address."

Can we please stop saying that lack of local fee markets is a "fundamental flaw" of the EVM design

"SVM didn't originally have local fee markets either", response to "The lack of Fee isolation is a fundamental flaw in the EVM design".

Bitcoin has...

no charismatic leader, no funded foundation, no governance token, no vesting schedule... Nothing.

some sort of dystopian crypto hellscape

The Year is 2025 Uniswap has made the Unichain... And...

“ZK bridges” for cross-chain are NOT trust minimized

Cause you still need to trust the chain (which is in honest majority). "ZK doesn’t prove anything if each blockchain doesn’t know the canonical state of the blockchain (impossible unless you literally build an L2 with validity proofs)."

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Customisation Curation and Specialisation

why you, as an app developer, should be building with modular infrastructure: ordering & monetisation, customisation & complementation, curation & specialisation.

A difference that will soon be very important: only State Diff based rollup can do Volition

Next big narrative of StarkNet: Volition. Finally here!

Celestia rollup that’s free for users.

"Your DA is cheap af anyways, why not subsidize for users?"

My first take on @Blast_L2 and the risk of your deposits there

"The idea to invest your funds put in a bridge is not new, but Blast takes it to the new level (in terms of TVL, at least)". Also Part 2: TL/DR is that Blast is really a hedge fund with L2 bolted in. Its ecosystem right now.

Why wait a week? Fast Finality Optimistic Rollups

Basically let validators to have alternative way (maybe a zkp) to send signal that something is correct.

Incentivizing honesty and participation in the OP Stack’s Fault Proof System

the theory behind how bonds are incorporated into the OP Stack's Fault Dispute Game to incentivize both participation and honest behavior.

The buzz around Bitcoin rollups is insane.

how and why Bitcoin is going modular with some of the chads making it possible. See also Some deep Bitcoin L2 questions for my smart friends and a lot of new attention to “Bitcoin L2s”, but also a lot of confusion.

My 10 thoughts on Modular after ETHDenver

It's no longer a narrative, but a reality.

Kernel Ventures: Rollup Summer — The Flywheel Momentum Kicked Off by ZK Fair

"delve into the development of ZK Fair and provide a fundamental analysis of the current Rollup landscape".

Ethereum is now captured by the very same custodial L2 plague as Bitcoin. And it literally repeats Bitcoin step by step

Step 1. Ban L1 scaling, Step 2. Introduce scaling "solutions", Step 3. Make L1 even more expensive. Both call it "scaling". The truth is it's not scaling: it's just an attempt (a successful one so far) to lock people into custodial L2 products. Also Solana is basically shared sequencing. Also Ethereum: innovating around based sequencing designs; Bitcoin: calling sidechains sequencers.

Blockchain need to be upgraded. Even... rollups.

"the uncomfortable truth - can rollups really be more agile than L1 once they have enough at stake?"

Which is more an “Ethereum L2”

It's an L2 because we said it's an L2.

the fact that Celestia has DAS doesn't help you

"Data availability sampling doesn't help secure your rollup if your DA layer and consensus layer are different".

Validiums need their own Stages system

"A good Validium (with good DA, good DA bridge, upgradability with plenty of time to exit, etc...) can be more secure than instantly upgradable Rollup with permissioned fault/fraud proof system (or lack of)".

ORU vs. ZKRU tradeoffs

op is gud always. Also extended discussion and here. And If I had to deposit $1B with a gun to my head, I would probably use an optimistic rollup see also here and here and here and here.

The reason ZK L2s with decentralized sequencer escape hatches and exit windows are better than alt L1s

This has been well understood for years.

Ethereum L2s can steal all user funds at any moment!

Always have been. But the pizza will be greener in the future.

One underrated part of Optimism’s superchain vision is that you could have pretty fast interoperability between L2s with different sequencers

Still gotta run full node.

panDA

An abstraction layer for DAs to scale up. It's actually what every RaaS or Rollup framework should have.. Great deck.

Fighting L2s is akin to fighting multi processors in 90s.

Cannot find human that fights L2s.

L2 frens hour: say something nice about another L2 team

Where was the L2 and first zkEVM war bros.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

how many billions of dollars have been wasted on ERC20 approve() transactions

$763M on Ethereum alone.

Calling it "LVR"

'a bit like calling the difference between a real car's engine's efficiency and the theoretical physical limit "loss versus perpetual motion"'

Everything Is A Perp

Basically you can frame everything as a perp, with different powers of index prices. See more discussion here.

auction-managed AMM

An Auction-Managed Automated Market Maker. Shows the design space of v4.

Measuring the impact of hidden DEX costs

How RFQ protects users from MEV-induced slippage.

someone trades on Uniswap in 20 years

"value will not simultaneously go to a builder, filler, wallet, web frontend, L2 sequencer, suave validator, L1 eth burn, L1 mev burn, rollup DAO, paymaster, relayer, trading protocol DAO, AMM LP, 3rd party DA provider, L3, LST protocol, etc". God we got so many infras.

Anyone have real data on why stablecoin borrow rates have skyrocketed?

Conjecture: Ethena and Pendle.

Why I’m bullish on defi

"ethena will bring funding yield (maybe like 60% on 5B) onchain, creating a large liquidity suck, rerating all sources of borrow".

Aave has passed a proposal to whitelist free flash loans for select actors.

"The thing is, Uniswap v4 will offer free flash loans for all users, from its singleton pool. Fees are going to zero.". See PoC.

🔍 🤖 MEV

Censorship on L1 and Inclusion List

"I outline why I believe addressing censorship in relayers and builders is more pressing, and a natural solution is to give validators some degree of freedom to include their own transactions (i.e., an inclusion list)." For somehow, I always wanna put these into MEV section. See also A censoring builder at 40% market share and censorship on mainnet is currently a non-issue

An Analysis of Intent-Based Markets

"We find broad conditions for oligopoly in intent markets". More participate != better price for users. "90%+ fill rates from single centralized entity and most auctions entirely uncontested".

Economic Analysis of Execution Tickets

1. ETs allow the protocol to capture all MEV; 2. ETs are a new Ethereum native asset (like ETH); 3. ETs are MEV futures.

King of MEV jaredfromsubway.eth has just set a new record

Bro spent $130M in gas fee alone.

The Intents Landscape

In lieu of thread I present ye olde Web2 style logo wall for all the Intent players.

today - ETH introduced blobs - Some MEV issues

proposers will realize that if the proposer before them has $$$$ MEV they should send 6 blobs for the ~2% it will get reorged (the “threshold” at which block propagation reaches avg slot); beaver will realize it should just ignore the blobs to gain another 200ms.

On OEV

Putting MEV back to where it belongs.

The Spectre of MEV on Bitcoin

Yeah Ordinal related MEV!

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

How to retrieve all the transactions of a wallet in one line of @DuneAnalytics code

For you data scientists.

Intent Core

a reasonably optimized, minimalist intent engine.

bybit-smm

A simple market making bot for Bybit.

op-stack-bridge

Bridge for op-stack chains using WAGMI.

what's the most easy peasy way to make a ui for a contract nowadays?

evmkit.com, scaffoldeth.io, eth95.exe, ABI Ninja, whatsabi...

