Wei Dai Profile picture
Research Partner @1kxnetwork. CS PhD @UCSanDiego. Research & investing for the future of crypto. Alpha in highlights. Personal opinion, not investment advice.
May 4 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. Image
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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.

Apr 10 6 tweets 3 min read
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.

Link to table github.com/ethereum/L2-in…Image
Jan 19 4 tweets 2 min read
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.Image
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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.

Sep 17, 2024 7 tweets 3 min read
1/ Is DA a commodity? Do DA layers have network effects? The debrief thread.

The most popular answer from the poll is "Yes & No".
The most argued for answer in the replies is "No & Yes".

Obviously none of the four options in the poll capture the full range of nuances. 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.

May 3, 2024 7 tweets 2 min read
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.