Alan Xin

Building Web3 together. Core Contributor @fight_club_vc @BlackFlagDAO fka BanklessDAO | ex: @CoinDesk Chinese #blockchain #crypto #DeFi #AI

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

The coolest badge I’ve ever received, programmable and able to add other modules. Kudos to OnionDAO @oniondao_ @spacemandev. It also reminds me of the Edge City @JoinEdgeCity. #buidl #oniondao

[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.

[余烬 @EmberCN]

在去年 9 月 Bitget 升级做通用交易所 (UEX) 后，到现在差不多五个月时间。Bitget 陆续上线了链上交易、美股代币、传统金融 (TradFi ) 等版块，并且都取得了非常不错的成绩。像美股代币交易高峰时一度占到 Ondo 全球美股代币市场份额的八成，现在也还占到差不多四成；TradFi 的话则是在 1 月份时创造了单日 $60 亿的交易额，爆发力惊人。

Bitget 应该是看布局的业务发展都非常顺利，决定进一步深化 Bitget 作为通用交易所的品牌印象：升级 Bitget App UI 界面。
把 TradFi 从二级菜单直接拎了出来放在了 App 底部导航栏，跟 Crypto 的交易各占一个核心位。以后交易 TradFi 能够一键直达，交易路径步骤减少、交易体验上升。

这看起来只是一次 UI 界面的布局优化，但其实背后的含义非常关键：这是 Bitget 业务重心变更的重大决策。
目前的加密交易所上线 TradFi 其实本质上是防御性的产品附加，就是别人有的我也要有。现在 Bitget 直接把 TradFi 提到了和 Crypto 同等的战略地位，这意味着 Bitget 的 TradFi 业务版块不再是 Crypto 的功能补充，而是成为了跟 Crypto 同等重要性的核心支柱。

这次业务重心的变更，是 Bitget 在通用交易所 (UEX) 上的又一次极为关键的押注。他们押注的是代币化市场总规模能够快速扩张，那么，他们将能够吃到市场增长的最大块蛋糕。

[Skylab 🛰 @skylab_xyz]

🚀 Web3 Founder Pitch Hour – Tomorrow!

The wait is almost over! Skylab and @fight_club_vc are bringing together seasoned VCs from Bloccelerate, Decasonic, and TBV to hear pitches from rising Web3 founders.

📅 March 26, 2025 | 11 AM ET
📍 Last chance to register! Link below:

[Fight Club 🥊| BanklessDAO @fight_club_vc]

Join @fight_club_vc and @skylab_xyz for our first Pitch Day this Wednesday, March 26 at 3pm UTC.

Register for the event at the link below.

https://t.co/H8DVdSK6j5

[Skylab 🛰 @skylab_xyz]

🚀 Web3 Founder Pitch Hour is happening!

Skylab and @fight_club_vc are bringing together seasoned VCs from Bloccelerate, Decasonic & TBV to hear pitches from rising Web3 founders.

📅 March 26, 2025 | ⏰ 11 AM ET 📍 Join us here: https://t.co/6a6xQ6Y1Gu

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

@mckaywrigley @OpenAI Compared with r1’s CoT, can I say o1’s intelligence feels artificial?😌

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

Memecoins have pushed crypto off course by hogging too much attention and capital. Builders get sidetracked, legit projects overshadowed, and most memecoins are Ponzi-like schemes that won’t last. Sure, it brings in new users, but is that the best way to learn crypto? #memecoins

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

@QwQiao It’s time for crypto to make positive impacts on the daily lives of average people

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto"

https://t.co/rEbRjZYtFB

[Jordan Lyall @JordanLyall]

The digital art market is tough, but I’m committed to keeping Prohibition running for now

To make ends meet, I'm offering consulting/advisory services to projects I admire

If you'd like to leverage my decade of experience in building in crypto (DEX, DeFi, NFT, memes) please dm

[The Engine @TheEngineMedia]

The new episode of The Engine is up!

This week, our guest is Matt Luongo @mhluongo!

He is the CEO of @thesis_co, a crypto venture studio behind Fold, Keep that became part of @TheTNetwork, tBTC, Saddle, Tally Ho! And now also thUSC and @MezoNetwork.

We dug into his more than 10 years of experience building in the space and traced his deep Bitcoin roots.

[Fight Club 🥊| BanklessDAO @fight_club_vc]

Web3 AI: 🤖 + 🧠 = 🚀 ?

Intrigued by the intersection of Web3 and AI? We break down the Web3 AI tech stack in our latest newsletter and spotlight @PondDiscoveries foundational GNN model. Stay tuned for a deep dive! #Web3AI

https://t.co/MZoPUI1Roe

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[CoinDesk @CoinDesk]

Solana-based gaming platform @MixMobOrigin today said it had acquired the licensing rights to the Original Stormtrooper, which first appeared in Star Wars: A New Hope.

https://t.co/1qAKV0HSPo

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

It's fantastic @memebrains @PublicBored to offer the web3 community a digital billboard truck at #ethdenver to display whatever you want for free!

👇 https://t.co/8mK43aVrjq

[CoinDesk中文 @CoinDeskChinese]

https://t.co/Y6rlOUqdck ETF终于通过啦！今天北京时间8am，美东时间7pm，欢迎参加吴说区块链的Collin Wu和CoinDesk中文一起的twitter space https://t.co/Y6rlOUqdck， 和大家一起分析一下ETF通过之后，下一步是什么？市场会如何？币价怎么走？ 欢迎关注！

[CoinDesk @CoinDesk]

"We did not approve or endorse #bitcoin": @GaryGensler said a court forced @SECGov's hand to greenlight spot $BTC ETFs.

@jesseahamilton reports on the sign-offs for the #bitcoinETF

https://t.co/AqlskX5uic

[Bankless @Bankless]

Addressing BanklessDAO drama

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

Excited to see V3 coming! Congrats! @parcelHQ

[Parcel @parcelHQ]

Introducing Parcel V3 📣

5x faster payroll + payments for onchain orgs, powered by sub-accounts built on @safe

✍️Delegate to trusted approvers
💯Flexible execution (non-sequential)
🧾Automated invoices and receipts
⛽️Gasless payouts & more

Sign up for early access ➡ https://t.co/BtnyogHKe3

[Alan Xin @xinalan]

Amazing!

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

Here's my conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, his 3rd time on the podcast, but this time we talked in the Metaverse as photorealistic avatars. This was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. It really felt like we were talking in-person, but we were miles apart 🤯 It's hard to put into words how awesome this was for someone like me who values the intimacy of in-person conversation. It gave me a glimpse of an exciting future with many new possibilities and fascinating questions about the nature of reality and human connection ❤

Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
0:52 - Metaverse
15:27 - Quest 3
30:16 - Nature of reality
34:54 - AI in the Metaverse
51:51 - Large language models
57:49 - Future of humanity