GasFees.io

tracks the gas cost of performing common actions on different L1s and L2s.

Stop doing smart contract development

no.

zabi

Interact with EVM based chains via Zig!

TimechainStats

Gud dashboard for Bitcoin.

weAudit

the collaborative code-reviewing tool by trail of bits.

Calldata.pics

See live blob usage, live block size, live calldata usage and everything.

L2 Watch

Dashboard for Bitcoin L2s.

Bitcoin Layers

A general overview of Bitcoin layers (core, stacks, lightning, etc).

🔍 🛸 Cosmos

🔍 🕸️ Web

big thread about native development for Apple Vision Pro

Tips for apple developers.

🔍 📖 Others

Here's why hiring an all-star marketing leader won't fix your problems

tl;dr: - CMOs don't exist; - if they do they're wildly expensive; - they don't work because you can't outsource story.

Midjourney v6 to reimagine famous artwork in an aesthetic inspired by Wes Anderson films

Cool.

Inner monologues actually offer great intuition on why an internet of agents can work better than a single one

Native built-in agent == inner monologue.

'90s Dad Thrillers: a List

Notes toward a theory of the Dad Thriller.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

NYU Blockchain Lab: Breakdown of Infrastructure From Research Perspective

My first talk at ETHDenver!

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Remainder - world's most powerful ZKML prover

200x proving overhead on decision forest inference.

an overview of the main zk-rollups in the space

categorises these rollups and compares proof systems, VMs, and EVM compatibility, highlighting notable chains built with their respective zk stacks.

If EVM = HTTP ZK = HTTPS

HTTPS (SSL) provided integrity of communication, paving the path for online banking, SaaS, remote work. ZK provides integrity of computation, enabling interoperability at infinite scale.

You Don't Need a Ph.D. to Build ZK-Enabled Apps

Some zk applications for mass adoption and consumer use cases.

stwo

StarkNet's new prover, with M31 field, Improved Cairo VM, Circle STARK, GKR lookup, Mixed-degree trace.

TEEs are a crutch for weak people who don’t want to solve hard problems

Gud discussion on TEEs and ZK. One good point in here is "if we build with TEE, we could have real applications".

WARPfold - Wrongfield ARithmetic for Protostar folding

an approach to non-native arithmetic in folding; in the paper it is discussed for Protostar, but it also works for Hypernova in the same way.

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🔍 🧠 AI

opML: Optimistic Machine Learning on Blockchain

A production-grade machine learning framework for blockchain.

opp/ai: Optimistic Privacy-Preserving AI

Combines zkML + opML with zkML's privacy and opML's scalability. See thread.

Introducing IMO: Initial Model Offering

Tokenizing AI Models as ERC-20 with Onchain AI Oracle and Revenue Sharing token. Also ETHDenver talk.

LLM Powered Autonomous Agents

"it can be framed as a powerful general problem solver."

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

In support of simple inclusion lists

"I would prefer implementing an optional protocol that does not need a hard-fork and rolling it out as soon as possible over adding a complicated scheme under consensus were we don’t know whether Relays and Block builders will follow it and where having multiple consecutive blocks gives bigger stakers and pools an advantage over smaller operations." See also: Inclusion List (EIP-7547) End to End Workflow.

The more the less censored: Introducing committee-enforced inclusion sets (COMIS) on Ethereum

inclusion lists: A committee of multiple proposers participate in the construction of an inclusion set (IS) of transactions to force include in the subsequent block.

to know how much ETH is "really" staked on ethereum

It's not simply TVL. "we have to check withdrawal addresses to see how many are using eigenpods, and then subtract however much ETH has been "slashed" at that layer."

Betting On 7 Deadly Sins

SocialFi: 100x-ing on pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

ODIN

bonded service on ethereum via EigenLayer that works with block builders to pause dapps before a malicious transaction is executed by simulating protocol invariants and economic incentives.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

new policy for Bitcoin Magazine regarding their Bitcoin L2 coverage

TLDR: 1/ L2 cannot have its own token; 2/ Must be able to bridge back to L1; 3/ Cannot function without Bitcoin; 4/ Meta-protocols are ok (Ordinals, BRC-20).

the "true" way to build was to enable "permissionless innovation" at L2s/L3s?

Vitalik said it may require L2 to be simpler for fault tolerance. L1s should be simple.

What exactly is Arweave AO?

It's all sovereign rollups and storage based computing paradigm!

Booster rollups design

"Imagine deploying your dapp once and having it scaled automatically across all L2s. If extra blockspace is needed, more booster rollups can be added without any additional setup work".

Minimal KeyStore Rollup spec

A spec for Vitalik's Dedicated minimal rollup for keystores.

Contract Deployment Approaches in Layer-2 Solutions

transaction compressed based rollup => send tx to zero address for deploying; state-diff based rollup => Declare on L1 => Deploy on L2. More details here.

Superchain Savings Estimator

Find out how much cheaper your recent Superchain transactions will be once EIP-4844 arrives (already arrived!).

Nobody knows what post-4844 L2 fees will be like.

CT speculates on: - L1 blobgas market/volatility; - L1 priority fee extraction; - L2 DA submit rate....

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

The risks of LRTs

"LRTs are risky. There is no free lunch; risk accompanies the additional rewards for holding LRTs."

A proposal that pushes @Uniswap's infamous “Fee Switch” closer to reality has once again put CT into a frenzy

This time is different cause real stuff was built.

When people talk about @Uniswap there are 3 different entities they might be referring to

Uniswap Labs (App, X, Wallet), Uniswap DAO, Uniswap Foundation.

🔍 🤖 MEV

Ethernow

What's happening on Ethereum right now? Cool new concept of Blob Contention.

Reconsidering the market structure of PBS

"we need to precise which market we’re interested in: the market allocating proposing rights, or the market allocating building rights?"

Why aren't transactions landing on chain?

"You can look at the tool used to monitor public transactions; it should identify transactions that should be included in a block but are not. It’s not 100% reliable, but it throws up some exciting blocks to explore. Either way more resarch is required."

So Cowswap single-handedly solved LVR & MEV and nobody is talking about it?

"LVR - yeah, if you're fine with a centralized auction; MEV - not really, since solvers are whitelisted and are trusted with pre-trade transparency".

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

Upgradeable contracts are not something to brag about

"In fact it introduces an additional attack vector risk. Contracts should be immutable if possible by default, unless there’s very strong reason for upgrading." And "Immutability serves as a pivotal element in fostering trustlessness, whilst the implementation of upgradeable contracts directly compromises the immutable nature inherent to all contract structures."

EIP-4844-dev-usage

Open-sourced an EIP-4844 dev usage tutorial. Dive into blob transactions, opcodes, precompiles, etc, with easy-to-follow examples.

EVM from Scratch

An ongoing open-source book on EVM by shafu.

mopro

Making client-side proving on mobile simple.

balls

A DSL for generating optimal EVM bytecode.

gaslite-core

Gaslite's Highly Optimized Smart Contracts.

🔍 🕸️ Web

Happy Leap Day!

Bugs in the leap day 2024.

🔍 📖 Others

DOOM via Checkboxes

DOOM rendered via checkboxes in a web browser. Also a fork of DOOM via Console.Log()!.

