Will be tweeting slides for others to get the gist of Beam Chain - Justin Drake's reimagining of the consensus layer

The buckets to be improved and how we can do that through incremental forks

Alright, lets talk about @timedotfun and how it turns your time in to a redeemable, composable currency.

We'll do this in two parts, like my "WTF is..." articles to save some of you time.

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SHORT VERSION
Platform
🔹Mobile (PWA) + Desktop
🔹Tokenizes your time (minutes)
🔹Priced on bonding curve (global)
🔹Minutes are "redeemed" for events (calls, direct messages, group chats, etc)
🔹95% of redeemed value, 2% trading fees go to creator
🔹Creator determines which features are redeemable (and their prices)

My Commentary
🔹The team has very specifically gone after Friendtech's creator monetization vertical and addressed key weaknesses (platform fees, no redemption or recurring revenue models, rigid contracts, lack of sustainable 3rd party extensibility)
🔹Product is polished and feature-rich
🔹Redemption features provides the release valve needed in an eco supported by a bonding curve
🔹Sustainable 3rd party extensibility of the contracts could turn this from an app to a protocol (huge)
🔹Headwinds will be FT psychological trauma, fostering an active eco and enforcing creator redemptions

If you want more details (and pictures) - keep reading.

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LONG VERSION

First - Let's address the SocialFi elephant in the room: Friendtech (and how this isn't that).

If anything - it's an opinionated evolution.

FT displayed a lot of potential that everyone kinda saw, but the app, team and vision was ultimately not great at any of them.

Thus, opinionated apps are coming to market targeting subsets of the properties within SocialFi.

Per the above, time is targeting creator monetization, social speculation and the ability to serve as a platform for 3rd party apps atop it's ledger/currency (minutes).

All things I was personally excited about (and which FT didn't capitalize on).

Okay, but how and why is it different?

Glad you asked.

First, lets lay the foundation of the protocol:
🔹Social login (X)
🔹Time (minutes) are priced on bonding curve
🔹You can redeem minutes for events
🔹Events are meetings (optional), direct Q&A messages and access to a group chat

I like pictures:

The thing to note with the above, is the flow of capital (fees) and configurability (minimum redemption price).

Lets zoom in on the bonding curve so you can see what I mean:

Breaking it down:
🔹Creator has the power to set a minimum price before people can redeem for meetings or get access to GC (so you're not hopping on a call for sheckles)
🔹All events are a request/accept model, so you can have people send messages or ask for meetings, but unless you as the creator accept it/respond they won't pay out and return to purchaser in-full.
🔹When redeemed, a few things happen:
- Those minutes are sold in to the curve (supply/price down)
- The value from that sale goes to the creator (95%), holders (~2%), referee (0.5% [optional]) and platform (2.5%)
🔹For group chats the redemption is automatic every X weeks for Y minutes (set by creator), so it simulates a subscription model
🔹Outside of redemption, trades can still take place for speculatoooors where fees are split between Creator, Holders and the platform.

Both flows, visualized:

That covers the basic setup of what's in place today.

So what are my thoughts? I'll lay out a bear and bull.

Bull Thesis
@timedotfun is used for sustainable, one-time user events but also turns in to a protocol where developers build secondary, sustainable interfaces and experiences for creators to redeem events on.

More experiences. More creators. More devs.

You saw some of this with friendtech where ownership of keys granted you access to a 3rd party tools, but that wasn't sustainable for those devs. FT had a 50% fee take rate and without redemption or transferability the only income source was trading volatility. Not great.

Here, devs have:
- A cut of the 95% creator fees
- Can be whitelisted to bypass restricting methods (transferability, minimum limits, etc)
- An API for obtaining internal information

Best part? The team is showing you the way. Subscriptions and group chats leverage this feature just like any 3rd party dev would. It works. Today.

Bear Thesis / Headwinds
In short: cold start, unfamiliar pricing schemes and ensuring creators honor their inbound.

If the creators don't push people to the platform for redeeming their time or if the users don't feel like creators are active enough, both sides could walk away unhappy.

They've already implemented notifications for both email and text (on top of the PWA notis), so this should help the latter problem, but it might feel like a ghost town early on.

