Jim McDonald

Advisor, Bitwise.
Opinions are my own and do not necessarily express the views of my employer.

[Attestant ⟠ (Bitwise Onchain Solutions) @AttestantIO]

Attestant is pleased to announce that it has been acquired by Bitwise Asset Management Inc:

https://t.co/d1Ou8vdaHc

[Hong Kim @hongkim__]

Bitwise is acquiring @AttestantIO, a non-custodial institutional Ethereum staking provider with $4B in staked ether.

Why? We fell in love with the Attestant team and their work.

They are:
- Ethereum staking experts. Staked since Beacon chain genesis. CTO Jim McDonald @jgm has contributed to the consensus protocol, from design through specs to code.
- Open source contributors. Maintains Vouch (multi-node validator client) and Dirk (distributed remote keymanager), which is used by 23% of Lido's node operators.
- Engaged community members. Publishes research on client diversity, consensus node performance, mev, restaking, and more.

None of this will change post-acquisition. We'll aim to protect and amplify the protocol focus, open source contributions, and community engagement.

Over the coming months we'll rebrand Attestant to Bitwise "Onchain Solutions". At Bitwise, our goal remains to be a great partner to clients and good stewards of this ecosystem. Now expanding into non-custodial onchain investments solutions is a step we're thrilled to be taking.

Grateful and excited for the journey ahead together with the Attestant team —

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@pintail_xyz It's definitely the case that not all builders provide payloads to all relays, because we commonly see a mix of payloads when querying multiple relays. I don't know the extent to which that this is the case, however.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@pintail_xyz Vouch will use the largest bid from all queried relays that isn't in the excluded list, so as long as at least one relay returns a payload from a non-excluded builder you won't have to use a local payload.

[Liquid Collective @liquid_col]

Exploring Ethereum’s Correlation Risk https://t.co/TNq5q7qorH

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@mevproposerbot @ultrasoundmoney Bad bot. It was virtually all withdrawals, and the proposer lost out on better payloads due to the relays accepting them in the bid value.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@superphiz @beacon Genesis validators: 21063
Genesis validators exited: 6271
Genesis validators with 0x00 credentials: 2144

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@stevifi @superphiz @AttestantIO Vouch is a validator client, Dirk is our signer. The biggest difference between Dirk and web3signer is that Dirk uses threshold signing, which means that you don't need to have multiple copies of the same key on different computers for resilience, or rely on a central database.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@JayBuidl @superphiz @AttestantIO Vouch provides the same level of protection for execution clients as consensus clients, as for the consensus client to accept a block as valid its paired execution client must validate the payload as well.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@zkcat_eth @AttestantIO @superphiz Consensus and execution clients are paired; if the execution client paired with consensus client A accepts a block and the execution client paired with consensus client B does not accept the block the consensus clients will have different heads.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@sir_yves @AttestantIO @brian_armstrong @dcinvestor @coinbase It's very similar to the consensus layer as per https://t.co/0Jlb1k7sDk because consensus and execution nodes are paired, with the execution node being driven by the consensus node for deciding on the chain head.

Perhaps worth a new article...

[pintail @pintail_xyz]

New article looking at validator returns post-merge, comparing with my previous modelling, and considering the growing role of third-party block builders. https://t.co/X5CmrTuCgP

[Attestant ⟠ (Bitwise Onchain Solutions) @AttestantIO]

We're delighted and excited that our CTO, @jgm will be speaking at the '#London #Blockchain Finance Summit 2022' next month, hosted by @MetaLinkCapital and @NovumInsights.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

New article on the impact of MEV relays in Ethereum: https://t.co/FhaSb98dhO

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@TimBeiko Deprecate goerli. Point smart contract devs to sepolia. Start a new testnet with an initial 1MM validators and large total supply to allow validator testing. Bonus points for reducing ejection balance to 30 Ether.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@mmrosum @foldfinance @0xdef1 @emilianobonassi @bertcmiller The list of relevant blocks can be found at https://t.co/VlVc9jFBVW

[Attestant ⟠ (Bitwise Onchain Solutions) @AttestantIO]

With the #Ethereum Merge expected next week, we're delighted to share our latest article:

"Exploring Execution Block Rewards: September 2022"

https://t.co/Dxtz0s0STE

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@EthOzark @EthereumPools I think the graph makes it pretty clear that this would be a rare occurrence, but it does happen.

[Jim McDonald @jgm]

@ajsutton Is this using the local execution node or a blinded block relay? I worry far more about the latter than the former.