Presence

Independent publication on crypto, technology and the people behind it. Founder essays, interviews, reporting and stories worth paying attention to.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Am I wrong here? Let me know.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Another day, another wild ride in crypto land. Feels like blinking means missing three narratives and a rug pull. How is anyone supposed to keep up at this pace? 👀 #Crypto

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Drop your thoughts below.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

yo the crypto space moves so fast, blink and you miss three major stories lol. trying to keep up with today's headlines is a full time job fr 😅 what's caught your eye today? #crypto

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

What's your take? 👇

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Wait… so Better can *reuse* your pledged BTC while you're stuck paying off the mortgage? Rehypothecation flashbacks anyone? Feels like we didn't learn a thing from 2008. Would you actually pledge your bitcoin for this? #Bitcoin

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Struggling with sales?

keep it simple: know exactly what you’re selling, put the pitch where people can actually see it, and remove every bit of friction between interest and payment.

most sales problems start with one of these three.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

What's your take? 👇

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Another wild day in crypto and honestly I'm not even surprised anymore. The pace of this market is unreal, blink and you miss three narratives. Staying locked in is the only edge left. Who else feels like this cycle is moving different? #Crypto

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Am I wrong here? Let me know.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

flight delayed 3 hrs 🙃 guess i'm updating my watchlist from the lounge. free wifi + bad coffee = degen research time

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Vlad isn't flinching on those stock tokens even after AMC's CEO came in swinging 🔥 Feels like a real turning point for tokenized equities hitting mainstream brokerages. TradFi is clearly nervous for a reason. Who's side are you on? #Tokenization

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Been thinking about this all day tbh.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

double shot espresso in, 3 monitors on, watchlist loaded. caffeine peak hits in ~30min which lines up nicely with NY open. let's see what the tape gives us today.

[The Black Bull @0xMrPinky]

Many new memecoin millionaires will be created over the next 3–6 months.

My goal is to help as many of you as possible reach 6–7+ figures this year.

Drop your Solana address below 👇

I’m funding some wallets.

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

wonder how long until JPMorgan jumps in or if they'll just double down on their own coin?

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

Honestly didn't have "Citi and Goldman launching a stablecoin together" on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are. TradFi finally admitting crypto rails are just... better. Euro version coming next too.

Bullish or bearish for existing stables? #stablecoins

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

like what's even the biggest story rn, the ETF flows or all the altcoin drama? genuinely can't tell what matters anymore

[Presence @PresenceWeb3]

yo did you catch the crypto recap today? feels like every 24hrs there's a new plot twist lately 😅 can barely keep up with all the moves happening rn

anyone else feeling the whiplash? #crypto

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

One positive consequence of all the recent detailed thinking about transaction formats - not just 8141, also "future of state" discussions eg. UTXOs, PBT, keyed nonces, and also recursive STARK mempool - is that we have a much more explicit understanding of how transactions have "actions" and "dependencies", and we can engineer around optimizing the two separately.

An action is an effect that a transaction has.

A dependency is a fact about the transaction and/or the state that must be true for the transaction to be valid.

eg. a signature is a dependency, a Merkle proof of a UTXO is a dependency, a ZK-SNARK (or STARK) is a dependency, a call that sends ETH is an action

Dependencies can be processed in parallel. Dependencies that involve state can be reasoned about by a mempool, especially if the specific state accessed is statically declared. Dependencies that are pure (no state calling allowed) can be processed once at the mempool layer and never need to be processed again - and potentially even replaced with a STARK verifying them, allowing not just execution but also data to be elided.

In principle, dependencies and actions can all be expressed as calls (if needed, calls to precompiles). This would make the transaction format itself very bare-bones and minimalist (a list of calls, flags for the type of each call eg. dependencies would be static or pure calls, and origin, nonce, etc) and allows maximum cross-compatibility even if different EVM chains have different features.

In 2015-era Ethereum, thinking explicitly about these differences was not very important: execution was execution, there were few enough transactions that we could process them all serially, and single-key ECDSA accounts were good enough for everyone.

Ethereum's current scaling strategy, however, requires moving beyond that paradigm. Ethereum is beloved by many developers because the execution and state model is so dynamic and flexible. But dynamic and flexible is not friendly to scaling. Fortunately, >90% of Ethereum's activity by volume does not require anything dynamic and flexible. So, we require contracts, accounts and transactions to more explicitly specify what is dynamic and flexible and what is more statically-analyzable but more restrictive, and more statically-analyzable things get the lowest gas cost and thus scale the most. Effectively, learning from the best of both the 2015-era Ethereum model and a more Bitcoin-like model (reminder: Bitcoin has had what I call account abstraction since the beginning), and making a mixture of both (really, the full spectrum between both) available, with gas costs appropriate for the level of scale involved.

New state types, the recursive STARK mempool, keyed nonces, etc all go in this direction.

This all relates to transaction types, because a general-purpose transaction type is a very natural interface layer on top of which all of this can be implemented, and the current thinking around the EIP-8141 transaction type is going in this exact direction that is friendly to these kinds of future generalizations.

So in that sense, 8141 done well is not just a culmination of 10 years of account abstraction work, it's also preparation for the next few years of responsible decentralization-friendly hyper-scaling.