Mostly Software

  • Friday

    • YC’s message to founders in this market downturn (fiat and crypto): https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1527238287471292417 (basically it’s getting bad, just survive, pretend you don’t have funding, conserve, and get through it).
    • Remember curl <url> -OJ to keep the filename.
    • 500 Aptos tokens each for the 100 selected validators in phase 1. It’s already locked and final choices will be made Monday (you’ll get notification over email/discord). Testnet golive is tuesday noon.
    • Coffeezilla’s 6-video series on crypto casinos (like roobet) and social media influencers (like nelk): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4qw3AkxFDSMD7ocgT7wEQq6hHuLAPRTn.
      • Roobet and Wizza are affiliated to a guy named Allen Temiz.
      • These partnerships give stevewilldoit/nelk way more money than the merch drops and the metacard. 
      • Fake streams, fake giveaways, fake money, many complaints.
      • Kyle and John own privatebet, another scammy app they pushed.

  • Thursday

    • Deepdive into DFNS and CaaS. Assets, account management, signing arbitrary, policies, more. Crosschain, security, multi-tenancy, split of onchain vs offchain.
    • Swagger can autogenerate clients in many languages from openapi specs: https://editor.swagger.io/.
      • Remember these used to be called swagger specs, now openapi.
    • DSA = Digital Signature Algorithm.
      • ECDSA = Elliptic Curve DSA.
      • EdDSA = Edwards Curve DSA.
    • TSS = Threshold Signature Scheme.
    • Miro is a whiteboarding solution. Can use for presentations, any browser collab.
    • Monzo is like Mint. Manage your money. Check all transactions, set budgets, get notifications, etc.
    • Omnibus account, omnibus wallet.
      • Many people have access. Usually used for business. Like a treasury. Also everything is in the omnibus’ name, so the multiple parties behind it remain private.
      • 2 models for crypto custody specifically:
        • Segregated: every individual has their own keypair(s).
        • Omnibus: there’s a single keypair (account) with all the combined assets and then bookkeeping for individuals is held in a secondary (centralized) service/db (offchain).
        • Imagine Bank of America. Segregated means I hold my money in a savings account with them. Omnibus means there’s a single account holding all USD for people named Brian, and I have a claim for a certain amount of it.
      • “Custodian” is basically synonymous with “depository”.
      • While omnibus in its purest form means 1 keypair, you can also have an omnibus hierarchy. One master key, but then subkeys (and subkeys and subkeys..) give access as well. Even onchain.
      • Omnibus is basically giving your ownership over to the custodian, rather than holding yourself (but you have a claim for return, of course; just not an individual account).
      • Omnibus is more efficient: imagine you ran all of sushiswap with an omnibus account. The only gas transactions you’d have to pay would be new people joining/leaving with their wallets. All swaps on the dex would be managed offchain in the individual service, not written to eth mainnet, because the omnibus account holds the funds always.
      • Omnibus is harder for compliance/regulation. Obv more obscure. You have to augment with a custom system.
    • Aave released Lens on polygon. A social media protocol.
      • Your wallet has an NFT, your profile. You can then use metamask (or another) to login to dapps, and the dapps use the NFT to establish your profile.
      • Many dApps already support this on polygon.