How they used to trace money flows in criminal investigations in the 1980s

Basically visualize every transaction on a huge board.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

ORA team will be at ETHDenver and give 15 talks & panels

Everything about AI, ZK, and Blockchain. Also our own event and party.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Polygon zkEVM: proving Ethereum mainnet blocks avg per-transaction costs are $0.002 - $0.003

The only comparable stack is RISC Zero's, but now we also got Succinct's SP1 at 0.01-0.02 average precompile system.

Speeding up M31 (2^31 - 1) arithmetic on different CPU architectures for Plonky3

Goldilocks is making another prime field really fast.

Succinct announced Succinct Processor 1 (SP1)

A new cool great open-source zkVM based on Plonky3. Multiple dunks on RISC Zero. With benchmarks looking much better than RISC Zero. Uma's analogy: plonky3 = pytorch, SP1 = GPT4. The ecosystem moves: SP1 Sovereign SDK adapter. Thoughts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Our highly subjective view on the history of Zero-Knowledge Proofs

By LambdaClass.

Proof of accredited investorship with zkPass Part I

"Or: Proving that you are an accredited investor so you can legally buy almost any securities and receive airdrops, with zkPass".

CLS

circom language server.

Introducing Circle STARK

The foundation for another leap forward in scaling blockchains with STARK proofs.

zkwasm-research-backup

zkwasm research backup by Fluent Labs member.

ZKVM Compilers: Goals

By Anoma.

Doom in RISC0

Finally some real use case of zk lol.

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🔍 🧠 AI

AI Intent Engine

z0r0zzz built IE (Intent Engine), then AI Intent Engine is built. OSS keeps winning~

LWM

A general-purpose large-context multimodal autoregressive model.

Scaling ChatGPT: Five Real-World Engineering Challenges

Five scaling challenges: KV Cache & GPU RAM, Optimizing batch size, Finding the right metrics to measure, Finding GPUs wherever they are, Inability to autoscale.

Trust and Teach

Similar to opML, but use general purpose rollup Catesi to run LLM.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

5 takeaways from “Read Write Own” by Chris Dixon

1: Networks are the internet’s killer app; 2: Corporate Network Incentives; 3. Squeezing The Balloon; 4: Innovation is Skeumorphic; 5: Ownership.

Breaking BFT: Quantifying the Cost to Attack Bitcoin and Ethereum

How much does it cost to 51% attack Bitcoin and Ethereum? To find out, we simulated what an attack would look like.

By All Accounts: On Points Attestations & Tokens

"Onchain points serve as a potential new primitive for teams to use alongside tokens to explore paths to better user identity, user ownership, and incentive alignment. However, points will only be conducive towards these goals to the extent that they’re carefully leveraged with these ends in mind."

ERC20 phishing scams netted $50M/m to the bad guys mostly using permit() increaseAllowance() approve().

"This is the legacy of idiots in Ethereum security community. We are now on track to lose $600M money this year because of loud parroting, not stopping thinking what is being done, what will be the implications and does it make sense in the first place."

your open-source claim is just simply a meme!

Uniswap closed dev's pr on changing license to open-source one.

Thinking about the history of airdrops

"What was the best ever airdrop? Why?" Mentions: Uniswap, Optimism, Arbitrum... Also Why Airdrops don't work.

Unbundling staking: Towards rainbow staking

Rainbow staking, a conceptual framework allowing protocol service providers, whether “solo” or “professional”, to maximally participate in a differentiated menu of protocol services, adapted to their own strengths and value propositions.

Shumo's Story with Manta

"three stories that is along the journey which worth remembering".

Good lesson in oracle integration design here

"For loan originations, if you have a backup price oracle, you should use the more conservative of the inputs (lower bound for valuing the collateral, upper bound for valuing the debt)". Actually the problem is Compound v2 use Uniswap TWAP.

Concurrent Block Proposers in Ethereum

"We present an initial analysis of increasing the number of proposers in a single slot."

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

What everyone gets wrong about building blockchain apps

Decentralization is not an On-Off Switch.

shared vs. dedicated sequencers for L2s

"- Use a shared sequencers if your L2 need atomic composability with others. - Don't use a shared sequencer if you don't care about atomic composability and want maximize performance or sovereignty over sequencing."; "no L2 needs atomic composability with others (and if you want this, you are misinformed and a cuck); the only reason to delegate sequencing to somebody else's network (not necessarily shared) is because your lawyer said you shouldn't run the sequencer yourself".

Bringing MOVE to the EVM

Move + EVM = Movement.

What are your feelings on Bitcoin L2s?

We can't build true L2s right now, or even offchain DA ones. But we can do sovereign rollups and BitVM rollups.

why are all the zk rollups underperforming optimistic rollups?

"zksync, the biggest zk rollup, has only $140m TVL. optimism has 6x that and arbitrum has 20x. are zk rollups cursed or something?"

Reviving a Cursed Coin

"I spent a few days researching the competitive landscape on ZK rollups and got really bullish on Polygon".

What's the difference between rollups and sidechains?

Answers: direct inherits L1 safety, unilateral exit, ability to force tx inclusion to L1, consensus external or internal.

Time is a flat circle.

One-click deploy of rollup now (new smart contract), the degenerator before.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Uniswap v4 + UniswapX will change the game for DEXes by connecting orderflow & liquidity across all chains

TL;DR: DEXes will no longer have a home field advantage; More powerful concentrated liquidity without headaches.

Ethena

A new "stablecoin" (they said they are not lol) with 27% yield. Funding announcement. Thoughts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. 20.

are a TPA (token purchasing agreement) and SAFT (simple agreement for future tokens) generally regarded as the same thing?

TPA = Spot Contract, SAFT = Forward Contract.

a proposal to upgrade Uniswap Protocol's governance system

Bullish signal on crypto in general. Turning on fee switch not included. Also, UniStaker, estimated rewards.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

czip

EVM Calldata Zip, aka czip.

ephema

A research group focused on unravelling truth at the cutting edge of the Ethereum ecosystem.

fast-fourier-transform-solidity

An implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm written in Solidity, a crucial algorithm in the realm of digital signal processing.

zkllvm-mpt-proofs

zkLLVM-based Merkel Patricia Tree storage proofs.

LLM x Security

- LLM-based Invariant Synthesis, - LLM-guided Fuzzing, - LLM-based Test Harness Synthesis.

createXcrunch

A Rust-based program designed to efficiently find zero-leading, zero-containing, or pattern-matching addresses for the CreateX contract factory.

aave-address-book

A source for all Aave ecosystem addresses, constantly maintained and both Solidity and JS-friendly.

Sandooo

A sandwich bot.

bls12-381-hd

BLS12-381 hierarchical key derivation in Go - ERC-2333 & ERC-2334.

aligned_layer

A verification layer for zero-knowledge proofs using Eigen Layer. Our mission is to extend Ethereum's zk capabilities.

balls

A DSL for generating optimal EVM bytecode.

Tstorish

Use TSTORE in contracts deployed to multiple chains with varying opcode support.

🔍 🤖 MEV

a new type of MEV-resistant auction

Leaderless Auction, a decentralized auction with no auctioneer, "assumes a predetermined participant set of which more than two thirds are honest". Basically MPC co-processor.

