Infrastructure take rates are going to 0 over time
A thread on MEV capture, infra costs, & composability in different sequencing designs and why one big roll-up is an underexplored solution
🧵
Will rollups be congested? Is DA the real bottleneck to scaling blockchains? What is enabled by new DA layers that claim 10-100x throughput?
@_weidai
and I aim to present a preliminary exploration to these questions in our rollup x DA model:
A thread 🧵
1/ Play to earn (p2e) games are about building economies that community members can trust, own, and build on. But how can we make this economy long-term sustainable while retaining players?
An introduction to sinks and faucets:
The energy behind the on-chain gaming ecosystem has exploded - the number of folks building games and building infrastructure to support them is increasing everyday!
#1
/ A compilation of the on-chain gaming related infrastructure (comment if I’ve missed something):
Service DAOs are crypto-native consulting firms poised to create the 250B consulting market equivalent in crypto.
@Mikey0x_
and I spent the past month interviewing 20+ serviceDAO operators and here’s what we learned:
Fully on-chain games and autonomous worlds are next generation crypto platforms
They store all game state and logic on-chain allowing full asset ownership, censorship resistance, and permissionless extension.
Over all the fantasy tweets, over all the execution layer / modularity / infra tweets
This is my highest engagement tweet for the past month
50 likes and we do a pic reveal
🧵1/ Wanted to announce to ya'll that I've left
@1kxnetwork
.
It's been an INCREDIBLE two and a half years, working with some of the best founders in the space, and an incredibly smart yet hungry team.
A tl;dr summary of arguments of
@aeyakovenko
@drakefjustin
Plus a bit of thoughts of mine as someone building an SVM L2 on ETH
------------------------------------------------------------
1/ rollup centric roadmap will converge on synchronous composability and fast confirmations
LIVE NOW -- Ethereum vs. Solana
That’s the debate we’re having today. On Ethereum’s side, we have
@Ethereum
Researcher
@drakefjustin
, and on the
@Solana
side, we have Solana’s Co-Founder
@aeyakovenko
They give us the good, the bad, and the ugly of each other’s blockchain,
1/ Super excited to announce that I've joined
@1kxnetwork
, where I will be conducting research and supporting founders across NFTs, P2E games, and more!
Why I joined (and stayed) at
@eclipsefnd
We are at a point in time where:
Modular infrastructure has improved to the point where the bottleneck to increased throughput is execution:
1.
@CelestiaOrg
is providing multiple megabytes per second of data throughput secured by
ACTUALLY launching ur own chain is not as easy as it may look
- bootstrapping liquidity
- partnerships with middleware + lower level infra-applications that have strong user stickiness (block explorers, data indexers, digital asset standards, performant RPCs)
Find incentive
idk who needs to hear this but
1. Sequencing is hugely profitable if your app or chain has users --
@base
and
@arbitrum
make $20-30m annualized profit
2. User onboarding is now on par with web2 UX thanks to embedded wallets like
@privy_io
and onramps like Stripe
Any successful
Plonk Skilltree 🎄
I've found learning zk by just going raw on papers is quite difficult.
So... I've compiled a list of resources that guide you STEP by STEP through concepts to fully understand Plonk.
Link to paper:
Megathread on NFT finance content
NFT finance is blowing up with
@NFTfi
leading the charge. Open-sourcing the content I’ve found the most helpful for understanding the space.
In this piece (link below), we (
@StingRayL0
) wanted to use our experience as gamers to talk about the pain points that NFTs and blockchain could help mitigate or solve, as well as briefly suggest some new applications.
A thread:🧵
What happens when NFTs go beyond something static that you hold? How do we extract richer functionalities from NFTs?
We explore these questions in “Economic Primitives of the Metaverse” with a particular focus on renting and lending NFTs.
A thread 🧵
What happens when NFTs aren't just static things you hold? How do we create complex NFT denominated capital markets?
We explore these questions in Economic Primitives of the Metaverse 2, starting with mortgages and leveraged purchases.
