Sandile

A projecting part of a fortification, representing a strong defensive

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Rural Deep XXXIX https://t.co/BdDLEcTN9v

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

what actually makes one stablecoin win over another for institutions, yield, custody, or just brand trust?

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

yo Anchorage just opened the doors for institutions to grab fUSD 👀 feels like every week there's a new stablecoin trying to win the big money game. curious if fUSD actually stands out or just blends in. thoughts? #stablecoins

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

The Rules of Bitcoin
1. Buy Bitcoin
2. Don't Sell the Bitcoin

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

what's your go-to reset when the screen starts winning?

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

just closed the laptop and touched grass for the first time all week 🌱 charts will still be there when i get back, promise. highly recommend

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Honestly, the rate hike itself is priced in at this point. What I'm watching is the tone - if the Fed signals recession fears, crypto could actually catch a bid as a hedge play. Feels like a pivotal week. Who else is glued to the charts? #Crypto

[Machi Big Brother @machibigbrother]

ETH has won. The world will know soon enough.

[fxyo @kingfxyo]

i am begging you, PLEASE make a genuinely high quality game that incorporates crypto.

not a token with a game duct taped to it. not another idle clicker. not some shit i play for 4 days because there’s an airdrop.

give me a game i actually WANT to waste 6 hours a day on.

give me insanely rare items to hunt. real progression. difficult grinds. player trading. an actual economy. items that people give a shit about owning.

then build aggressive burn mechanics into everything.

crafting burns items. upgrading burns items. rerolling stats burns items. entering certain areas burns resources. repairing gear burns resources. prestige burns shit. make the economy constantly consume what players are producing instead of infinitely inflating until everything is worthless.

i want to log in every morning wondering if today is the day i find some 1/1000 piece of shit that makes me lose my mind.

crypto should make the game MORE interesting, not be the entire reason the game exists.

is WEB3 gaming really too much to ask for?

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Finally, the block building pipeline.

In Glamsterdam, Ethereum is getting ePBS, which lets proposers outsource to a free permissionless market of block builders.

This ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization, but it leaves the question: what do we do about block builder centralization? And what are the _other_ problems in the block building pipeline that need to be addressed, and how? This has both in-protocol and extra-protocol components.

## FOCIL

FOCIL is the first step into in-protocol multi-participant block building. FOCIL lets 16 randomly-selected attesters each choose a few transactions, which *must* be included somewhere in the block (the block gets rejected otherwise). This means that even if 100% of block building is taken over by one hostile actor, they cannot prevent transactions from being included, because the FOCILers will push them in.

## "Big FOCIL"

This is more speculative, but has been discussed as a possible next step. The idea is to make the FOCILs bigger, so they can include all of the transactions in the block.

We avoid duplication by having the i'th FOCIL'er by default only include (i) txs whose sender address's first hex char is i, and (ii) txs that were around but not included in the previous slot. So at the cost of one slot delay, only censored txs risk duplication.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, the builder's role could become reduced to ONLY including "MEV-relevant" transactions (eg. DEX arbitrage), and computing the state transition.

## Encrypted mempools

Encrypted mempools are one solution being explored to solve "toxic MEV": attacks such as sandwiching and frontrunning, which are exploitative against users. If a transaction is encrypted until it's included, no one gets the opportunity to "wrap" it in a hostile way.

The technical challenge is: how to guarantee validity in a mempool-friendly and inclusion-friendly way that is efficient, and what technique to use to guarantee that the transaction will actually get decrypted once the block is made (and not before).

## The transaction ingress layer

One thing often ignored in discussions of MEV, privacy, and other issues is the network layer: what happens in between a user sending out a transaction, and that transaction making it into a block? There are many risks if a hostile actor sees a tx "in the clear" inflight:

* If it's a defi trade or otherwise MEV-relevant, they can sandwich it
* In many applications, they can prepend some other action which invalidates it, not stealing money, but "griefing" you, causing you to waste time and gas fees
* If you are sending a sensitive tx through a privacy protocol, even if it's all private onchain, if you send it through an RPC, the RPC can see what you did, if you send it through the public mempool, any analytics agency that runs many nodes will see what you did

There has recently been increasing work on network-layer anonymization for transactions: exploring using Tor for routing transactions, ideas around building a custom ethereum-focused mixnet, non-mixnet designs that are more latency-minimized (but bandwidth-heavier, which is ok for transactions as they are tiny) like Flashnet, etc. This is an open design space, I expect the kohaku initiative @ncsgy will be interested in integrating pluggable support for such protocols, like it is for onchain privacy protocols.

There is also room for doing (benign, pro-user) things to transactions before including them onchain; this is very relevant for defi. Basically, we want ideal order-matching, as a passive feature of the network layer without dependence on servers. Of course enabling good uses of this without enabling sandwiching involves cryptography or other security, some important challenges there.

## Long-term distributed block building

There is a dream, that we can make Ethereum truly like BitTorrent: able to process far more transactions than any single server needs to ever coalesce locally. The challenge with this vision is that Ethereum has (and indeed a core value proposition is) synchronous shared state, so any tx could in principle depend on any other tx. This centralizes block building.

"Big FOCIL" handles this partially, and it could be done extra-protocol too, but you still need one central actor to put everything in order and execute it.

