Carlos Lima

Physics & Chemistry teacher | Science communicator | Reimagining school from scratch | Using AI to build personalized education | Science, Education & Society

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

Physics & Chemistry teacher.
Science communicator.
Defending scientific literacy in the age of AI.

Here I post:
• Science threads
• AI in education
• Technology & society

If you care about science-based thinking — follow.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

@algerstmehn @Algorand Portugal🇵🇹😍

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

@MinervaRevista_ Eu diria, numa análise sumária e ligeira, que o vosso texto teria sido escrito pelo visado no mesmo. Ambos, o visado e o autor do texto que aqui partilham, têm uma notável habilidade com as palavras. Parabéns a ambos. Que continuem a partilhar as vossas perspectivas.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

@PeraAlgoWallet @PeraAlgoWallet is amazing, but adding on-chain encrypted messaging would be a game changer. Being able to chat with other users via their NFDs would make the ecosystem feel much more connected! 🚀

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

11/
A caveat: I’m not a developer. This is what I managed to piece together from the announcement and the broader context.
If anyone with deeper technical knowledge of xChain Accounts can correct, refine, or add to any of this, please do. Always learning.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

1/
The Algorand Foundation shipped xChain Accounts: use any EVM wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, Coinbase) on Algorand dApps. No new wallet. No seed phrase.
Here’s exactly how it works under the hood and why it’s a meaningful piece of cross-chain engineering.
A thread.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

10/
What I find interesting as a teacher: this is a classroom-ready demonstration of how the same private key produces signatures with different meaning in different cryptographic domains.
Account abstraction stops being abstract when you can demo it in five minutes.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

@Rainmaker1973 Braga. 😍😍
Thanks @Rainmaker1973 👑

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

That’s not the point of the post.
@devjoshstevens wrote a public requirements doc. I matched it to a substrate that fits the spec. Whether Polymarket builds on Algorand, Solana, Monad or stays on Polygon, the exercise is useful for them and for anyone else evaluating L1s for real-time settlement.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

Polygon, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Monad, Sui, Avalanche, every chain in this conversation has earned its place solving real problems for real users. This is about which substrate matches the spec for one product: a global, real-time, fairness-critical prediction market.

For that spec, Algorand answers line by line:

• 2.8s blocks, absolute finality. Block n is final at n+1, no reorgs since 2019. "Settlement is instant" becomes a property of the chain, not a roadmap item.

• Flat 0.001 ALGO per tx. No fee market, no priority auction. On election night, the cost curve is a horizontal line.

• 10,000+ TPS sustained. No public mempool, txs route to the VRF-selected proposer and either land or fail deterministically. The "cancelled tx" failure mode doesn't exist.

• AVM primitives that read like Polymarket's wishlist: atomic groups (16 ops as one), box storage for per-market state, logic sigs for delegated trading, rekeying for protocol-level account abstraction.

• Falcon-signed State Proofs, NIST-standardized post-quantum, cross-chain verifiable. The trust-minimized path for Polygon liquidity to migrate without a custodial bridge.

And the part nobody else can sell: no public mempool means MEV/sandwich extraction isn't harder, it's structurally absent. For a platform whose product is information integrity, that's brand defense.

The route in isn't "migrate." Launch perps on Algorand. Greenfield Rust backend, new contracts, no legacy markets, no MM coordination. 90 days against any other candidate. Measure p99 settlement, cancelled-tx rate, fee variance, consensus liveness. Let the metrics speak.

@devjoshstevens your post was the most honest infra statement in DeFi this year. Respect. Whatever chain you choose, the standard you've set is right.

Best.

[Josh @devjoshstevens]

This is my 3rd week as VP of Engineering DeFi at @Polymarket , and I'm going to be straight: the traction @Polymarket has seen has massively outpaced our infrastructure, and we haven't done nearly enough to scale to keep up. I hear you, and fixing this is our entire focus. We're a major company now, and we need to engineer like one. Here's exactly what we're doing:

- Onchain data latency. We're working on making this near-instant so the experience is incredible.
- Chain migration. We need more block space, cheaper gas and much smaller block times so settlement is instant.
- Transactions are getting cancelled. We understand this is one of the most frustrating issues right now, and we have a complete fix coming very soon.
- Massive focus on the website to make it faster, more responsive, and with better UX.
- We added observability everywhere. Proper alerting so we catch issues ourselves, market makers should not be the ones telling us something is down. That's been unacceptable, and we know it.
- E2e tests throughout, starting with the CLOB, so issues get caught in CI before anything ships.
- CLOBv2 is not a rewrite. It won't improve performance or stability on its own; it's an upgrade that unlocks us to move fast right after. We'll do better with communication next time.
- We are rebuilding the CLOB from the ground up. Most important thing we're doing. Without it, we can't be the best DeFi exchange in the world. We know it, we're on it, it's mission critical.
- Unified TypeScript SDK for all APIs, which is shipping soon.
- Unified API. One WS connection for everything, with a schema that's actually readable.
- New Polymarket contract in the works that unlocks things that are simply impossible on the current protocol.
- New hires: Head of QA Automation, Head of Dev Tooling, Head of Internal Tooling, Head of Data Engineering.
- Smaller, dedicated teams. Fewer focus points per person, clearer ownership. People do what they're good at and are accountable for it.
- Working closely with customer support to give them real debugging tools so any user issue gets properly diagnosed, not lost.
- Proper communication with marketing and market makers so everyone knows what's coming and when, and MM can submit feature requests with a clear path to get them into engineering and shipped.
- Working with 4 security teams daily to ensure we're super secure and that funds are always safe.
- Perps incoming. Brand new contracts and a backend built from scratch in Rust. We're proud of this one.
- A lot of other fixes are running in parallel right now.

Starting next Friday, I will be posting weekly engineering updates.

I joined because I genuinely believe in what @Polymarket is trying to do. @shayne_coplan built this so the world has somewhere to go to find out what's actually going to happen, not what the media thinks, not what a pundit says, but what thousands of people are willing to put money on. But right now, our engineering isn't living up to that. We've let people down, and I'm not going to dress that up. I came here to fix it, and that's exactly what we're going to do. The next few months are going to speak for themselves. Stay with us.

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

https://t.co/eWSXQ5cDs8

[alpha arcade @alphaarcade]

On a slightly more serious note:

What we are able to do is actually insane thanks to the infrastructure (Algorand) we are built on.

Every trade executed in real time, p2p and on chain. No offchain trading but on chain settlement. Just on chain settlement instantly with 100% reliability and for a fraction of a penny.

When an order is submitted it either matches EXACTLY as it was supposed to or it fails. And it's instant and final.

The only issue is if our infra can't keep up with the chain: not the other way around.

It's insane this is even possible 🤯

[Carlos Lima @CFDSLima]

@justinsuntron Ignorance is out of fashion.
Check your facts.