Mark Odayan

dev + blockchain stuff, research and more.

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

I've been wanting to write about rollups in Ethereum for a very long time, and this article represents finally delivering on that.

https://t.co/KYwrU8z3BL

We have a lot of work to do, but I hope that this helps drive something forward. If you wanna more about this, find me in Bangkok this coming week 🇹🇭👌

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

World Cup Kylian Mbappe is just something else

[_gabrielShapir0 @lex_node]

I enjoy all forms of using blockchains to do cool/useful stuff, but for people who have a "my L1 blockchain gas token is going to moon because of RWA tokenization" thesis, you need to think about it more deeply

even though USDC has custodial backing, USDC is essentially a bearer asset (now legally so thanks to the magic of the GENIUS Act), so USDC trades actually do execute/settle for example on Ethereum and it's legit bullish for ETH the more USDC is on Ethereum, especially if you subscribe to a "ETH price goes up to reflect the TVL it secures" thesis of valuation

but most securities tokenization today is completely different.

the relevant securities are not bearer assets. they are registered assets. and the register is *not* onchain--it's offchain, on a transfer agent's private systems. as for the tokens, they are not assets at all, but rather either "instruction tokens" or non-binding partial representations of what a transfer agent has allowed to happen on its offchain books--as it were, a voluntary partial obscured disclosure of the transfer agent's books.

in effect. the transfer agents and depositary companies and broker/dealers are using blockchains as simply a messaging bus--either to send messages to you about the state of their books, or to let their clients send messages to them about a change desired in their books

...sending a token around within their schemas is simply an overly complicated and undertermined way of constituting a message you send back to their offchain systems

there could be a more robust/interesting version of this, like for example transfer agents and brokers using zkSnarks to verify they follow a certain algo offchain so that they can't rug anyone or do anything funny, etc., kind of like an L2 for regulated offchain SQL databases, but that's not what they're doing either

literally they could do the exact same thing as they are doing now, without tokens, by just sending text messages on Ethereum: "transfer 500 shares of SPACEX from my account to the account of whatever person is registered as owning address 0x32asdf987asd8f9 on your offchain books"

If I used Ethereum to send a message to my bank, "wire $5,000 to my buddy John", would you say that there is $5,000 of TVL/volume from me on Ethereum? of course not--the asset is not "on" Ethereum, it's in my bank Ethereum is not where any transaction is actually being executed or settling, it's happening on SWIFT or whatever...in that scenario, Ethereum is being used as a messaging service, nothing more, and you would value Ethereum like a decentralized messaging app insofar as most of its activity is like this

so why are you saying these tokenized stocks etc. are "on" Ethereum or part of Ethereum's "TVL" or that ETH/Ethereum is "securing" these assets? It is not. It is a giant psyop.

If this is all tokenization will be, your financial models for how they affect ETH etc. should be much different. Sure, the transactions still require ETH as gas, that's still activity, that's still good for ETH, but "decentralized broker/dealer messaging app (basically decentralized Bloomberg terminal)" is a lot less impressive of a narrative than how most portray tokenization to be--usually, their idea of why tokenization is so bullish for ETH/Ethereum is the idea of Ethereum becoming an atomic execution/settlement/value-storage layer for securities. Especially, all the valuation models that take into account "how high must ETH price get to secure $x trillion of value" go right out the window--in this model, Ethereum/ETH is not securing the assets or the execution or the settlement, just securing a really weird abstract and oddly inefficient/indirect way of doing broker/dealer messaging.

if you really want the tokenization narrative/trend to pump your L1 gas coin, you should be a huge partisan of true native tokenization--where the L1 is the definitive asset execution/settlement/value-storage layer WITH NO INTERMEDIARIES INVOLVED...the blockchain must be *replacing* and *disrupting* the transfer agents, the custodians, the depositaries, all of it...

don't get so easily seduced by 'oh something is onchain therefore this is an amazing validation of blockchain and my smart contract gas token is going to be so valuable'

learn to look into the nature of these arrangements and only get hyped on the ones that are actually doing something you could not do without putting it onchain--eliminating intermediaries, true p2p trading, trust-minimization, etc.

[David Seroy 🏔️ @david_seroy]

Our industry needs a massive washout and capitulation.

It’s starting. Going down another 50% should do it.

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

@DenysVitali @chweicki @SocketSecurity @GovCERT_CH Targeted for sure but probably not DPKR, I'm sure they have bigger fish to fry haha

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Received a suspicious coding assessment for a crypto company I had zero mutual followers with (yet they had 100K+ followers on twitter), I just checked the package.json and found this dependency lol (thank you @SocketSecurity)

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

@toghrulmaharram I genuinely judge people who have ever considered the bozos at Bankless as an informed authority on Ethereum (at any point of their existence to be explicit on who I judge)

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

I don't think people understand how positive it is for sentiment existentially questioning the relevance of technology like Bitcoin and Ethereum actually is and also having financial markets reflecting that.

I know that sounds like the plane meme with red dots but it's indicative of a "great filtering" of opportunists.

I really don't need to explain to anyone with atleast some reasonable understanding of computing and systems enginering of what the work being done here is contributing to evolving computing, and how market conviction really doesn't matter in short-term horizons.