The other major headwind I could see is simply pricing ones self being too cumbersome for users which leads to them never even getting set up.

"How much am I worth per-minute?"
"Why do I have to price in ETH? What if it goes down?"
"Well if my minutes are X and my subs are Y but I want to do meetings for Z which would mean my hourly is...?" (you get the idea)

Conclusion
Time is a very thoughtful and well-executed iteration in the SocialFi space, and I could see it gaining steam for people with tons of inbound.

As with any early projects it has some minor UX hitches that make things frustrating (like pricing your minutes and having to do hour/minute conversions to see what you're setting at), but in general the platform is intuitive.

Another promising app out of @alliancedao.

Thanks
Shoutout to @0xKawz and @timed. I talked to the team several weeks ago purely based on SocialFi tweets and when asked about doing a review was given no restrictions - just my honest thoughts and a holistic view.

I'm very happy to announce that after digging in deeper, I'm bullish and will start pushing redemptions to the platform to get a better feel for how it could mature.


@timedotfun If you want to give it a go, here's a signup (yes ref).

Free, mobile and social sign-in:
time.fun/?ref=0xbreadguy

Sorry bros - @unichain is bearish for $ETH (the asset).

...but I'm also incapable of seeing new mechanisms and drawing technical diagrams to help people understand them, so I'll FUD it while detailing some of the cool tech. ☺️🧵 WTF is Unichain?

It's @Uniswap's Defi-focused L2 within the OP Superchain.

What does that mean? It is joining a collective of L2s that share revenue and promise interoperability.

Today, Superchain accounts for ~44% (!) of all L2 fees.

Figures here:

https://x.com/0xBreadguy/status/1832069441867096173

Chat, is this enough to live in Southeast Asia for the rest of the year?

(Yes it is)

Here's what my one-bag looks like, and what I'll live out of for the rest of the year following Token 2049. 🧵☺️
Toiletries

Pretty basic stuff here, optimizing for space.

Notables:
- Travel electronic toothbrush (quip)
- Carabiner because shelf space can be hard to come by on the road
- Exfoliant + soft hand towel combo
- Larger travel towel just in case

"L2s will make Ethereum deflationary again"

No they won't - and we already have examples of why that's true.

A report on L2s, blobs and why the Ultrasound Money meme is dead without mainnet users

TLDR
🔹L2s will only make ETH deflationary if they saturate both the blob and regular fee markets
🔹L2s, largely, aren't beholden to a specific batch posting cadence to L1
🔹The combination of the above means L2s will constantly maneuver around each other to avoid creating a high fee environment for themselves

--------------------------------------------------

BACKGROUND
First, a brief reminder of how Ethereum looks post-Dencun (the update from March that made L2s ~10x cheaper for user).

Dencun introduced the concept of blobspace, which is an expansion of blockspace on Ethereum meant for Layer 2s to post their batch data to.

A visual:

This new area has a few properties worth noting:
🟦"Blobspace" is currently limited to 6 max individual blobs within it per block

🟦It's a separate fee market from regular blockspace, but uses a similar mechanism
🔹Blockspace: If the current block is >50% utilized, increase the base fee in the next block
🔹Blobspace: If 4 (i.e. >50%) or more blobs are in the current block, increase base fee for the next block by ~12%

NOTE: L2s can use either blockspace or blobspace for their purpose, at their discretion.

LOOKING FORWARD
Given the above, we can predict a few things about expected behavioral flow of these L2s that will lead to burn:
🔹L2s will first saturate blobspace to the point where it stops being ~free (3 blob/block)
🔹Once it hits this level, they will begin doing the calculus of posting costs/reputational savings and opt to either:
a.) Use calldata
b.) Slow their posting frequency / spread out / coordinate to cool the fee market

That is all to say that L2s modus operandi will be to constantly adjust their behaviors to avoid creating a high fee environment for themselves, despite the top L2s already making millions per month in profit (w/ near-100% margins).

The ETH vampire death loop:
🔹Prolong low-fee environment
🔹Wait for Ethereum to scale, resetting market
🔹Prolong low-fee environment
🔹Wait for Ethereum to scale, resetting market...

