Work on Aera and help shape the future of treasury management
As we recently announced,
@auditless
has been tasked with supporting the
@aerafinance
Foundation in developing future versions of the protocol.
To than end, we are hiring several protocol engineers at different
Uniswap V3's license has now expired.
Anyone can fork the protocol.
But it's notoriously tricky to understand. Took me two days to fully *get* it.
Here's my take on why it was hard and the one insight that unlocked everything.
ERC6551 is misunderstood.
It doesn't just make NFTs better.
It creates a new asset class โ tradable collections of accounts.
Remember what happens when a new asset class is created in crypto?
Time to get rigorous with Uniswap V3. How much more impermanent loss are LPs taking on with concentrated positions?
- In the range [1/2 P, 2 P] where P is the current price, impermanent loss is nearly 4x higher
- 10x+ higher for very narrow price ranges
AggLayer is honestly one of the most impressive strategic counter-attacks I've seen in crypto.
It negates switching cost effects of competitors + threatens to create a strong network effect.
But at its core it's a counter-positioning strategy.
It redefines the market.
ERC4626 is my favorite standard.
I've used it for over 5 vaults in 2 different smart contract languages.
But one wonders โ where is it going next? What does it enable?
Here's the breakdown โ
Rust in Cairo compiler
Rust (wasm) in Cairo hints
Rust in cairo-rs VM
Rust in Protostar/cairo-foundry
Rust in starknet-rs
Huge implications for StarkNet developer ecosystem growth, individual as well as group productivity.
Spearbit security audits are ruthless.
Yet Arbor Finance passed with 0 Crits and 0 Highs.
How? They followed the "Pre-Audit Checklist".
Use it to ace your next audit.
(Compatible with all blue chip auditors.)
1. Follow (so I can DM you)
2. Comment "Audit"
I'll DM you.
Starknet critics used to call it centralized, slow and difficult to learn.
In less than a year, the end-to-end stack is being aggressively re-architected for performance and ergonomics. Moreover, the work is largely community-led.
Secret sauce? Rust. ๐งต
Happy to share that I'm a proud dad of this 3-week year old boy.
No playbook for this yet, just trying to enjoy it.
Many cliches I could say about the last 3 weeks...
Instead, 3 things I'm grateful for:
โ Moms (sheesh!)
โ Flexibility and the fulfilling work I get to do (now I
Uniswap V4's most fun feature.
Hooks. ๐ช
Why? Developers are using them to build next-generation AMMs.
Want a preview?
Here are all the hooks designs we've seen in the wild โ
Cairo 1.0 introduced a stable intermediate language called Sierra. This is an intro to reading Sierra for advanced developers, aspiring Cairo auditors and fellow compiler nerds. Welcome to the bleeding edge of code-to-STARK compilation:
Summary below ๐
Retroactive public goods funding is a powerful mechanism with fascinating implications.
Which is why I'm excited that
@Starknet
is announcing the "Early Community Member Program".
They are assembling a dominant collective of contributors.
Apply by November 23.
Link below โ
Never seen anything like this.
๐คฏ
@cronfinance
did a full stack simulation of their protocol.
โฃ Private Ethereum node
โฃ Simulates agents running arbitrage w/ real price information
โฃ Front-end where testers can act
I donโt think thereโs an ecosystem that spots talent earlier than
@Starknet
and a lot of it was
@GuthL
who has an uncanny sense and a big heart for the rough diamonds.
Thank you
@StarkWareLtd
@Starknet
, appreciate you for all the support you have given me when I was just getting started on my journey as a research engineer with a grant for
@devpillme
to create a Starknet section and now for being a user of Starknet. โค๏ธ
Huge news ๐คฏ.
StarkWare is catapulting Cairo from one of the lowest level smart contract programming languages to perhaps the only usable and performant high level smart contract language.
Read up ๐
Time to announce: Cairo 1.0 ๐ฆ
This is Cairo's biggest advancement to date.
Cairo 1.0 will enhance usability, safety, and convenience. It will support StarkNet's permissionless network requirements, and will simplify and secure the protocol
Account abstraction, intents, signatures, multisig wallets...
These focus on interfaces from the user perspective.
But offer very little composability...
@safe
{Core} solves this.
Here's why you should read the whitepaper โ
Back in 2021,
@tarunchitra
mentioned an idea he had for a decentralized treasury management protocol.
@gauntlet_xyz
had figured out a way to use a network of parameter submitters to collectively satisfy arbitrary treasury management objectives.
Challenge
This was one of the
There is one way to build a $1M NFT collection.
"The Infinite Game"
And
@jackbutcher
plays it it perfectly.
His piece 008 was a masterclass hidden in a single picture. ๐งต
Starknet uses native multicall so this is still an overestimate.
The thing that Optimistic roll ups had going for them was tx costs.
Now their final defence will be to spend more on BD, community, incentives.
@apolynya
โs thesis playing right out.
Parallel
@parallelTCG
are pioneering an interesting strategy in web3 gaming.
