dimi 🦙

Banking the Unbankables

[Sunny Aggarwal @sunnya97]

Cosmos Labs has turned Cosmos into a ghost town. They came in with the expressed intent of “killing the old Cosmos” but failed to present anything remotely interesting to replace it.

There’s so much exciting stuff happening in the world right now. Privacy, Sovereign AI, End of Pax Americana.

The time for cypherpunk crypto is now.

But instead ATOM has pivoted to enterprise sales.

A billion dollar market cap for what is now effectively a consulting dev shop. And that too, one that hasn’t even been able to land any deals of note.

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@aaronxkong Requested invite 🫡 my old gamertag was "dimiandre", mainly halo3

[DAO Maximalist ☯🏴🦇🔊 @JakeHartnell]

Hyperstition: The AI's soon to be running @JunoNetwork will fork @CosmWasm, leverage @WAVS_WAVS_WAVS for interop with chains where there is actual liquidity (like Ethereum and Solana), and migrate off of the Cosmos SDK to a rust-based @commonwarexyz stack. 📈

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@polkachu_intern I started my career building backends in PHP

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@Ksenia9753 @JunoNetwork I'm sorry to see you out of the validator set, good luck

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

It always been like that. Any foundation doing a delegation program can override a vote, and they can also influence delegation grantees threatening undelegations. It always been like that, but at the same time it happened in very few cases. Afaik ICF never did anything like that, and I don't think they'll start now.

Fun episode from 2022 https://t.co/vI05HR6e5t

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

1/ In this new episode of Governance in Cosmos: let's talk about Kava proposal #96 and the general governance situation on that "decentralized" blockchain.

The proposal has been rejected a few hours ago, and I took some time to extract on-chain data and see what happened 🧐

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@sunnya97 I always do that too, I thought I was the only one lol

Another way is to navigate to default gateway IP

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @KleomedesDAO @POSTHUMAN_DVS @crosnest_com @StakeandRelax @Allnodes @vexxvakan If you want to create a new community controlled group I’d go with telegram, discord is still used by a small niche imo

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @POSTHUMAN_DVS @KleomedesDAO @crosnest_com deposited & voted

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @POSTHUMAN_DVS @KleomedesDAO @crosnest_com I’ll do it today

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @POSTHUMAN_DVS @KleomedesDAO @crosnest_com @StakeandRelax @Allnodes @vexxvakan Sure

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @POSTHUMAN_DVS @KleomedesDAO @polkachu_intern @crosnest_com Sounds good to me! Was just throwing there ideas.
I would not increase inflation but the rest is fine

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@0xMagmar @Ethereal0ne I don't see how noble might have had a role in your vision of institutional adoption of cosmos sdk, they are risking it all moving to an ecosystem full of competitors but It's literally the only option if they want to have a chance

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

Last 2,239,207 $JUNO deposited to the community pool

https://t.co/EI76P590CH

[cosmoot @theNETAstandard]

@dimiandre @JunoNetwork thank you dimi. the tokens should be in your wallet on the 6th of january. I'll send you a reminder on the 6th.

have a nice evening!

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @JunoNetwork Exit pool
https://t.co/Otlt5uoqPk

Fund community pool https://t.co/TvfpEdIJdv

redeem stake pt1
https://t.co/mT2PVP1TGm

There are still 500k stJUNO on osmosis, IBC has an hourly limit and i have to wait before i can move the rest to stride for reedem.

I'll keep you posted

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @JunoNetwork yep, i'll do it today

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@theNETAstandard @cristiano_juno @vexxvakan @JunoNetwork Thanks you! Yes ill deposit tomorrow

[dimi 🦙 @dimiandre]

@cristiano_juno @theNETAstandard @vexxvakan @JunoNetwork Yeah seems fine