State Lock Auctions

Aligning Incentives in Ethereum's Transaction Arena.

Introducing the CAKE framework

Chain Abstraction Key Elements. Application layer -> permission layer -> solver layer -> settlement layer. See also: 1. Working group.

MMASim

MEV-Boost Auction Simulation Framework.

Flashbots Protect & MEV-share data

More here.

🔍 🕸️ Web

Twitter Internal API Document

Reverse engineering of the web version of Twitter.

🔍 📖 Others

Supper place village city state

Want to build a new city or network state? Here's a playbook: Supper, place, village, city, state.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications

By Vitalik. And our post on it about solving the challenge with opML and the tweet.

Subscribe now

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

plonkish_basefold

"a fork of https://github.com/han0110/plonkish, that includes an implementation of BasefoldPCS and an implementation of the Zeromorph compilation of FRI (for benchmarking purposes)".

safu-zk

A website documenting anything and everything about ZK security.

Indifferentiable Hashing

A rust implementation of indifferentiable hashing method that is proposed by Dmitrii Koshelev.

What Is a ZK Audit?

A look into the ZK audit process and techniques the leading ZK auditors employ to examine ZK circuits.

Beyond the Surface

Exploring the Advanced World of Zero-Knowledge Proofs & Recursive SNARKs. This article expands the 2022 talk on Recursive Proofs. Time flies, feels like it was just yesterday.

zkConvex

A Large-Scale Anonymous Electronic Voting Scheme Based on zk-SNARKs.

Benchmarking ZKML Frameworks

Benchmarking ZKML frameworks with ezkl on RISC0, Giza, and ezkl.

The explanations for halo2 are kinda gigabrain

Here’s a guide on understanding Halo2 for dummies.

Passport Verifier

Proof of passport in Noir.

Groth16 verifier with OP_MUL and OP_CAT enabled

A worth mentioning Groth16 verifier with OP_MUL and OP_CAT enabled in 2022.

sgx-tlsn-notary-server

tlsn notary server inside a gramine SGX enclave.

Goat-hash

The Ajtai hash function Over Goldilocks.

Reef

A zkSNARK system for proving that a committed document matches a regex.

Plonky3 performance improvements

Team fixed a performance bug, and now the performance is accelerated by about 10x in about 6 months.

The first ever SNARK proving ASIC

Built by Accseal. Optimized MSMs and FFTs.

zk-eth-call

proves result of eth_call.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Good framing of hash signature and blockchain

A hash/checksum proves "what", A signature proves "who", A blockchain proves "when".

Computer vs. Casino: Crypto’s culture war

Technical vs. Financial, Developer vs. Degen, and more.

The head of growth at AltLayer profited at least $200000 from insider trading BlurCrypto says

Sold NFTs right before the airdrop announcement and after the snapshot announcement. More details. Also analysis from Arkham.

Farcaster Frames

Basically better iframe on Farcaster. See: whats a farcaster frame? Examples: magic trick frame, and Doom.

Most popular TLDs for crypto projects on defillama

.finance > .com > .io > .fi > .xyz > .org...

An overview of recent non-standard Bitcoin transactions

"This is MEV."

EF Academic Grants Round 2024

Wishlist here. Interesting new topics under EF's radar.

Hackers need to fund their accounts with gas but where do they get the funds?

A year ago the answer might have been exclusively Tornado Cash, but now things have changed a bit.

When do Bitcoin Node Operators Upgrade?

An analysis of historical Bitcoin Core node versions to examine the updating behavior of node operators over the years.

ERC404

Mixes ERC20 and ERC721 to give you an NFT token with native fractionalization. Read more here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4. It achives fungibility in NFT trading. Improved version of DN404 and how DN404 works.

V0 of Intents Engine (IE)

A natural language command interface for contracts.

economic security flippening

It's a meme, but it's also a real thing.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

What counts as an L2?

At this point I'm too afraid to ask what is optimium.

can you explain to me what an L3 is without making me cry

L1/L2/L3 mostly just refers to where a chain derives its fork choice rule. L1 nodes - decide their own FCR; L2 nodes - decide FCR by looking at some other L1 (eg Optimism nodes following bridge contract deployed on L1 Ethereum); L3 nodes - decide FCR by looking at an L2.

i cannot think of something that makes less fucking sense than a million rollups

Maybe it's better than 1m smart contracts? Cause each rollup is instantiated into a server. Also Polynya's take.

Unpopular opinion: validiums w/ centralized sequencers and DA is a valid point

Pros: - Self-custodial; - No selective censorship (L1 inbox); - Privacy from public observer; - Speed. Cons: - Centralized MEV; - Possibility of liveness failure.

another example of marketing way before the actual product

Immutable criticized. The optimistic side is also not doing good.

Universal Plasma and DA challenges

This discusses "Optimistic DA" constructions like the one initially introduced by Metis two years ago or the recently proposed OP Plasma spec which will be used by the Redstone OP stack chain.

why would we need L2/3/4s?

Look at Farcaster, we do need those layers!

Can we stop saying that shared sequencing enables synchronous composability by default?

The only current way for one to "synchronously compose" between the L2s sequenced together is to operate the full nodes for all of those L2s.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Jupiter Team Fraud History

Team hustles.

Has Uniswap lost the plot and become part of TradFi?

"Uniswap touts open-source, decentralization, etc. values (and was founded based on a FOSS grant from the EF) but popularized BSL and maintains an army of vicious IP lawyers who go after even compliant uses of the small fraction of their stuff that is still open-source". And also Uniswap's recent open source move.

smolrefuel.com

Ever had tokens but no gas money to use them? This solves that. It uses permits to do a swap that requires no initial ETH, so you can get your first ETH.

Whales Market

Trade token warrents, even points, even WLs...

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

walletscrutiny

Know your wallet like you built it.

walletcompare

A sheet for comparing wallets.

some thoughts about Bitcoin after working on a Bitcoin L2

TLDR, "developing on Bitcoin is a horrible experience".

MassDropERC721

A modern, minimalist, and gas-efficient ERC-721 implementation that introduces a novel design allowing creators to mass mint tokens to specified addresses at deployment time.

who is the best smart contract audit firm as of now?

Answers: @trailofbits, @ChainLight_io, @kalos_security, @SpearbitDAO, @NethermindEth, @CertoraInc, @sherlockdefi, @LeastAuthority...

Batch Transactions (AA) and State Diffs are more powerful than you think

Saves a lot of gas for the user. Also Comparing ZK rollups.

Cairovm Codes

Online Cairo compiler. I thought it will be something like evm.codes, but it's an online playground for Cairo.

blur-v2

Blur has no public GitHub so this repo houses all contracts for Blur and Blend. Also DethCode for better viewing code of Ethscan.

Sui and Aptos

Core difference Toxic marketing driven vs engineering driven culture lol.

blobstream-starknet

Celestia -> Starknet bridge. A port of Celestia Blobstream X contracts in Cairo for Starknet.

The best Ethereum analytics sites

@l2beat, @growthepie_eth, @tokenterminal, @DuneAnalytics, @flipsidecrypto, @ultrasoundmoney, @beaconcha_in, @DefiLlama...

