Elkmar

Building convictions, losing capital

2017 class

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

This is wild. Google Research demonstrates a ~20x more efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm that could break ECDSA keys within minutes with ~500K physical qubits.

Google is now are more confident on a 2029 post-quantum transition. We are no longer looking at mid 2030s, we could have quantum computers of this scale by the end of the decade.

They believe this result is so severe that they are not publishing the actual circuits. They instead published a ZKP proving that they know of the quantum circuit with these properties. This is very atypical, showing Google thinks this is serious shit.

All blockchains need a transition plan ASAP. Post-quantum is no longer a drill.

[James | Snapcrackle @Snapcrackle]

Fair warning. This post is bullish on Ethereum.

Yesterday, the Ethereum Foundation Enterprise team ran the Institutional Ethereum Forum in New York City.

Broad Adoption Activated.

Invitation only. 100's of Banks, asset managers, and infrastructure providers representing around $250 trillion in assets under management.

feedback so far
"Absolute banger tbh."

"People won't stop talking and networking and the content has all been great."

"Your institutional team did an amazing job. I was there. Kudos."

BlackRock. Western Union. Robinhood. Moody's. Baillie Gifford. Securitize. All on panels. Not as guests. As participants building on Ethereum.

This is what adoption actually looks like. EF also presents its post-quantum security strategy and launches https://t.co/1fPpbCRIcY.

EF also presented its post-quantum security strategy and launched https://t.co/1fPpbCRIcY. This is not just leading blockchain. No major technology platform has a published, open-source post-quantum migration roadmap at this level of detail. Ethereum is doing it before it is required, not after.

Proud of the Enterprise team for putting this together.

Choose Ethereum.

[Chaos Labs @chaoslabs]

https://t.co/rZBlGCOabb

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*.

We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial.

But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?

From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board".

See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability.

And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher!

Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with.

If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases.

Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other.

*Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.

And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi.

---

So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory.

I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher).

Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

[rektdiomedes @rektdiomedes]

This @maplefinance tokenholder update was literally the most bullish call I've ever listened to in crypto...

Some highlights:

- Revenues at ATH's
- Flows looking great despite broader crypto woes (note: Maple is currently the #10 defi protocol by TVL on DefiLlama)
- $3.3B in loans originated YTD
- ARR at $31M (goal to hit $100M ARR by end of this year)
- Aave partnership continues to be extremely fruitful
- Big focus on fintech/neobanking sector... goal of signing collaboration agreements with three major fintech companies before the end of this quarter
- Lots of info on ‘Maple Trading’ and why its so bullish for the protocol
-Insanely strong balance sheet including $18M in stables/liquid assets
- SSF for token buybacks
- Hints at new partnerships/announcements coming soon...

And finally...

- Big emphasis on the fact that ALL VALUE accrues to tokenholders!

There is no contentious ‘DAO’ battles or etc... no equity component... there's no weird separation of entities… literally just pure value accrual to tokenholders…

All insanely bullish and I firmly believe there is no protocol in all of defi better positioned going into the coming bull market 🤝

[YQ @yq_acc]

https://t.co/iPl6IG3cHa

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@zachxbt Let him cook

[0xngmi @0xngmi]

I think ppl don't realize how bad the problem is with time-based token unlocks

If the token has perps or can be borrowed anywhere, they can be hedged by shorting the token

And that incentivizes team to make token price go down, as if it goes up their position blows up

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@JupiterExchange Using the Treasury to buy tokens from the team is wild

Don’t worry we’ll use the funds raised and put them directly into our pocket, not important how the market behaves or how the protocol is doing

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@aadvark89 @PolymarketTrade Honestly, it's better trying to vibecode a bot that try to exploit other bots

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@AutismCapital I think they're just taking out any potential competitor from the trading features they'll launch soon. Everything will happen and stay on X, and that's not crypto

[0xngmi @0xngmi]

Ever had to use a new wallet or defi protocol, googled it, and worried about picking the wrong one from a scam ad?

I built https://t.co/nuiOTTI5dn to solve this

It searches over >5k whitelisted domains manually curated by DefiLlama, it's <6kb and loads instantly

Bookmark it

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@mindsharexbt Sympa l'idée de traduire juste des tweets en anglais sans créditer l'auteur. Comme ça pas besoin de se prendre la tête à réfléchir, de toute façon on est des spécialistes je crois avec Gad Elmaleh

[Token Terminal 📊 @tokenterminal]

BREAKING: @ethereum's staking ratio surpassed 30%, marking an all-time high.

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@mrguy1121 @KyleSamani @jon_charb Because he didn’t get to invest in it

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

@KyleSamani @jon_charb It would be a bag of yours you would shill it to death

Go explore other new technologies please, you are everything that is wrong in crypto

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

The real test will be:

- peg stability under stress
- capital efficiency
- market adoption

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

Users deposit pETH into CDPs and mint pUSD.

Unlike many historical CDP systems, Polaris explicitly tries to solve:

- upward depegs (stable > $1)
- poor capital scalability

Arbitrage and mint/redeem paths are central to peg maintenance

[Elkmar @cryptelkmar]

A notable point:

The entire team + advisors invested their own capital in a founders round

The stated goal is to raise only what’s needed for development and audits, not to overcapitalize the protocol