Research Partner @1kxnetwork. CS PhD @UCSanDiego. Research & investing for the future of crypto. Alpha in highlights. Personal opinion, not investment advice.
Privacy is the last hurdle to mass-adoption of onchain finance. Can we simply add self-sovereign privacy to today's onchain finance and expect everything to work better?
The answer is no. We must make hard decisions on trade-offs between the following three desirable properties:
1. Maximally useful: no transaction limits, supports private payments and anonymous DeFi 2. Self-sovereign privacy: contents of private transactions cannot be revealed without consent from involved individuals 3. Threat resistant: adversaries cannot use it to hack & launder funds
Choose any 2, but never 32/ Why self-sovereignty of assets and privacy?
Rights to property (article 12) and rights to privacy (article 17) are two fundamental human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published by the UN in 1948.
What is self-sovereign privacy?
Per Eric Hughes in his Cypherpunk's Manifesto, "an anonymous transaction system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired".
Self-sovereign privacy means that no one should be able to see contents of privacy transactions unless the individual involved choose to reveal their content.
May 4, 2025 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
1/ Dankrad: "let's commit to scaling the L1 100x over 4 years."
Vitalik: "let's simplify the L1."
If you had to choose one, which one would you commit to?
These are surprisingly different approaches, in their underlying philosophy: research-led vs. product-led. 2/ Rough break down of Vitalik's post:
- New simplified consensus design (3 slot finality)
- Replace EVM with a RISC-V VM
- Sharing erasure code for DAS, block propagation, and history storage.
1/ Universal interoperability standards are brewing in Ethereum. 🧵👇
List of foundational cross-chain components to be standardized:
1. Addresses 2. Messaging 3. Tokens 4. Intents (?)
2/ Addresses were not multi-chain by default, leading to poor UX in a multi-chain world.
Wallet addresses should behave like email addresses, identifying the chain of interest.
There are numerous efforts currently and CAIP-10 seems to be most promising in terms of universality (beyond Ethereum and EVM chains), but it is not as human friendly.
Solana is under pressure, from TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins related traffic.
Three interesting graphs (snapshot taken at the time of writing):
1. Mean and median fees are both up significantly.
2. Txn failure rates is at 40%, relative to 20% before the traffic spike.
3. Interestingly, block CU utilization is down and hovering below 20M.
Unlike on Ethereum, congestion on Solana leads to less full blocks, in terms of CU utialized.
This may in part be due to apps over estimating CU utilization, as pointed out below by Mert.
2/ @0xBreadguy summarized the reasons for "Yes & No" (QT). To paraphrase:
- DA is a commodity because secure DA services are large indistinguishable.
- DA has no network effect because rollups don't benefit from other rollups sharing the same DA layer.
The EIGEN token design is bullish for ZK and bearish for restaking.
Yes, you read that right.
Read this thread to find out why 👇
2/ The whitepaper outlines two types of tasks: 1. Objective (e.g. 1 + 1 = 2) 2. Intersubjective (e.g. price of Eth rn)
It also clearly states:
- restaked ETH for objective tasks
- bEIGEN for intersubjective tasks
But, objective tasks can be proved via zk directly!
Sep 28, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
1/ Seeing a lot of excitement on FHE recently. Here's my take in a thread: for trust-minimized applications, FHE is a game changer that enables application-level privacy. However, for it to truly shine, FHE needs to be used *alongside* other tools such as MPC and ZKP. 👇
2/ FHE enables compute on encrypted data. It can help solve the privacy issue with public blockchains--that every bits of information is recorded publicly on-chain.
Jan 2, 2023 • 8 tweets • 6 min read
2022 was an exciting year, I look forward to continue my work on research, development & product in blockchains/Web3! I'm making a thread of all the talks I gave in 2022 around privacy, blockchain, and ZK. 🧵👇🏽
The first set of talks is around fully homomorphic encryption for blockchains and why zero-knowledge execution cannot provide full state-privacy for shared-state applications.
2/ Rough break down of Vitalik's post:
Unlike on Ethereum, congestion on Solana leads to less full blocks, in terms of CU utialized.