Transient Goodies

Transient bytes but may add more data structures soon.

reth-walk-storage

Uses the reth db to walk through all the storage slots of a contract.

open-stylus

Abstracted OpenZeppelin smart contracts written in Rust for Arbitrum Stylus.

PoWFaucet

Modularized faucet for EVM chains with different protection methods (Captcha, Mining, IP, Mainnet Balance, Gitcoin Passport and more).

🔍 🤖 MEV

UMA Oval: Capture MEV Created By Your Oracle

So basically what it does is that it allows you as the protocol to capture the redistributed MEV created by your oracle. Explanation by UMA is "Today there is a public tx (the Chainlink update) that creates fuck tons of MEV. Oval's goal is to force an auction to be run to recapture that MEV. We decided to do this by hacking Flashbot's MEV-Share because we can add essentially no additional trust assumptions over MEV-Share." More discussions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

"Sirrah" a minimalist TEE coprocessor

Kind of a mashup of Solidity and Gramine-SGX. The code release and end-to-end demo include an MEV-aware auction and a timelock decryptor.

OFAs are a bad idea

Orderflow has two sources of value, the most obvious is due to inefficient execution. This is what we see when transactions are backrunnable, or when liquidation protocols are designed to use instant liquidations instead of auctions (like Maker).

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

want an easy 500M?

Do this: - fork any existing DA layer (Celestia for example), - rename all refs to Data Availability as Data Publishing, - say you are the first-ever Data Publishing layer in crypto, - add points system, - sprinkle in the word yield in there somewhere. I'm literally the author of the CIP-5 (rename DA to DP). If you wanna do this and want my recognition, I will give it to you if you give me airdrop. I'm half joking, half serious. Oh maybe 80% joking.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Zero Knowledge in the Celestia Baselayer

New working group for ZK in Celestia. See existing researches, ZK-Proving DAS, and (ZK-based Improvements to Celestia).

Debunking TEE FUD: A Brief Defense of The Use of TEEs in Crypto

Some common misconceptions/superficial arguments about TEE’s like SGX and their intended use floating around so we thought we would compile some quickfire responses.

The Proof Supply Chain

The pipeline from an application’s intent to generate a ZK proof to that proof’s on-chain submission.

Understanding the Zero-Knowledge Landscape

A comprehensive overview of the zk landscape.

"Why not just use ZK?" or "Why not just use FHE?"

You don't need ZK or FHE.

kzg-verifier

KZG commitment verifier in Noir.

Every time you wrap a SNARK in another SNARK

"you’re “leveraging up” on cryptography. You’re rehypothecating field elements. Each layer of your IVC increases the risk to the whole system".

Subscribe now

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Heuristics for Detecting Censorship

Methods for detecting censorship: track high paying transactions, track waiting transactions, track reorged transactions, track interactions with specific addresses, track addresses not being included. Read full here.

Batch Transactions for EOAs

Supercharged EOAs will save millions of dollars & cement the EVM's network effects.

the most successful brand associations in crypto history

Uniswap -> AMM, Celestia -> Modularity... And restaking related narratives.

EigenLayer's approach is different from Polkadot and even Cosmos

So Polkadot is shared security, but EigenLayer and Cosmos are not. Other restaking related works: Evolution of the Trust and EigenLayer, Restaking in Shared Sequencers, who are the top 3 eigenlayr competitors? why haven't we seen any clones pop up?, The Future of Liquid Restaking.

Anatomy of a Verkle proof

"I’ll dive deep into it since I believe it’s a surface area of this EIP that is still quite opaque to many people (i.e: even client teams working on this change)."

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Value-Capturing Based Rollups with Based Preconfirmations

Proposes a protocol for based rollups to capture block-blocking value through auction for exchanging preconfirmation rights.

Classic L2s and Light L2s

Probably better terms for L2 based on the core issues, Classic L2s = rollups, plasma, state channels; Light L2s = validiums, volitions.

someone tried to call upgradeTo on the optimism bridge lol

Intention is to to upgrade the bridge contract to his own malicious version. Almost got it lol.

Optimium/AnyTrust have equivalent security to a sidechain

"An Optimium, the fraud-proof-equivalent of a validium, has sidechain-level security and is not an ideal scaling solution for Ethereum." More discussion: 1, 2.

Again Finality

Finality has two meanings for L2: L1 ordering / inclusion finality, and the real real finality (must consider challenge period if op). L2Beat used the ordering finality one. Some discussions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Orderflow.art

Illuminating Ethereum's order flow landscape. And some insights from it on UniswapX and on CoWSwap.

Uniswap Protocol Fee Report

Overall recommendation is incrementally rolling them out.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

sandstorm-starkware-verifier-integration

Repo for reverse engineered StarkWare's verifier.

Ethereum Dashboards

A collection of dashboards related to Ethereum.

A UI for Flashbots Protect

Even easier to use with this new UI.

5th annual ElectricCapital Developer Report

Annual report on the state of Web3 dev ecosystem.

Why can't I revoke all approvals on an Ethereum account in a single transaction?

Because EOAs can’t do batch transactions. EIP-3074 fixes this, call your local core dev to include it in the next hardfork. See also this is isomorphic to being able to have all your funds stolen in a single transaction (Solana-style)..

anyone have examples of ERC-20s that do not implement the decimals() method?

Good lists in the replies: erc20-addresses, weird-erc20. Related.

If I fire off like 50 txns with nonces 0-49 from the same address what does mempool do?

"afair, geth puts the lowest nonce tx into the 'pending' pool and all others in the 'queued' pool, as a tx is included, the tx with the consecutive nonce is moved into pending and so on". A lot more insights from the comment.

trustless-blockchain-data-verifier

Verify blockchain data presented at popular websites using Light Client technology.

etherscan-quick

Open blockchain explorers in less than a second.

🔍 🤖 MEV

Trading in the Dark: Measuring Reordering Slippage in MEV

Aka why TG bots are experiencing it disproportionately. "likely due to intra-bundle competition and their preference for trading illiquid pairs."

Essential Tools for Ethereum Block Builders

Toolkit for MEV space.

🔍 🕸️ Web

How Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases

"Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved."

Ideal monitor rotation for programmers

The perfect rotation is 22 degrees.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

Could Blockchain Be A Key Factor For Trustworthy AI?

AI x Blockchain, and the two approaches of zkML and opML.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

plonky2-gpu

A GPU-accelerated version of Plonky2. It reduced the proving time for ed25519 signatures — from 45s to just 5s.

How do you make sure that a high level zk language generates the correct assembly that is proven by the zkVM?

1: reexecute with compilation to verify it in a blockchain; 2: prove transpilation from the high leel language to the assembly language.

"Why not just use ZK?" or "Why not just use FHE?"

The one-liner: if you only use ZK or FHE, hidden state is fragmented. You can edit your on-chain hidden state. I can edit mine. BUT you cannot edit my state. I cannot edit yours.

how multi-proof works in Taiko

"If these two proving mechanisms have a disagreement, like one of them having a bug, then the system would resort to a higher-tier mechanism." See detail post.

Making Sense of Web3’s Burgeoning AI Ecosystem

Web3 AI tech stack, infrastructure layer, middleware layer, and application layer.