They are both:
โ Building a "web3 native" autonomous worlds game (Colony)
โ Building a "web2 + NFTs" style trading card game (Parallel TCG)
[IN PARALLEL.]
Be lean with your MVP.
Yagi:
โ got hundreds depositing in testnet vaults
โ helped automate several popular projects
โ just received an Early Adopter Grant from Starknet
Running tech costs?
$27/mo.
Here's the breakdown ๊
Thanks to many friends in the
@Starknet
community for providing me with ideas and vulnerabilities.
Was fun to try & curate a small snapshot of things that can go wrong when building smart contracts with Cairo.
Curious about Cairo Security? Look no further.
@SpearbitDAO
has just released our seminar with
@p_e
on the new types of vulnerabilities and ideas that security researchers should keep in mind while reviewing Cairo code.
1-hour long of pure Cairo alpha ๐ซก
Link below ๐
Started compiling a set of resources about Cairo 1.0. The language is evolving quickly so one of the best ways to learn it is to study the corelib and projects like Quaireaux, Kakarot and Dojo. All that and more featured below:
(PRs welcome)
Earlier this year I started to tweet regularly.
Thought I would hear:
โ Why are you wasting time
โ Isn't this too much work
โ Cringe
Instead:
โ "Loving the content"
โ "Seeing a clear 0 to 1"
โ "How do I do this"
Get friends that motivate you to keep going.
โค๏ธ my crew.
Want the secret to building a career in crypto?
Stop chasing how people made money last year.
Instead:
โฃ Follow your passion with consistency
โฃ Think about what the space needs next
โฃ Don't assume others will create demand
โฃ Go to ecosystems where you're wanted
It's so over.
While your favorite smart contract language is hoping to be more like Rust, Cairo is already a step beyond and incorporates a truly linear type system while maintaining the elegance of Rust-like syntax.
TLDR; Cairo1 = best parts of Move + Rust + Linear Haskell
Very promising that Open Zeppelin are migrating to Scarb.
Cairo now has a universal package manager that is becoming accepted in the community, something that Solidity still doesn't have.
.
In Cairo, boolean operations are implemented as arithmetic operations over felt252 types.
a & b = ab
a | b = a + b - ab
a ^ b = (a-b)^2
!a = 1 - a
From the docs:
.
@eniwhere_
added a memory data structure to the
@KakarotZkEvm
project.
Memory is one of the hardest things to implement in an EVM, but the Cairo trait system allows the solution to resemble Rust/C++ implementations.
The smart contract dev stack is too complex.
And it'll only get larger with coprocessors and client-side proving.
@vercel
solved this for UI development, incorporating client/server side computation in one platform.
Want something similar on Ethereum?
Just use Cairo. โ
Hosting a Starknet breakfast with
@tarrenceva
in NYC next Tuesday.
Casual chat about Starknet and related topics: ZK, autonomous worlds.
DM me for RSVP.
2023 is a great time to build a crypto company.
The industry is 15 years old.
Smart contracts have only been around for 8 years.
Yesterday, 200+ people learned why AI has given crypto its biggest challenge to date.
Miss the issue?
Check it out now: .
I can't ignore it any longer.
LLMs (
#GPT4
) threaten to permanently disrupt the gradient of human productivity.
We all need to step back, reflect and re-adjust.
Over the next 2-weeks, l'll push hard to evolve my workflow, build tools and share the learnings.
๐
@Starknet
Cairo 1 doesnโt just look like Rust, itโs incredibly fast.
As a Solidity developer, I spent inordinate amounts of time writing and running tests. With Cairo 1, thereโs no trade off between safety and productivity anymore.
Stop overthinking gas optimisations and start building.
I'm launching a Substack.
You can subscribe for free here: .
I plan on sharing field notes about building great crypto products, mechanism design, engineering, strategy.
If you like my Tweets, please subscribe and enjoy
I know 10x TPS is exciting and all,
But have you seen Cairo 2?
A novel state machine composability pattern that breaks through the Solidity / Vyper trade off between extensibility and auditability.
๐คฏ
.
@worldcoin
is misunderstood.
It's neither eyeball harvesting nor "onboarding the masses" to crypto
@worldcoin
is a PLATFORM.
It makes developing new financial primitives in emerging countries 10x easier.
Let's dive in โ
Every week I share what I've learned in my journey to make good long-term decisions: tech, crypto, sci-fi, performance, longevity, investing, etc.
๐ฌ
Because the best time to plan for the future is today.
A number of the early Cairo 1.0 repositories are focused on tooling to help w/ general computation (e.g., data structures) and games.
So I'm releasing `suna`, a DeFi/financial use case focused Cairo library built for
@yagi_fi
.
๐งต below
Learned that crypto Founders are still relatively unaware of
@attio
.
It's quietly become the Linear of CRMs.
Have been joyfully using for months, can't see going back to Hubspot.
They've done it again.
@tarrenceva
@dojostarknet
created the ultimate integer type for DeFi.