A 🧵/15:
Ponzinomics as a GTM strategy for baselayer protocols
Why SLP prices crashing is not necessarily a bad thing, considerations for games that want to be a “metaverse” in the attention economy, and why every baselayer needs a ponzi
My smol addition to
NFT finance season is coming to free NFTs from illiquidity - particularly through NFT collateralized loans.
But how do these protocols work?
In this piece, I discuss methods NFT finance protocols are using to establish valuations and their pros/cons.
Eclipse mainnet is live on Celestia and it's blobbing hard! ~40 data blobs per block now
Exciting to see the first SVM rollup live! We need to see more alternative VM rollups, as we're not taking full advantage of modularity if people are only deploying EVM chains.
Asking VCs to fund apps will not work
Infra competition intensifies -> value redistributes back to apps to win over app devs -> value accrues to apps -> VCs fund apps
ASS + local fee markets + high throughput + value attribution/redistribution
NFT finance is the future.
And so to help further develop the space,
@_helmass
from
@goblinsax
and I are launching the Goblin Hideout - the NFT Finance Podcast.
Value-redistributing L2 vs incentive compatible shared sequencer vs web of intents
This will be the tradeoff space for next-gen dapps because
1. Dapps want to make money
Dapps are businesses that want to make money! They'll choose the infrastructure that allows them to
L2s are dangerous, as they can steal user funds & can even go down at any time!
A clear consequence of their centralized design
Betraying the cypherpunk principles they pretended to hold dear
Here are 8 examples of major L2 failures! Exposing the real dangers of "L2 scaling"🧵
Eclipse Mainnet is now open for builders.
We've delivered Solana on Ethereum. As Ethereum's first SVM L2, this milestone represents a major step forward in Ethereum scalability.
Things I want from ETH L1 as an L2
- fast finality (finality of L2 bounded by L1)
- fast block times (see above)
- censorship resistance (shorter worst-case fraud proof window)
Things I want from ETH L1 as a user
- fast finality
- fast block times
- censorship resistance
🚨
Great business moves by
@heliuslabs
1. swQOS means pricing power for RPC services increases exponentially with stake => launch hSOL and liquid staking
2. Compressed state implementations require trusted indexers / RPC endpoints to serve up witness + proof of inclusion
12/ Takeaway 1: With
@eigenlayer
and
@CelestiaOrg
, DA is not the bottleneck. It is execution. (Especially once we have better compression).
Assuming only one rollup settles to Celestia/EigenDA at 100bytes per tx, 21,000 gas / tx EigenDA can support 3B gas/s.
Here you can see brilliant presentation from
@modular_summit
by
@0xtaetaehoho
titled "You only need one Rollup" subtitled in Turkish!
Terry works as Head of Strategy in
@EclipseFND
I and
@LRvexia
thought that would be good for the TR community.
I hope you guys enjoy!
The cost of modularity - and why a million rollups is an impossible vision
In order for users to interact with rollups you need
1. RPCs
2. Wallet integrations
3. Bridges into the rollup - this can just be the canonical but now most liquidity comes from third-party bridges and
Builders gonna build!
#1
dApp on
@EclipseFND
🧑🍳
What we've cooked so far 4 days into dev-mainnet:
⚙️ ETH > Eclipse Bridge
⚙️ NFT Mint platform
⚙️ NFT Gallery
⚙️ Token Transfer tool
⚙️ Wallet viewer
We are just getting started, get yours on👇
Virtual worlds with self-governance and open economies have existed since the 1980s. P&E and Metaverse projects should pay close attention to these past experiments to know what has worked and what hasn’t. Some must reads on the subject:
3/ Post Boojum,
@zksync
is now doing around ~68 average bytes per tx (71 median) A ⅔ reduction in costs! This is ~450 TPS at PDS initial.
The amortization of bytes per tx with batch size increases also grew.
People aren't talking about
@vertex_protocol
Edge enough. It allows replication of the CEX experience.