The SNARK vs STARK distinction needs to die. So much misunderstanding caused by people misusing “STARK”.

ZK and SNARK, ZK and Validity, SNARK and STARK.

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🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

2 mining pools (both of them force all miners to KYC) comprise 55% of Bitcoin hash rate.

Potential risk of Bitcoin mining pool.

Do we have a confident way to detect solo stakers yet?

Airdropping to solo staker may be a new trend. Potential solution: ETH-Solo-Validator-Addresses.

BRC-20 Indexer War: Everything You Need to Know

The "fork" on BRC-20. See also blockbeats's report in Chinese.

new era of "soft composability" in Ethereum

Protocol Era -> Ownership Era, Soft Composibility Era.

Bitcoin 2023 Annual Review

Comprehensive coverage of metrics across a number of different verticals in the Bitcoin ecosystem to gauge performance in 2023.

Is Ethereum more permissionless than Solana?

"Yes and no".

blyss for BTC

Count your coins, privately. A website that can tell you the balance of an address without knowing which address you looked up. Using FHE.

Latest Thoughts on Bitcoin: the Good the Bad and the Ugly

Good: Bitcoin works; Bad: Difficult to scale; Ugly: Hard to change protocol.

Someone spent $66000 to inscribe data onto Bitcoin

Initially, no one knows what it says. It appears those 8.93 MB of raw binary data are trait files for a TaprootWizards collection and more about source code: Quantum Cats. And the tech behind the project (really insightful and fun)!

Increase Ethereum Gas Limit Per Block?

Recently, people are discussing about increasing the gas limit of Ethereum. This does not require a hardfork, but only node level configuration. In some of the benchmarks (proves to be outdated), the client of Besu faces some performance issues, but they should be ok with 40 or 60m gas. Vitalik thinks increase gas limit at modest rate is reasonable. And 0xfoobar thinks ethereum should stack rank its clients. This is also related to the state growth of Ethereum and client implementation and client diversity. See also writeup on why increasing the gas limit is difficult. More discussions: 1, 2, 3.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

A taxonomy of data availability policies in (Ethereum) rollups

1. post DA onchain vs. not post DA onchain; 2. post onchain vs. post in DAC; 3. post raw tx data vs. post state diff.

optimium/anytrust chains are equivalent in security to sidechains

For more detail on why this is the case. How you can see that AnyTrust chains have sidechain security. Also see discussion here.

Restaking's risks?

Is restaking the new Terra/UST risk? See also a list of risks, and kydo's response and we need new language for new financial systems

Flipping of L2 TVL to Other L1 TVL

Ethereum L2s = $20.7 billion, Other L1s = $19.67 billion.

Etherscan is awesome but is also a critical point of failure for Ethereum

We need to fix Etherscan with open-source and public infrastructure.

growthepie.xyz

A public goods funded Layer2 fundamentals and blockspace analytics.

What is the difference (if there is any) between Optimiums and Plasma?

Answers: You should be always able to exit permissionlessly from Plasma; Amount of data a whistlblower needs to submit. And big misconception that Plasma = Fraud-Proofs + external DA (similarly to Validiums = Validity Proofs + external DA).

spent some time in the trenches with Celestia data

Key takeaways: - Minimal demand right now, but this is a non-issue. The team nailed RaaS integrations - Fees are probably a long-term issue. Where will sustainable demand come from? - First-price auctions are inefficient, Manta is proving why.

If full danksharding with max 256 blobs is implemented.

It means we can have at least 3 meaningful rollups with 3k tps each.

The Fellowship of The Rollups: Rollup Framework Shared Sequencer and RaaS

Comparisons between Rollup Framework, Shared Sequencer, and RaaS.

Now that it seems that ZK and optimistic go head-to-head against one another

Ultimately, OP will be ZK. "Optimistic rollups were clever to act fast and build network effects and stickiness."

rough proposals that enable interoperability in optimistic rollups with latency < the challenge period

They all have a flaw that node operators will run all the interoperabled chain clients.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

friendtech treasury (All Earned Fees) finally moved from an EOA Address to a Multi-Sig one in Dec.

In the meantime, they also sent half of their earned fees, which is 7,800 ETH ($16.6M), to Coinbase.

"if ETFs then why defi"

Self custody, utility, onchain & crosschain liquidity, lower fees in L2, more financial products and options, "drinking from the teat than being bottle fed".

The Bitcoin ETFs would be "Cash Creation" only.

TL;DR: - Cash Creation outsources execution to the ETF issuer, yet execution is not the issuers' specialty; - In-Kind Creation on the other hand allows experts in slippage minimization to best handle the problem; - Expect high frequency traders scalping ETF flows when issuers strike the NAV (i.e. when they determine the fund's NAV at the end of the trading day).

War and Peace of Euler in 2023

Behind the scenes of Euler's 240M exploit recovery.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

Stealth Chad

An Implementation of ERC-5564 Stealth Addresses and ERC-6538: Stealth Meta-Address Registry.

celestia.cool

A Celestia mempool visualizer.

forge-gas-metering

Utilities for more granular and realistic gas measuring in forge tests.

zevm

Zig Ethereum Virtual Machine.

checkphone.xyz

Check out the estimated values of the perks from the Saga Genesis Token from the Solana Phone.

Tenderly Gas Profiler

Break down gas usage by function call.

mev-bootee

Partial Block Building with TEEs.

Security comes from simplicity.

"108K lines of solidity for your new protocol - this is not the way."

walletbeat.fyi

An open repository of EVM-compatible wallets.

🔍 🤖 MEV

Ethereum Timing Dashboard

Timing games involve validators delaying their block proposals to increase their MEV rewards. A perfect dashboard for that.

🔍 🕸️ Web

Computers by the Millions

By Jef Raskin (the creator of Macintosh).

Capital and enclosure in software commons: Linux & Ethereum

Covers: - intros to Common, commons - commons enclosure/capture - how the Linux + Ethereum commons are structured - how capital engages w/ these commons.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

Shadow events & ERC-7571

I wrote about the controversial shadow event and ERC-7571.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

The prevailing pattern in Circom

Do computation once outside the circuit, then contraining seems bad, because: need to implement same logic twice; double witgen time unnecessarily; many apps don’t need non-determinisms; halo2 lets you pull from advice cols directly.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

"Ethereum L1 is a B2B chain"

People's thoughts: "when podcasters start taking control over a chain’s narrative it’s a red flag"; "nobody's saying ethereum needs to become aptos"; "Is NYC a B2B city?"; "L2s are incredible technologies"; "it's not very serving to individual users if you need a phd to operate an escape hatch"; "And yes Ethereum needs to optimize execution to support rollups and L2s as best as possible"; "Ethereum is not built for users and devs"; "wondering if you’re trying to be the first onchain B2B or something".

In 2024 if anybody quotes you high transactions per second (tps) you respond with questions about

1. gas per second; 2. state size; 3. load distribution; 4. networking environment; 5. reproducible benchmarks.

Five myths about bitcoin

1. finite supply of Bitcoin is just consensus; 2. bitcoin users are anonymous; 3. bitcoin is beyond the reach of the law; 4. bitcoin wastes energy; 5. bitcoin will replace credit cards and/or cash.

