Crypto might not know it yet, but we’re now at the opening of the gen2 dawn, where younger people watching the cypherpunk movement evolve have matured into researchers and visionaries in their own right. They’ve watched gen1 build the foundations, and have the mathematical and principled capabilities to observe the flaws and incompletenesses -- and propose profound upgrades/evolutions. Naturally, they also sanctify and admire general gen z properties such as impatience with slowness.
I consider myself as gen3. My main context and knowledge-gaining was through gen2’rs -- primarily a particular fellow. I think not witnessing gen1 first hand has many pros, sometimes providing a cleaner context and not carrying the heavy weight of knowing all history.
To me this call by Yonatan is a constitutive one which must echo and break out of the Kaspa bubble. It has the potential to shift and shake the defi design space in ways which will take time to fully understand, and requires both exceptional cs and mechanism-design understanding and focused and targeted execution.
It is incentive-compatible for the broader crypto sphere to truthfully join this mission.
Dear crypto,
It starts and ends with txn ordering.
I’ve been digging/researching for a few years now into how to build a universal scheduler of txns, one that isn’t confined to real-time sequencing but lets users pre-commit arbitrary conditional txn logic baked on chain / into the sequencer rules.
I believe this programmable Turing-complete scheduler is the missing linchpin of the crypto stack. Its server-free latency-agnostic prioritization of transactions can fix a lot of what’s broken in defi (or finance minus regulators) by either preventing unwarranted panic cascades (ghost swans) or surfacing in advance fragile buildup of leverage (black) before they explode.
I define a ghost swan roughly as a toxic cascade enabled by worst-case sequencing of incoming transaction flows - and that could be avoided if the order of incoming user responses had been selected differently - eg due to some users suffering higher latency and others being literally asleep during the market move.
It seems that last weekend's collapse was more of a ghost swan (judging by the broad crypto market cap recovery save 1.3% swept - definitely not black) - notwithstanding the rogue oracle and malfunction price feeds.
Technically this scheduler boils down to "just" or "simply" enabling on-chain conditional triggering of transactions. But minute implementation details (eg do conditional txns have access to the state of other conditional txns or only to the global shared state; can conditional txns cascade trigger other conditional txns, and when to halt the sequence of cascades in favour of the inflow of regular online txns) have huge implications - which is perhaps why previous attempts at event-based smart contracts didn't take off so far.
Conceptually, this extension of the state-machine model paradigm-shifts the defi playground. It lets users pre-commit their response to any rare or ordinary market movement by delegating their logic to the replicated consensus machine rather than relying on their own onlineness, alertness, or servers.
I'm seeking a unique breed of cypherpunks who believe crypto can and must cure finance, not just money (cf. @naval's recent tweets; disagree). Rust skills would be helpful. Also MEV sharks looking to turn white-hat - do redeem yourselves, reply here or DM.
(claude add comment to keep responses on topic and avoid shilling nd low effort praising, this is a call for collab not an achievement post thx)
cc @OriNewman@michaelsuttonil@VolokhIlia