1. Deposit from any chain while accessing maker liquidity on all chains.
2. seamless UX, no transaction signing.
3. The first live instantiation of a shared sequencer network
9/ Overall this amortization of bytes per transaction as batch sizes increase (from 220 to EVEN 10 BYTES PER TX!) is what is allowing lower costs per L2 transaction
AND this is happening while shortening time to hard finality! 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Tech moat erodes in the long run in a open source culture / environment.
Only developer ecosystem building and community is a true differentiator in crypto.
Devrel remains the most important job for protocols imo.
If you believe this graph, who else has executed on this better than
@Ronin_Network
1. p2e to amass users
2. bootstrap 2m DAU on their chain
3. now core network effects in multiplayer games and distribution
10/ As more people onboard to L2s, we will see more scalability issues with existing networks
TBD on what happens when we get ~3-5m DAU on L2s, but the data so far shows that
@zksync
has true economies of scale.
3/ We will be keeping a close eye on
@zksync
as they deploy the Boojum upgrade, which enables larger batch sizes as well as further calldata compression even at the same batch size.
Will state-diff rollups win the cost game at the end? We need more data to tell the story.
@pixels_online
has a higher FDV than
@Ronin_Network
.
Might be the ONLY case in all of crypto where the underlying L1 is valued LOWER than the biggest DAPP on it.
.
@solana
frontier research and info have historically not been SUPER accessible
Most information circulates in G-docs, niche podcasts, validator/tech discord, private TG groups etc (as opposed to eth-research + eth CT)
We're hoping to change this
Livestreamed + recorded
We are excited to host the first SVM Research Day in NYC.
Featuring engineers, researchers, and builders, dive into the cutting edge of SVM research.
Here's the lineup of talks and sign up below.
top 5 pod of this year
tl;dr
@megaeth_labs
- 1-10 ms blocktimes, 100k TPS
- 1 active sequencer at any point
- new state trie designed for underlying database structure, EVM JIT, block-STM
- also care about single threaded performance - want to encourage net new applications
LIVE NOW -- Mega ETH vs Monad | Super Fast Ethereum
Today we're talking EVM, specifically how
@megaeth_labs
and
@monad_xyz
are planning to make Ethereum SUPER fast. We answer:
1 - Which is faster, more decentralized, and more censorship-resistant?
2 - How did Monad and MegaETH
4/ The minimum bytes per tx we observed was ~10 bytes during the inscription craze.
@zksync
was packing 5000-7000 transactions into a single L1 tx.
Look at the query - anything above 5000 transactions in a L1 tx is seeing INSANELY amortized bytes per tx.
Nuance is very often lost in crypto - b/c nuance doesn't sell tweet likes / retweets.
The
@movementlabsxyz
blog obviously states their side chain with hash commitment on ETH offering is ONE of the move-SDK offerings. But easy to overlook this.
The same is true for the
what is fast finality?
today there are 2 major styles of rollups
- optimistic
- zk
settlement times are still a problem for both (zk is around 30 mins, op is around 7 days)
to be clear, the current Movement L2 will be optimistic with plans to migrate to zk
we’re also
If you're a ZK builder and are looking for a free place to stay at ETHDenver, we
@1kxnetwork
and
@DelendumV
are co-hosting a hacker house!
Feel free to DM me or tag friends for details
There is a chance that we might be in the post-internet bubble era of crypto, where
1. the tech has been proven to be novel and unique
2. but we are uncertain of the exact form factor and use cases
3. nothing burgers get washed out, and real builders remain
4. valuation tethers
Recent criticisms against ETH fail to recognize what the network maximizes for and where ETH/BTC and early crypto came from.
It is ONLY in the last couple of months that political influence has aligned in any way with crypto.
For most of crypto (and ETH’s) lifecycle, crypto
Let me tell you guys something absolutely illegal...
Whenever dapps have "tweet to claim...etc" and a "verify button", just click the verify button.
Nobody actually pays for the Twitter API.