  • Wednesday

    • Solana 1.10 upgrade.
      • Nodes can use QUIC instead of UDP. Quick UDP Internet Connection, it has asynchronous capability. It’s a multiplex transport on top of udp.
      • Instead of first-come-first-serve resulting in spamming nodes to get transactions in, they’re adding stake-weighted transaction processing. With a fee structure. Like a standard mempool of other chains.
    • Block/Dorsey.
      • They already have the Cash app, venmo equivalent.
      • They bought Tidal from Jayz, so there’s music connection. May sell tickets in Cash app, making it an ecosystem, not just a simple payment service.
      • They bought Afterpay, BNPL (buy now pay later) app. It’s like a shorter, limited credit card. You pay in regular installments some time after the purchase. Interest free! Klarna and Affirm are other options.
      • They’re also building a wallet.
      • They’re also building devtools.
      • They’re also running miners.
    • Sidechain vs rollup.
      • Sidechain is completely independent. There’s a smart contract that bridges it with other chains, but comes with no guarantees. It uses its own verification. Polygon is a sidechain.
      • A rollup uses another L1 as the settlement network. So you get ALL the security guarantees of the first network; you get all the balances and original verifications (like arbitrum and optimism on eth) – the L2 is just a cheaper side network for subtransactions.
        • A zk rollup is a subset of other rollups. More efficient. Loopring is an eth zkrollup.
      • That’s what bridges are for. They lock one asset on one network then notify the other network to mint the other asset.
      • Good overview: https://np.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/jiuicy/widespread_understanding_of_l2_scaling_tradeoffs/
      • A fork is even different. Used the same tech, but has now become something else (like changing consensus to PoA, as in eth->bnb).
    • Polygon Nightfall mainnet is released. It’s a private polygon.
    • Consensus.
      • Fundamental problem is the byzantine generals problem. Distributed nodes. How to agree when messages can be fraudulent or missing?
      • Just a voting system. All nodes have the chance to vote once. The majority (could be >50% or >66.6% or whatever threshold you want) outcome is executed. The leader (changing everytime) collects/aggregates/submits/etc.
      • Related but not identical to the actual algorithm: your “vote” could be proportional to cpu power, held stake, or any other metric. This is how we have PoW, PoS, dPoS, PoA, and one.
      • Actual process: preprepare, prepare, commit.
        • Preprepare: The client’s request makes it to the primary node (leader). The leader sends it to every secondary node in the network.
        • Prepare: Every active node that got the new request from the leader then does additional checks on it, and EACH sends it back out to EVERY other node.
        • Commit: Every node then checks for final validity, and if they approve, sends a confirmation back to the client. Once the client has received the threshold of approvals, the request is finalized.
      • Solana’s Tower BFT uses Proof of History (PoH) as well, which cryptographically affirms chronology. Like a clock for blockchain (rather than just sequence of block 1 then block 2 then block 3 etc).
      • PoA and PoSA, authority and staked authority.
        • For PoA, it’s more efficient (and less decentralized).
        • You can even configure PoA to not require gas, if you control (or trust) all the nodes to the point where you don’t need to have incentivized mining. The validators just validate without reward bc you own them.
        • Very common in private networks, private blockchains (like for enterprise supply chains) bc you can optimize for performance more than decentralization.
        • VeChain is PoA.
        • PoSA is a hybrid between PoS and PoA. Proof of Authority confirms the identity of approved validators, and then voting is among that approved pool and voting is proportional to stake. BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain, BSC) is PoSA (21 validators).
        • Clique is a common PoA algorithm (I’ve set this up before). It came from EIP225: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-225.
      • Paxos is an old and robust consensus mechanism.
        • It handles fail-stop, missing messages, wrong order, and other node failures; it does NOT handle malicious messages (like BFT does).
        • Paxos is the basis for zookeeper.
      • Raft.
        • An evolution of paxos. Basically the same algo, but a bit simpler.
        • https://raft.github.io/
        • Good visualization: http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/
        • Each node has one of 3 states: leader, follower, candidate.
          • If a node doesn’t hear from a leader, it identifies itself as a candidate. It then sends a message to all nodes to vote. The first node to receive majority becomes the leader. This is leader election.
        • Consensus works just like log replication in DBs. The leader receives a state change. He sends it to the other nodes as a proposal. The nodes reply if they can successfully verify that state. Once the leader receives majority votes on the proposal, it sends a message to all nodes that the new value has been committed by the leader. Once majority nodes confirm they’ve committed as well, the leader sends a message back to the client.