What even is the point to the EVM charging gas for memory?

"It's opaque, confusing, makes gas usage unpredictable and encourages state bloat. Let's just give 32MB to every tx, and make it free. That's still nothing compared to the 16GB of memory requirements for geth." "A lot of these gas values were decided early on in the release of Ethereum and just never changed because it 'worked' afaik."

someone should make a coEVM where only invalid EVM txs go through

Like a shadow evm.

Ledger is potentially tracking you

"why did they glue together apps listing and genuine check? They're not trying to save network calls, that's for sure because their software makes 2 thousand network calls for all sorts of unnecessary stuff".

Sticking to 8192 signatures per slot post-SSF: how and why

"faster finality can only be achieved with a smaller validator set size"? See also this.

"Halting the Solana Blockchain with Epsilon Stake"

But in limited setting of "validator set of 3, old code, low spec pc..."

what non-rollup use cases will exist for eip-4844 blobs transactions?

Short term data storage for proofs, temp web content, constantly-refreshed data of global importance, NFT storage, block headers, oracle data...

Annotated Ethereum Roadmap

"By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023!" Also Avalanche's version, and thoughts on Ethereum's democracy process, and some discussion on increasing L1 gas limit.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

crypto-related 2024 predictions by pseudotheos

"A rollup will rug and fail", "ZKRU still don't overtake OPRU"... See also Neel's.

make l2s experiment again

Arbitrum Stylus (latest benchmark), zkSync native AA, StarkNet Cairo, Aztec Noir, Optimism superchain, Fuel Sway, Polygon CDK, Fluent/Stackr WASM and JS, Astria & Espresso shared sequencing, Alt layer restaked rollup...

list of appreciations from toghrul

Solana PoH, Cosmos IBC and Tendermint, Avalanche Snowman, Polkadot "rollupized" sharding, Zcash Sonic and Halo2, Algorand SLEs, Cardano UTXO and Ourobotos.

Shared sequencing is just a nicer way to say "All chains will be run by the same set of people."

Similar to the validator set we have in base layer.

How Celestia Blobstream works

"so a rollup posts data to Celestia (user doesn’t need to do anything). Then the rollup can proof inclusion of some data in Celestia on Ethereum through the use of Blobstream (note you use it at different steps depending on ZK Rollup or Op rollup)". Also see the difference between EigenDA and Celestia Blobstream.

A tweet on tx costs

Take zkSync as an example for tx costs.

Zcash to sovereign rollup

The possibility of Zcash deprecating the Zcash Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, and seeing the Zcash protocol become a Sovereign Rollup.

Origin of EigenDA

All dots are connected.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

The Story of Edge Programming Language

Build a EVM language, but "baited by Paradigm". Sad story.

Heatbeat Explorer

Cool visualization of Cosmos blockchains. And also TxStreet.

Smart Contract Patterns: The Proxy

The proxy pattern, a way to upgrade a smart contract without losing its state.

🔍 🤖 MEV

Runtime Monitoring as DeFi Security Solutions

"There’s a new breed of method, runtime monitoring, that shifts the focus from months of defense preparation to preemptive prevention, enabling responses within seconds."

🔍 🕸️ Web

hacker-news-undocumented

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors.

How Big is YouTube?

Use statistics to understand the number of videos on YouTube.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

The State of zkEVMs: End of 2023

The ultimate guide to every major zkEVM project's progress in 2023, comparing Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, Taiko, Immutable zkEVM, Linea, zkSync and StarkNet.

Introduction to Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning for Blockchains

A general intro to zkML by Giza CEO.

is GKR really faster for grand product?

I don't have a perfect sense what this is, but you can read the thread if you know.

FHE posts by PSE

Zero to Start: Applied Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

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🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

A brief history of crypto

Polynya's personal perspective of the various eras in crypto.

Token Approvals are stupid

Cause it caused 95% of the hacks.

Harmony Infinite Minting Bug

The story behind and how they averted a disaster.

Ethereum Obituaries

A curated list of Ethereum Obituaries.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

zksync's Boojum upgrade

It's said to be "one of the most game changing updates to an Eth rollup EVER." It makes zkSync super cheap with calldata compression.

The first L2 to migrate to Celestia modular DA

L2beat's elaboration on the Manta Pacific. See also comparison of Optimism and Manta L1 calldata. Also an analysis on how secure is the construction of not using Celestia blobstream.

"AnyTrust is not basically the security of a sidechain and you know that"

It doesn't have "basically" the security of a sidechain, it has the security of a sidechain.

Celestia explained from an Ethereum alignment perspective in 6 steps

Step by step explanation of Celestia's narrative.

Exit Window instead of Upgradeability of Layer2

TL/DR - If an upgrade has 10 day delay but your forced transaction has 15 day delay you will not be able to exit from a Rollup when malicious upgrade is pushed and your withdrawal transaction is censored (forcing you to use L1 forced tx mechanism). Examples: dYdX 9 days upgrade delay but 14 days of withdrawal max censor....

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Auctions: context types of auctions what is an auction from the Auction Theory Perspective and from the Mechanism Design Perspective and EIP-1559 as a specific example

Explore auctions in general and their application and significance in blockchain in particular.

By volume the Uniswap Protocol is the largest DEX.

Autstin debunked the myth that Uniswap is not a DEX. 1: 1inch is not dex but aggregator (see also, aggregator is just a dex with no liquidity but really good protocol owned atomic arb bots); 2: The Uniswap interface is just small part of the protocol..

DeFi will eat CeFi - it is simply preprogrammed

Noticed that DeFi (on Base) is cheaper than CeFi (on Coinbase).

Stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits are the same thing

Already talked about in Crypto Banking 101 two years ago.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

zig-stealth-addresses

A Zig implementation of Ethereum stealth addresses (ERC-5564).

Implementation of Shadow event completely free way

Reth impl, geth impl, and erigon impl.

verifi-web

Using smart contracts to verify the content of a webpage, mitigating the risk of connecting a wallet to a website affected by a DNS takeover.

etherscan-labels

Full label data dump of top EVM chains in JSON/CSV. Scaped from Etherscan.

EVM Network Landscape Report

The infras and its supported chains. Full report here.

EthTx Transaction Decoder

Decode transactions including reverted ones. Also check out tenderly.

Storagoor

Check out storage slot of Sepolia if evm.storage is not supporting it.

🔍 🤖 MEV

Launch of the PBS Foundation

Seeded by Coinbase, Consensys, Fenbushi Capital, Flashbots, Paradigm, Uniswap Foundation, and Vitalik Buterin.

🔍 🛸 Cosmos

Historic Cost Savings with Celestia

By calculation of Numia, Celestia saved 10m of DA cost for rollups.

🔍 🕸️ Web

A Visit to the Physical Internet Archive

In a behind-the-scenes tour of the Internet Archive, founder Brewster Kahle explained how it preserves both digital and physical media.

Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

Bro hacked into Rockstar's servers and stole GTA 6 source code, with phone and Amazon firestick.

🔍 📖 Others

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.

zkOracle and zkCoprocessor

This post looks at the recently popular concepts of zkCoprocessor and zkOracle and compare their differences. TLDR: zkOracle = zkCoprocessor (historical data access type) + zkCoprocessor (zkVM compute type).

