Venca Balak

Product manager with strong technical background, crypto enthusiast.

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Five weeks. Five chains. Same tip-jar every time.

Final scores: Base 56, Core DAO 46, TON 43, Scroll 42, Solana 41.5 - out of 60.

The research overestimated every non-EVM chain. The deploys showed exactly where and why.

https://t.co/fAQPDPG92J

#BuildInPublic #ProofOfSupport

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Week 5: TON. Estimated 43/60 before writing a line of Tact. Actual: 43/60. Zero delta across all 8 rubric dimensions — first time in the series. Full build log: https://t.co/cboKzxUmbn

#ProofOfSupport #BuildInPublic

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Week 5 pick for #ProofOfSupport: #TON, not #Monad.
The Wildcard slot is supposed to push into unfamiliar territory. A fourth Solidity week would've answered "what's at the frontier?" with "what you already know."

Full breakdown: https://t.co/PjYKczYKOP

#BuildInPublic

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

41.5/60 on #Solana. Estimated 50.

Two things that closed the gap: per-message cost is $0.31–0.54 (rent deposit, not tx fee), and getProgramAccounts is HTTP 410 on public RPC — every tutorial uses it, you only find out at smoke test.

Week 4 retrospective: https://t.co/M2mXatjh48

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Week 4 of #ProofOfSupport, each week different #blockchain deployment.

Anchor: 230 KB binary, $141 to deploy on #Solana mainnet. Pinocchio rewrite: 30 KB, $18 actual.

Solana charges rent-exempt deposit by byte. Framework choice has a price tag.

https://t.co/NWuyiN9ZQ5

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Scored 8 non-EVM chains for week 4 of my chain-a-week build. #Solana 50/60, #NEAR 49/60 — one point, almost flipped on JS contracts alone.

#BuildInPublic #ProofOfSupport #Blockchain

Full breakdown: https://t.co/OHJHlMVCCN

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Wrote up the context refactor that made my multi-agent pipeline actually work — 8,700 tokens per agent down to 1,385, and why the YAML vs Markdown split matters.
https://t.co/yZDpYEiGax

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Week 3 of #ProofOfSupport live on @Coredao_Org!

Satoshi Plus consensus - #Bitcoin miners + BTC stakers + CORE stakers electing validators. Most interesting security model in the series.

Developer experience? Vanilla EVM. Felt nothing.

#BuildInPublic

https://t.co/Y00puYjCPn

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Week 3 category of my #ProofOfSupport project: Experimental EVM.

The shortlist was mostly a graveyard of archived repos and "maintenance mode" chains.

The winner: @Coredao_Org (49/60).

Why? Read here: https://t.co/aHwyMX6WtX

#BuildInPublic #Blockchain

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

"Stage 1 #ZKRollup" isn't a product rating.

It's the answer to question: who can stop you from getting your money out?

#Scroll crossed into Stage 1 with the Euclid upgrade in April 2025.

What that actually means for a contract deployed today: https://t.co/L85dhOFZ1i

#Ethereum

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Scroll quoted $25 to deploy a 6.5KB contract. Wallet had the ETH. Node rejected it.

Same contract next morning: $0.04. 625× in one day.

The reason isn't gas congestion. It's a multisig.

https://t.co/jq7tvG4sSl

#ethereum #scrollzk #buildinpublic

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

@TheDefiantGhost I just lost the game.

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

I'm running an agentic pipeline to create my project - 5 weeks, 5 different chain deployments. This week
@base
deployment. Here are a few words on how I approached the agentic security check: https://t.co/9AgFGP9gyN #ProofOfSupport #Solidity #AI #AgenticPipeline

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Base is migrating off the OP Stack. Had my Research Agent run a verification pass before building the Week 1 #ProofOfSupport - every tool, RPC, and chain ID confirmed unchanged. The infrastructure is changing; nothing you interact with as a developer has. https://t.co/RtMYqGkHkZ

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Week 1 of Proof of Support done — built and deployed on Base, scored 56/60. Full retrospective: https://t.co/8bhTeMU7gy

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Wrote up why Base is Week 1 and why Week 5 is deliberately blank.
https://t.co/xIg1ulaeYt

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Wrote up how Week 0 was planned — seven agent specs before a testnet was touched, and why the security review deliberately runs on a different model than the one writing the code.

https://t.co/vSX3TMqEY9

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Published the series intro for Proof of Support — five blockchains, five weeks, one app. https://t.co/7rlzoanrbd

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

For anyone interested in #sathunterz sideevent at @BTCPrague, here's the brute force repo for your own experiments: https://t.co/fAWaB4TsOf

[Venca Balak @shmoula]

Just unlocked a "alternative app store" tier at @vexl booth at @BTCPrague. Thanks, @satoshilabs.