"When does Eth plan to scale?" you ask

As early as next year with Pectra update, which may expand blob capacity ~2-3x.

--------------------------------------------------

WE'RE SEEING IT ALREADY
The market hasn't presented this opportunity a ton, but we have two examples of L2s intentionally modifying behavior to save costs and avoid fees (as you would for any business or rational actor).

Ex 1: Blobscriptions Craze
🔹In late March blobs saw "price discovery" from a blobscription phase and despite that: L2s and builders on average limited their blobs to the non-price-increasing level of 3 blobs/block:

h/t @hildobby_ for the Dune

They had no obligation to go beyond the fee-increasing level and so they didn't.

Ex. 2: LayerZero Airdrop
🔹On 6/20 we saw the $ZRO airdod, which created a substantial increase in transactions on Arbitrum and led them to flood the blob market.

TLDR
-> More blobs from ARB
-> higher blob costs for all L2s
-> ~$800k in ETH burned by L2s that didn't have the infra in place to switch to regular blockspace

I covered it when it happened if you want to read more:


The big takeaway from the event was how the teams reacted to the high-fee environment:

h/t @blocknative for the article

🔹Scroll, a zk rollup with no obligation to post, stopped posting altogether (lol).
🔹Taiko, a based rollup with a strict cadence, slowed their batch pace.

Both market participants acted in a rational way to reduce their overhead.

Going forward, you bet your ass they're going to have automated processes in place to avoid burning hundreds of thousands of dollars before they switch.

All L2s will, which brings me to...

--------------------------------------------------

CONCLUSION, WHAT CAN WE DO

When I set out to write this report it was to simply calculate something like "It would take another 4 Base-level L2s to make ETH Ultrasound Money™️ again" but the more I dug the more realized the goalpost would never be hit.

L2s will constantly adjust their behavior to avoid heavy costs (read: ETH burn). They're business - of course they will.

So, what do we do given the above? We make mainnet cool again, attracting both users and builders.

No more of this:


More of this:


You have to balance scaling through L2s with keeping your powerusers on mainnet - not pushing them off indiscriminately to one of a dozen ecosystems of various constructions that give minimal economic nod back to Ethereum.

Star by adjusting the messaging
> Fill to capacity
> Scale to your comfort level
> Tell users and apps to gtfo (skip this step)
> Scale through L2s

You also implement things like EIP-7623 () which defend L1 users blockspace from being used as L2 cost-saving failover space.

Relying solely on L2s as actors and mainnet as purely settlement isn't it. Not with the current incentives.

Thanks for coming to my Bread Talks.

https://x.com/0xBreadguy/status/1807444529731211594

https://x.com/0xBreadguy/status/1821602952139960694

https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1822732571836314005

https://x.com/0xBreadguy/status/1823073712314139060

FYI -

The best math we can do is "how many L2s would it take to get to non-zero cost blobs and L2s changing behavior?" and for that, I have numbers.

Assuming behavior stays constant, we could add to current load and still be ~free blobs:
- 1 Base, or
- 2 Arbitrums, or
- 3 Blasts, or
- 4 OP Mainnets, or
- 9 Scrolls, or
- 12 Starknets, or
- 21 ZkSyncs, or
- Couple thousand alt-DA chains (Mantle, Eclipse, etc)

Reminder that once the above is added, they'll just jostle around to return to a low-fee environment and then coast until Eth scales again - resetting the market.

.@Arthur_0x's tweet got me curious on the DeFi landscape and what they might be looking at.

After removing some obvious non-DeFi categories, you can see a clear TVL uptrend in several sectors.

Notable:
> Lending TVL ATH
> RWA's waking up

Notable categories below 👇

https://twitter.com/Arthur_0x/status/1806314382541930498

Derivatives ATH.

Top protocol: GMX

A GUIDE TO FRIENDTECH

Seeing larger accounts shilling their "shares" on your timeline, don't know what they're talking about or where to start?

Here's the guide to understand and get setup on the hot new social token dapp on Coinbase's new Layer 2 blockchain: @friendtech 1⃣ BOOKMARK, LIKE, RT

Be sure to save the parent tweet so you can reference later and share with friends when they ask to buy your shares once you're setup. 🤝