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

just make one big defi zk rollup and don’t bother with cross-domain concerns

"vertical scaling > horizontal scaling". Also Sandeep.

Challenges & Solutions of Onchain FHE: Unlocking the Holy Grail

Hashkey's amazing post on FHE. Key takes: 1. FHE will need to be used alongside ZKPs and MPC to build a truly confidential and secure, shared state system; 2. A foundational limitation of onchain FHE is “who holds the decryption key.” Threshold decryption and MPC offer solutions, however they are generally bound by a performance <> security tradeoff. Also see pmc's post on FHE.

Lean Copilot

LLMs as Copilots for Theorem Proving in Lean.

Introduction of #zkWASM

Different zkWasms. But note that for the Delphinus Lab part, there may be some misinformation. Delphinus' zkWASM is developed and open-sourced for more than 1 yr, and adopted by many projects such as HyperOracle, ZKCross, and some unannounced major DEX.

private-zkp2p

Fork of zkp2p with privacy features. Hide you Venmo id.

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🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Emerging onchain business models (consumer crypto)

An overview of different business models onchain, including subscriptions (superfluid), referrals (mint.fun), and ads (rabbithole).

Solana Fees Part 1

How Solana’s fees work today, focusing on transaction-based fees.

another approach to readable addresses

Uniquely represent them with just 2-3 words from the seed phrase dictionary. See code.

An Overview of Ethereum Governance

By Tim Beiko. Slides here.

Examining crypto's product-market fit

#1: Alternative store-of-value; #2: Stablecoins; #3: Speculation and gambling; #3b: Cults; #4: DeFi; #5: DAOs; #6: Hybrid applications; #7: Identity and other usecases.

Forked Tornado

Tornado cash fork with blacklist to prevent illegal money laundering.

What might an “enshrined ZK-EVM” look like?

New key properties we want from this: verify Ethereum blocks, multi-client philosophy, auditability, upgradeability, supporting almost-EVMs. Basically, client teams (geth, reth) should shift their focus to zkEVM-based client.

Revisiting the Application Layer

Amazing research on revisting the applications. Cool idea: application = logic + state. Bitcoin: logic = limited scripting, state = just btc; Ethereum: logic = EVM, state = arbitrary asset creation.

it's easy to confuse eip and erc so here's the diff

erc's are interface definitions & a mild discussion on a forum with the occasional "what if we added callbacks" comment. eip's are changes to ethereum that require espionage, psychological warfare, infiltration, sabotage, black operations, getting cut off by core devs at devcon, and in rare cases full blown culture warfare. Lol.

2024 Ethereum Events

A list of events in 2024 for Ethereum.

Ledger Library hacked

See also possible attack vector, why load from CDN is bad, hacker's funny comments, ledger situation, the PR and joke.

Phone as Wallet

A reminder that your phone, yes the one in your pocket, is actually a super secure crypto hardware wallet and you don’t need to buy a special third party phone for that. Browser-based: authn-sign; App-based: geclave.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

The State of L2s: Theory and Reality

The stack of a L2, written by Arbitrum.

Stages update: Security Council requirements

On the thought process that L2Beat is changing its formula on security council.

Does restaking inherit security?

Not really, it only inherits slashing condition enforcement.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

Ethernow

A dashboard for incoming transactions into the Ethereum mempool.

Parsec

Looks like a better version of Etherscan.

why http://etherclients.com has SO MANY MORE nodes than http://ethernodes.org

"ethernodes.org doesn't seem to have enough nodes passively accepting TCP inbound connections, and primarily seems to use UDP based discovery".

If we as an industry really believe that this is what a contract should look like we've already failed

Simple contract comes with ~10 inheritance. The goal is simplicity, not complexity! I remind people that e.g. WETH9 is comprised of only 51 SLOC, is easy to grasp, and has no fancy inheritance.

Is it possible to have a contract self-destruct after every transaction and re-deploy itself to a new random address?

"unlikely to work on L1 with a true self-destruct + redeploy, But L2s already do weird stuff with data compression". The goal is to "make it difficult to argue that the contract in question constitutes "property" that the community/holders have an "interest" in (per the IEEPA)".

The Ethereum Virtual Machine

A full in depth explanation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and its execution environment.

2024 will be the year of the parallel evm

Another alpha prediction from gakonst. We'll see more investment in EVMs. See also this and this.

How badly could that break things? if make an address an alias of another one

"TUSD vibes".

rETH Instant Deploys

A script to automatically setup a rETH archive node in under 60 seconds.

MEV price prediction

Predict ChainLink price updates from the mempool.

ponder

A backend framework for crypto apps. Better alternative to The Graph?

🔍 🤖 MEV

Timing Games: Implications and Possible Mitigations

Amazing piece. "This post aims to provide context about timing games, highlight their implications, and outline different paths forward. The goal is to initiate a constructive discussion, contributing to an informed decision by the community."

Empirical Analysis of Cross Domain CEX <> DEX Arbitrage on Ethereum

"We investigated the prevalence of CEX <> DEX arbitrages and shed light on the patterns and insights into these opportunities."

The MEV industry keeps inventing fancy new words for old ideas

Intent is a more general term than limit orders tho.

The False Narrative of MEV Protection: How Private Transactions Can Result in a Poorer Settlement Than Sending Publicly

TLDR: 1. Private transaction != better settlement cause your tx may be placed after the top of block bundle; 2. Private transaction may = longer execution time cause you may only send tx to one builder.

Total MEV is only +0.3% APY to the 28M ETH staked $61000000000

So we are avoiding the "centralizing force" of a tiny portion of Ethereum? This data is supported by jaredfromsubway. And from this data we also noticed that "the biggest MEV searcher made 8.8/270 (~3% of all MEV)?".

a bot that appears to have private access to user orderflow that was landing bottom-of-the-block blocks on the Flashbots builder

TLDR: It checks the builder's balance to know "where it is".

an overview of the Intents vertical

The basics, the complex, the present and the future are all covered - as well as some pondering over where all of this is going and what problems lie ahead. By rain&coffee.

Longer block times lead to less CEX/DEX MEV per second but more atomic MEV per second.

The myth is longer block times allow you to do more trades on the CEX during the block and then net the inventory skew out into a single trade on the dex that pays less fees. But besides math, we need to consider the implied sequence.

Ok I solved LVR

Just do require(block.number % 2 == 0); in beforeSwap hook lol. Cause longer block time means more time for MEV.

🔍 🕸️ Web

dumb pipe

Connect A to B. Send Data.

MLX

An efficient machine learning framework specifically designed for Apple silicon (i.e. your laptop!).

Are there LLMs that can be run in a strictly deterministic way?

Yes, just modify it to always pick the word deemed most likely, instead of sampling from the distribution.

GPTs

leadked prompts of GPTs. It's like learning spells.

Open GitHub repros on runnable sandboxes easily

Add "http://pr.new" in front of GH url, so that you won't be hacked by a pr.

🔍 📖 Others

Everyone's talking about crypto points.

Just a sarcasm on crypto "points".

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

Subscribe Proof Of Track, follow me at @msfew_eth, or connect with me at sny.is.