  • Tuesday

    • Figment.
      • Enterprise-grade staking-as-a-service and nodes-as-a-service.
      • Across >50 chains (all the big ones): https://www.figment.io/protocols. 
      • Built primary for developers (so they can focus on the app) as well as people seeking yield.
      • Figment runs the nodes and offers APIs.
      • Figment Prime is a portfolio management platform they offer. Dashboard, analytics, etc. For VCs, hedge funds, enterprise customers.
      • Lorien Gabel CEO. Fidelity one of the investors.
    • Blockchain as a service (= LaaS, Ledger as a Service, since BaaS = Banking as a Service).
      • Remember gcp doesn’t have a product yet (but it’s in the works) – AWS and Azure both do. It’s what you’d expect; a network (nodes), services/APIs, datastore, security features.
      • ConsenSys also offers Quorum, an open-source blockchain for business. https://consensys.net/quorum/
      • AWS has probably the most complete solution.
        • Supports >70 chains/partners.
        • Stores with Amazon’s QLDB, quantum ledger database. Faster.
        • Offers managed blockchains for Eth and Hyperledger Fabric. Used by a ton of big companies: verizon, sony, philips, more.
        • Most common use cases: supply chain and value transaction.
      • Sequence, a product from the company called Chain, is an LaaS offering as well: ​​https://chain.com/
    • Arweave.
      • The infra to permaweb. Web3’s internet. Web2 was a network. Web3 is a storage solution. It keeps memory, all history of every address permanently.
      • https://arwiki.wiki/#/en/the-permaweb
      • It’s a blockchain, like any other L1. Immutable and permanent. BUT it’s optimized for storage in a lot of ways. Unlike other networks, where EVERY node has the full blockchain history, each node in arweave only has a subset.
        • While it is PoW, it uses Proof of Access as well. You have a better chance of mining the new block (and getting the reward) if you locally store a randomly chosen block since genesis. This incentives nodes to store as much as possible, and as diverse as possible (“rare” blocks give a better chance of mining reward because fewer other nodes have them).
        • SPoRA. Succinct proofs of random access. Favors data access speed as well. So a block storage on a local SSD wins over a remote storage solution.
        • It costs money to store your data on arweave (just like gas on eth mainnet), but your data will be stored permanently. A small portion of this fee goes to the miners (~15%). The rest goes to an endowment pool which is a safety net to keep arweave alive (by paying storage costs/rewards) in case traffic slows or something.
        • Native token is AR.
        • To set up a miner: https://docs.arweave.org/info/mining/mining-guide.
      • Filecoin is another big player in that market.
      • Arweave itself does not encrypt anything on its blockchain. But you can of course use it for private data by:
        • Encrypting the data yourself.
        • Using an existing platform on top of ArWeave. ArDrive is the most common; basically gdrive but using arweave to store the data underneath. It offers encryption solutions for your data.
    • 1inch gas refund program.
      • Levels. Stake x of the 1inch token, get a % refund (distributed monthly) for all your transactions on their dex aggregator.
        • Staking 100 = 25% refund.
        • Staking 1,000 = 50% refund.
        • Staking 10,000 = 75% refund.
        • Staking 100,000 = 100% refund.
      • Capped at 10k 1INCH token refund per month per person.
      • Staking 1INCH doesn’t give an APY, it’s for voting rights in their DAO. It’s for governance, not profit. This gas refund program is the financial incentive to participate in their DAO.
    • Onchainid.
      • Exactly as it sounds. Aggregates a bunch of data from your identity in decentralized systems, then offers that data to other systems (lenders, spectral credit score, etc).
      • This is good for eligibility, this is good for regulation, this is good for insurance, this is good for compliance, etc.
      • They also plan to simplify the login process, helping with onboarding-type stuff. This makes sense, if they’re the source of truth for identity.
    • Teller.
      • Banking as a Service, BaaS. Connects your users’ bank accounts to your app.
      • APIs, forms, many SDKs to integrate into your app. Shows users a simple, trusted login.
      • Already integrated with all major banks.
      • Integrated with Ramp as well.

  • Monday

    • Upgraded to fedora 36.
    • Coffeezilla’s tether video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-whuXHSL1Pg
      • Not transparent about backings.
      • Tether and Bitfinex owned by the same people (Phil Potter & others), many of which had other scammy endeavors.
      • Sharing reserves between the 2 companies (to make bitfinex not seem insolvent, to make tether appear backed, etc).
      • Used Crypto Capital, a crypto bank implicated in money laundering cases. Amazing weekend.
    • My digital ocean droplets are increasing from $5/mo to $6/mo.
    • LFG wallet down from 80k BTC to 313.
    • Blockfi and crypto.com (app) currently do no allow accounts to ny residents.
    • requests-ip-rotator (instead of public proxy).
    • Remember Gemini 6.36% apy for USDC (ERC20).
    • Positioned VYM to diversity dividends (high yield etf) on td.

  • Friday

    • SBF bought 7.6% of robinhood: https://decrypt.co/100275/sam-bankman-fried-buys-stake-robinhood
    • Played more with AWS orgs and IAM roles.
    • Default shell on mac is zsh, not bash. And remember the M1 chip is arm, not x64.
      • Rosetta is the tool that allows intel features to run on this apple silicon.
    • Command-shift-4 to snip on a mac.
    • Compared USDC yields on different platforms. Gemini 6.36. Midas 18.1. Crypto.com 8. Blockfi 7.
    • Installed the aptos cli, kubectl, aws cli, and terraform on the macbook.
    • Started getting the local aptos testnet up, in preparation for incentivized registration (the next 7 days).

  • Thursday

    • xNFT: crosschain DEX for NFTs: https://www.xnft.net/
    • Most popular startup banks: SVB (silicon valley bank), Mercury, Brex. Wells Fargo and First Republic as well.
    • Cocreate, an NFT platform: https://mashnfts.com/
    • Paradigm.
    • Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, of course. He’s the former president of ycombinator. He’s also doing worldcoin, that eye-registering onboarding thing.
      • He’s invested in a ton of different successful ventures.
      • Was CEO of reddit for a short period too.