Dimaranti

Founding engineer @mndl_ai | Former Co-founder of @blocksense_ | Led ETH ZK Light Client & LST Oracle Dev @ DendrEth

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@Plamen__Andonov Plamen turning nationalist was not on my bingo card.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Boil the Oceans

You know the phrase: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone’s said it in some overly ambitious meeting. It’s good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think it’s time to retire saying it.

Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first.

I was recently with a university endowment’s head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it — that’s the natural first reaction. But it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment.

Instead of worrying about doing the same thing we’ve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why can’t that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why can’t a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why can’t we have fusion energy? Why can’t we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product?

These aren’t rhetorical questions anymore. They’re engineering problems with paths to solutions.

Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten.

If you’re a worker — someone who trades labor for a living — this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if you’re already management or capital, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now?

The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now — if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves.

Buckminster Fuller coined the term “ephemeralization” in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables — each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasn’t describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization.

This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t use less of it — you use vastly more. Steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine.

But Jevons Paradox doesn’t activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions — to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee

That’s what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present.

Time to start.

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@mert I can do that

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@pumatheuma 🤯

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

Never bet against technology

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

🤯 real-time proving is here 🤯

Mainnet EVM blocks proven in under 1 Ethereum slot (12s). Goosebumps.

Succinct proves every Ethereum L1 block:

→ 94% in <12s
→ 99% in <13s
→ 99.9% in <12s, soon™

Yesterday RISC Zero unveiled a $120K home GPU cluster—proofs expected in 9.25s. Brevis, OpenVM, Snarkify, ZisK, ZKM are weeks from joining the real-time club.

Soon™ my validator will verify EVM blocks on a Rasberry Pi Pico—a $5 board that consumes <1W. I will ditch my EL client in favour of a zkEL. No 1 TB NVMe. Goodbye Geth, hello zkReth. Stateless and RAMless verification in milliseconds on a single CPU core.

With real-time proving 1 gigagas/sec (10K TPS) is within reach, without compromising validator decentralisation. From now on expect regular gas limit bumps. 10% of stake is already voting for a 60M limit—your validators can too.

Snarkifying mainnet turns Ethereum L1 into the first based and native rollup. Stage 2. Bug-free. Decentralised sequencing. No security council. No governance. The L1 will lead by example.

This Friday we celebrate. Join us for Ethproofs call #2, May 23 at 2pm UTC. 25 speakers, 2 hours of content. Calls are open—DM @corcoranwill for a calendar invite.

We are witnessing history. Believe in something real. Believe in real-time proving.

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@drakefjustin What incentivizes the prover to keep generating and publishing proofs?

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@adeolRxxxx The protocol had some very obvious bugs too

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

Bitcoin is a high-IQ, low-time-preference asset in a world addicted to DoorDash, dopamine, and debt.

Holding Bitcoin requires patience, conviction, and the ability to not panic when CNBC tells you it’s dead for the 47th time.

That rules out, oh I don’t know - 95% of the population?

This isn’t some egalitarian revolution. This is a cognitive filter disguised as a monetary network.

The rich, the strategic, the elite - those who understand volatility as opportunity - will stack the hardest asset on Earth while the masses beg for interest rate cuts and $600 stimmies to buy groceries they can't afford.

It's not a level playing field. It's a time-preference war, and Bitcoin is the scoreboard.

And every cycle, we watch it happen again.

The media ridicules it, the politicians fear it, and the smart money buys more.

While fiat punishes savers and rewards financial nihilism, Bitcoin inverts the whole structure.

It’s a vault for those who can delay gratification, think generationally, and understand that true wealth is preserved rather than printed.

The game isn’t rigged.

It’s just calibrated for adults.

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

This is why owning bitcoin is still the best trade

[Corey Hoffstein 🏴‍☠️ @choffstein]

2. No Pain, No Premium

The philosophy of “no pain, no premium” is just a reminder that over the long run, we get paid to bear risk.  And, eventually, risk is likely going to manifest and create losses in our portfolio.  After all, if there were no risk of losses, then why would we expect to earn anything above the risk-free rate?

Modern finance is largely based upon the principal that the more risk you take, the higher your expected reward.  And most people seem to inherently understand this idea when they buy stocks and bonds.

But we can generally expect the same to be true for many investment strategies.  Value investors, for example, are arguably getting paid to bear increased bankruptcy risk in the stocks they buy.

What about strategies that are not necessarily risk-based?  What about strategies that have a more behavioral explanation, like momentum?

At a meta level, we need the strategy to be sufficiently difficult to stick with to prevent the premium from being arbed away.  If an investment approach is viewed as easy money, enough people will adopt it that the inflows will drive out the excess return.

So, almost by definition, certain strategies – especially low frequency ones – need to be difficult to stick with for any premium to exist.  The pain is, ultimately, what keeps the strategy from getting crowded and allows the premium to exist.

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

Believe in something

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today's a good day to remember why we're here.

We're building the future of finance—internet finance.

Unstoppable global free trade, not trade wars.
Credible neutrality, not entrenched interests.
Permissionless innovation, not bureaucracy.
Undebasable money, not money printers.
Sovereign individuals, not intermediaries.
A multi-decade vision, not 4-year cycles.
The internet, not imperial superpowers.
Positive-sum games, not rent-seeking.
Peaceful revolutions, not warmongers.
Cryptography, not aircraft carriers.
Network effects, not isolationism.
Fairness by design, not cronyism.
Open competition, not oligopoly.
Network states, not nationalism.
Frictionless markets, not tariffs.
Innovators, not lobbyists.
Builders, not lawyers.
Devs, not politicians.

Internet finance is coming. It's built different. Believe in something.

[Blocksense Network 🏴‍☠️ @blocksense_]

1/ Last week, our chief cryptographer @dimonikolaev took part in an ETHOxford panel, discussing AI agents. TL;DR: blockchain will act as the coordination layer for AI, helping agents raise capital and pay each other (or humans) for tasks! Missed the panel? Catch Dimo here next👇

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@blockchainox @homedao @IEEEBlockchain Glad I had the chance to participate in the panel "AI Agents on Blockchain." I think we had an interesting conversation!

[Zahary Karadjov 🏴‍☠️ @zaharyk]

@metaproph3t Futarchy is what enables the Blocksense protocol to go beyond the typical 51% honest participants assumption and what allows us to say that we are protected by all the liquid capital in the world:

https://t.co/HKDVc0ssJ7

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

2025 will be the year of ZK

[Blocksense Network 🏴‍☠️ @blocksense_]

2025 will be the year of ZK

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@0xPolygon I'm telling them that Blocksense is a ZK-rollup for verifiable data and compute services but it isn't a L3.
Of course, they’ll just nod and ask if it’s like "Bitcoin" and whether it’s worth buying.😅
Happy Thanksgiving!

[Blocksense Network 🏴‍☠️ @blocksense_]

🤝 Blocksense has partnered with @citrea_xyz ! We’re blown away by how Citrea is transforming #Bitcoin with its ZK-rollup tech &amp; unlocking Bitcoin’s blockspace for building all kinds of applications. ZK meets limitless potential🚀 We’re honored to be deployed on their testnet!

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@fermah_xyz Standardization will improve a lot of things: interoperability, tooling, composability, adoption, security, scalability, and innovation.

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@Cobratate

[Dimaranti @dimonikolaev]

@_melinaed_ Bulgaria chemicals are based 🇧🇬

[Jameson Lopp @lopp]

Satoshi Nakamoto was a paranoid crypto anarchist.