These properties produced are valuable and you can't really copy them without reshaping the nature of your opportunistic system. Sure you can fool people but keeping people fooled for a decade or more is more impressive a feat and complex than any technical ingenuity.

I don't know man, but it seems very obvious that decentralized consensus is a viable thing that best achieves Pareto welfare which guarantees stability far more convincingly compared to our other historical and naive attempts at managing society.

You don't even need to try imagine application at a macro-scale. Just simply imagine small groups of people trying to maximize value while striving to make things fair.

The best thing I can imagine in the case that the workhorses of crypto turn out to be not that valuable, is that we actually figure out how to get to a steady state that guarantees a reasonable Pareto welfare over society without needing these manic-conceived solutions - honestly, that would be fantastic and restore my faith in good will but i think thats far fetched and therefore why I have the opinions regarding where i think computing needs to reach for ensuring the survival and permeance of the best sides of our nature (yes, very deep indeed). Else the worst-case is that I, and many others, are entirely delusional and ill-equipped to decide what is best for improving the welfare and output of society

[Leo Alt @leonardoalt]

bankless leaving Ethereum is one of the most bullish things one could hope for

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Agree

[Dankrad Feist @dankrad]

The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it.

The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it.

If we want to get Ethereum back to winning:
- create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap
- find a leader who is competent and wants to fight
- make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it
- fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability).

Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).

[Dankrad Feist @dankrad]

The way to save Ethereum: The community needs to create an organization that's economically aligned with Ethereum and accountable to it.

The EF now holds less than 0.1% of all ETH. There is no flow of Ethereum staking or fee revenues to it.

If we want to get Ethereum back to winning:
- create an organisation with credible funding, minimum $1b as a start. That's very reasonable for an ecosystem with $250b market cap
- find a leader who is competent and wants to fight
- make it accountable: a board of people who want ETH to go up, and a charter that holds the org accountable to it
- fund it permanently: A significant amount of staking revenue needs to go to it. A governance mechanism that can adjust it (also part of accountability).

Very hard to imagine now, but I think this is the only way (and it will probably happen, but it might take a long time before it is consensus).

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Ethereum MD brain drain. I'm concerned

[Julian @_julianma]

Life Update: I have decided to leave the Ethereum Foundation. I’m very grateful to have worked with so many talented and inspiring people on an incredibly important project over the past four years.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done. Here are some of my personal highlights:

- FOCIL. It will likely be the first multiple-proposer gadget live on any major chain. In a world where everything is financialized, my job was to prevent these proposer seats from being traded.

- Fast Confirmation Rule Go-To-Market. Designed and led the GTM strategy for FCR. A new consensus rule that drops bridging time from Ethereum L1 to L2s and exchanges down to 13 seconds.

- Strategy. Argued which markets Ethereum should go for and how. Trying to bring protocol design and ecosystem development closer to each other.

Why did I leave? The first three years at the EF I did market design research. The last year, I focused on product and growth work (the FCR GTM and strategic work). I really enjoy that domain and want to move further in that direction.

I’m taking some time to explore ideas that build on the financial infrastructure that crypto has built.

I would love to catch up with friends made along the way. My DMs are open 🙂

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Cybersecurity is quite literally a gold mine for job opportunity imo

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Seeing Barnabe leaving Ethereum research is probably the most shaken I have been about the future of Ethereum to date.

The people with the best perspectives bridging Ethereum to the wider computing paradigm are leaving and it's an incredibly worrying signal.

We can have billions of dollars of lost value a week, but nothing quite shakes me like seeing pioneers rethinking their allocation of effort and time to other things.

I'm actually concerned

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Fair enough, I'm not too sure about builder talent though there are some great people but I feel like it's quite far and few.

I feel like crypto is too niche here and a lot is comparatively more surface-level in use compared to Nigeria. There is also not a single thing I find tempting to interact with beyond exchanges in this country.

In general though outside of Africa, we definitely lagging behind across most metrics, which is expected but still feel like we are underachieving. We are very culturally similar to a lot of western nations and have experienced similar proportions of growth in fintech but when you look at the crypto scope I feel it might as well be static

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

Glamsterdam definitely the most significant change since the Merge, super excited for this

[Mark Odayan @markodayan]

In 2021, I started working on a dedicated utility to provide myself and other users with an easy and dependable way to keep in sync with Ethereum without needing to open up multiple websites, or wallets just for price discovery and learning of network conditions - a lightweight toolbar utility that communicates real-time pricing signals and blockspace insights as soon as new blocks arrive on the network.

After nearly 5 years of being live and servicing over 100 daily active users, I am now looking to expand the capabilities of this utility with Gastly V2.

Gastly primarily provides 2 core features:
1. Price discovery (transaction fees computed in real-time based on current network conditions and using fresh spot rates for fiat-denominated fee descriptions).
2. Network signals (Analyse the blockchain continuously as it expands and inform users of changing conditions that translate to significant events occurring in real-time).

Gastly V2 aims to expand the value that can be obtained with these core features, by providing wider options of transaction types and spot prices as well as more metrics that help reveal Ethereum context as it evolves.

Visit the new marketing page for Gastly, to find out more and see the app demo live!

https://t.co/mWoyG4uPGF