We could come up with designs that address this. One idea is to do the same thing that we want to do for state: acknowledge that >95% of Ethereum's activity doesn't really _need_ full globalness, though the 5% that does is often high-value, and create new categories of txs that are less global, and so friendly to fully distributed building, and make them much cheaper, while leaving the current tx types in place but (relatively) more expensive.

This is also an open and exciting long-term future design space.
https://t.co/CdpE9ugFxE

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

My first reaction to this was:

"And that's why I just got my $2,725 check of fileverse tokens now that fileverse has grown to the point where my dad regularly writes docs in fileverse that he sends to me"

My second reaction to this was:

"I see how this makes total sense from a crypto perspective, but it makes zero sense from an outside-of-crypto perspective ... hmm, what does this say about crypto?"

My more detailed reaction:

There are many distinct activities that you can refer to as "incentivizing users".

First of all, paying some of your users with coins that your app gets by charging other users is totally fine: that's just a sustainable economic loop, there is nothing wrong with this.

The activity that I think people are thinking about more is, paying all your users while the app is early, with the hope of "building network effect" and then making that money back (and much more) later when the app is mature.

My general view, if you _really_ have to simplify it and sacrifice some nuances for the sake of brevity, is:

* Incentives that compensate for unavoidable temporary costs that come from your thing being immature are good
* Incentives that bring in totally new classes of users that would not use even a mature version of your thing without those incentives are bad

For example, I have no problem with many types of defi liquidity rewards, because to me they compensate for per-year risk of the project being hacked or the team turning out to be scammers, a risk that is inherently higher for new projects and much lower once a project becomes more mature.

Paying people to make tweets that get attention, might be the most "pure" example of the wrong thing to do, because you are going to get people who come to your platform to make tweets, with every incentive to game any mechanisms you have to judge quality and optimize for maximum laziness on their part, and then immediately disappear as soon as the incentives go away. In principle, content incentivization is a valuable and important problem, but it should be done with care, with an eye to quality over quantity, which are not natural goals that designers of "bootstrapping incentives" have by default.

If fact, even if users do not disappear after incentives go away, there is a further problem: you succeed from the perspective of growing *quantity of community*, but you fail from the perspective of growing *quality of community*. In the case of defi protocols, you can argue: 1 ETH in an LP pool is 1 ETH doing useful work, regardless of whether it's put there by a cypherpunk or an amoral money maximizer. But, (i) this argument can only be made for defi, not for other areas like social, where esp. in the 2020s, quality matters more than quantity, and (ii) there are always subtle ways in which higher-quality community members help your protocol more in the long term (eg. by writing open-source tools, answering people's questions in online or offline forums, being potential developers on your team).

The ideal incentive is an incentive that exactly compensates for temporary downsides of your protocol, those downsides that will disappear once the protocol has more maturity, and attracts zero users who would not be there organically once the protocol is mature.

Charging users fees, but paying them back in protocol tokens, I think is also reasonable: it's effectively turning your users into your investors by default, which seems like a good thing to do.

A further more cynical take I have is that in the 2021-24 era, the "real product" was creating a speculative bubble, and so the real function of many incentives was to pump up narratives to justify the narrative for the bubble. So any argument that incentives are good for bootstrapping acquisition should be not judged on the question of whether it's plausible, but on the question of whether it's more plausible than the alternative claim that it's all galaxy brain justification ( https://t.co/iJYPFNaOgg ) for a "pump and dump wearing a suit".

TLDR: the bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it's not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary. And we do see that the successful apps now, the apps that we actually most appreciate and respect, do the bulk of their user acquisition work in that way, not by paying users to come in indiscriminately.

[Keone Hon @keoneHD]

I am bullish on NFTs.
I believe they will be a big part of crypto adoption

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

anyone actually read the DeFi section closely yet? curious if the "control" definition is as vague as it sounds

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Fresh Clarity Act draft dropped and the DeFi tweaks look... interesting? Still need 60 votes in the Senate which feels like a coin flip tbh. But hey, at least regulators are actually engaging with the details now. Progress is progress. #crypto

Anyone else cautiously optimistic?

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Been thinking about this all day tbh.

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Honestly, the daily crypto news cycle feels like whiplash lately — one day it's ETFs mooning, next day it's another exploit. I've stopped reacting to every headline and just DCA through the noise. Anyone else numb to it? #crypto

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Big move brewing in Europe 🚀 finance lobbies pushing to lift the cap on tokenized securities could seriously unlock institutional flows into onchain markets. Feels like RWAs are about to hit another gear. Who else is watching this closely? #RWA

[Monad @monad]

ONE BILLION DOLLARS OF TOTAL VALUE LOCKED IN DEFI ON THE MONAD LAYER 1 BLOCKCHAIN

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

Just catching up on today's crypto moves and wow, the pace never slows down 🚀 Feels like every day brings a new narrative to chase. Hard to keep up but I love it.

Which story caught your eye today? #Crypto

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

homemade ramen hits different when you nail the broth. spent 6 hours on it today and honestly? worth every minute. simple joys > checking charts every 5 seconds

[Sandile @Bastion_Angle]

3 monitors, 2 phones, 1 coffee. running the numbers: that's 6 screens of charts, 2 wallets to check, and roughly 0 chance I'm sleeping before 3am. efficiency is a lie we tell ourselves