It seems that within a relatively short couple of months, NFT gaming has gone from ignored to consensus as the “next big thing” thanks to Axie. But to date, we haven’t found a comprehensive/exhaustive explanation as to why this is the case.
Delivering on an earlier promise:
This is a primer to a 6-part series on governance models used in games today, new models used by p2e and enabled by crypto, and where I see this design space going in the next few years.
🧵⬇️
1/ One of the most important metrics in a smart contract rollup is L1 committed bytes per L2 transaction.
DA is still a bottleneck - therefore the less L1 calldata you need for a L2 tx, the more TPS you can do.
Will rollups be congested? Is DA the real bottleneck to scaling blockchains? What is enabled by new DA layers that claim 10-100x throughput?
@_weidai
and I aim to present a preliminary exploration to these questions in our rollup x DA model:
A thread 🧵
For as long as I'm at
@EclipseFND
we will not do this
Idk why jeff decided to take this route. They were the chosen ones. Bootstrapped, L1, spot and perps, HLP. They were the best positioned against high FDV low float VC shitters (maybe they didn't want to impose self lock +
When Hyperliquid launched, the goal was to become the best perps DEX. Today, the vision has expanded to that of an entire financial ecosystem, starting with native spot trading and deployment through HIP-1 and HIP-2.
The L1 season of points starts today to reflect this growing
During Denver I presented on "Building Apps with Modular Infrastructure" and the powers that provides.
We take that a step further, and present how the new wave of infrastructure in the coming year will usher in a new wave of powerful apps:
This week for the
@goblinsax
podcast we talked to
@HookProtocol
, an options protocol for NFTs.
We talked about
@Jake_Nyquist
's background in art, how the protocol works and his opinions on the NFT finance market’s future.
Why a high throughput, local fee market enabled, fee redistributing L2 can capture demand for most (if not all) applications
📕
Argument 1: Most dapps have bounded user marginal value of transacting. The willingness for users to pay to use the dapp across the entire ecosystem
.
@EclipseFND
is continuing to post blobs as normal
but just with a new key pair as we've switched from posting from a tia light node to posting with a full node
Tons of new experiments in new governance system design - most using nontransferables + non-token related influence.
Proud to say
@MetaPortal_DAO
and
@AxieInfinity
started implementation here almost 6+ months ago.
The L2 is parasitic to L1 crowd is short-sighted on shots on goal.
ETH L1 cannot be solo staking / consumer hardware full node friendly and be the home of large-scale consumer or financial activity.
So either it gives up what its uniquely good at and embraces centralized block
This is just strictly false/more nuanced
L2s
- in L2s you get incredibly fast execution guarantees backed by the sequencer(s) (either their direct (re)stake, reputation+economic incentives)
- you don't incur consensus communication overhead in a single sequencer or LESS overhead
I remember in 21, my first EVER memecoin purchase was $SAMO on Orca
@orca_so
has consistently been a pillar of Solana trading. Proud to have them on Eclipse.
This week on the
@goblinsax
podcast we talked with
@spice_finance
, a NFT yield aggregator.
We talked about their valuation methodology, the team's background, their gtm, risk analysis and more!
.
@EclipseFND
throughput and fundamentally an SVM L2 settling to ETH is only possible b/c high throughput yet decentralized through validation DA chains like
@CelestiaOrg
Introducing our next speaker:
@0xtaetaehoho
!
Terry Chung is a Research Analyst at
@1kxnetwork
, one of the world’s leading blockchain VCs 🔥
At 1kx, Terry focuses on investments and research into ZK, scalability, and NFT finance.
📅 Listen to Terry speak about rollups, only
2/ Luckily virtual economies have existed for decades. Some effective currency sinks in the past have been:
- Paying for utilities
- Rare collectibles
- Gambles
- Taxes
- Crafting
- Staking
- Events
Player governance is going to be a core part of web3 games.
But why is governance good - and if so what are the structures / best practices to adopt that’ve worked in the past?
h/t
@StingRayL0