โ Storage capacity of a felt
โ Future portability
โ Half the footprint of `u256`
StarkWare wrote a default ERC20 implementation in Cairo 1.0 that illustrates future conventions:
- `felt` for addresses (for now)
- u256 for amounts
- u8 for name/symbol
- underscore naming to break w/ EVM conventions
Researchers who were interested in account abstraction once it arrived on EVM chains learned a lot from
@Starknet
's early experience with it.
In the same way, people who want to get deep on coprocessors should start by studying
@HerodotusDev
:
Sequencing is at the intersection of L2 scaling & MEV, two of the most important topics in crypto right now.
You don't just have to be an appchain developer to care.
How far along is sequencing research?
What are the crucial components?
Here's the breakdown โ
10. Life is short
Your attention is scarce.
You should invest it by working with good people.
Not by tearing others down.
The market will take care of that.
Cairo is the most elegant and powerful smart contract language.
โ Helps you ship faster
โ Easier to build secure deep abstractions
โ A pathway to scaling/privacy with ZK
More people will get to try it, and they won't go back.
Let's track the journey of flipping Solidity.
The World Chain launch is misunderstood.
Sure, it maintains a great user experience for $WLD grantees.
But it also builds on
@worldcoin
's counter-positioning advantage when others won't.
Nobody else wants to deliver sybil-resistant blockspace.
Their mistake.
โ
Broke: Hard code zkEVM in your platform spending years.
Woke: Build zkEVM as an app on your general purpose zk platform which anyone can tweak and evolve for their needs. In a month.
Why does ERC4626 need an extension?
@hieronx
@ilinzweilin
@vikramarun
@joeysantoro
recently proposed EIP7540 titled "Asynchronous ERC-4626 Tokenized Vaults".
It adds:
โฃ two new actions users can take: requestDeposit, requestRedeem
โฃ two related view functions:
It's easy to assume Uniswap V4 is a platform for order flow.
Instead, it's a "don't burn your hands" implementation of concentrated liquidity.
One of the most complex things to build in crypto.
Here's why
โ
The one thing that Rust has but smart contract languages didn't.
Macros.
Yet
@tarrenceva
is using them in Cairo.
@dojostarknet
once again on the bleeding edge.
.
@BuildOnBase
got to $200M bridged in record time.
Most importantly โ unlike other L2s, it featured very little yield farming.
So I wanted to replay what happened.
Here's the crazy story of a flawless L2 launch. โ
I'm seeing some difficult conversations in my favorite communities recently.
Politics.
Decided to try & avoid it as much as possible a while ago.
Here's how I stayed sane when navigating political minefields in S&P 500 companies. โ
Five years ago (in December 2018), I left my job at
@McKinsey
to start
@auditless
and build crypto developer tools focused on security.
I kept exploring various product ideas while consulting crypto companies, building developer tools and smart contracts.
It was easily the
After writing Cairo 1.0 for a few days I have to say that the improvements in dev experience are impressive! Still Iโm proud to be one of the few thousands devs part of the Cairo 0 era.
Onchain games often require a form of low-stakes pseudorandomness.
Here's an interesting approach to generate random numbers for special names assignments by
@aloothero
for Survivor:
Great post on why instead of writing Solidity for your smart contracts and custom DSLs to invoke coprocessors, you should just write Cairo for all of it.
You need a language that facilitates validity proof aggregation from ZKRs, coprocessors, client side proving, etc.
If you haven't started to rethink the utility of your Solidity events yet, you should.
@shadowxyz
introduces 1000x savings compared to letting users pay for events.
But the roll-out won't be straightforward as other indexers respond.
Here's how I expect this to play out.
โ
Getting feedback that Graph isn't free anymore and the new pricing is confusing.
What options are people exploring?
Who is building indexing 2.0?
Who is picking up the public goods mantle?
@PaulRBerg
@bryan_johnson
Long-term there could be a flywheel.
1) Make the subscription available
2) Get NBA players on it and talking about how they swear by it
3) Youth start emulating
4) Keep introducing flavor variations & technologies
5) Make "cool" Blueprint restaurants
Society can be reprogrammed
Uniswap V4 introduced a new protocol aggregator pattern for DEXes.
It's inevitable that the other major DeFi use case follows suit (lending).
Enter
@AstariaXYZ
Starport.
I wanted to figure out whether it goes beyond simple modularity into true aggregation โ
ERC6551 introduces "Token Bound Accounts"
@BennyGiang
โ
@futureprimitive
โ
@erc6551
Each NFT now manages a dedicated set of wallets.
Each wallet is managed by the current NFT owner only.
Prediction: Starknet / Cairo will become a world class prototyping environment for Solidity devs wanting to build innovative protocols.
Then it will take over.
I spot a new Starknet game developed in the open.
Tsubasa.
All good things start with a single felt252 slot.
Written by
@lucas_lvy
(always fun to see Cairo code from
@StarkWareLtd
)