AI Agents have now reached over $10 billion in market cap.

So, are AI agents the next big thing, or just another way to pump tokens?

To find out, I spent the past few weeks learning about how AI agents work under the hood.

Here’s what I learned: Initially, I was very sceptical about AI “agents”.

“Sure bro, an AI decided to launch a token and start shitposting about it on Twitter…”

I dismissed it as another short-term narrative built to pump tokens.

However, the tokens & tweets are a small part of AI agents.

Ethereum block production is extremely centralized.

95% of Ethereum's blocks are made by 2 entities, leading to the potential for transaction censorship.

EIP-7805 introduces FOCIL, a way to preserve Ethereum’s censorship resistance.

Here’s how it works: 🧵 Justin Drake's Beam Chain proposal includes 9 major upgrades.

Upgrade #1 is to improve censorship resistance.

But why? Isn't Ethereum meant to be decentralized?

Let's quickly cover how the block-building process has evolved to where it is today.

Beam Chain was the biggest announcement at Devcon, introducing 9 major upgrades for Ethereum.

But most people still don’t understand them...

So, here are 9 tweets to explain the 9 upgrades: 🧵 Beam Chain is Justin Drake's proposal to redesign Ethereum's consensus layer (CL).

Before we dive into the specific upgrades, I'll briefly overview what the CL actually is.

Each Ethereum node runs two components:
1/ Execution Client
2/ Consensus Client

Abstract just announced Panoramic Governance.

It is a proposed way to reward both the users and app developers bringing the most value to the chain.

Here's how it works (in simple terms) 🧵 Panoramic Governance (PG) consists of two parts:

1. Activity Driven Loop
2. Emissions Driven Loop

(1) Incentivizes users for their active participation.
(2) Provides rewards for the best app builders.

(1/12)

Account abstraction is finally gaining the traction it deserves over the past few months.

So, why not build it natively into the protocol?

That's exactly what @AbstractChain is doing... and I spent the past week learning about it.

Here's exactly how it works (a thread): As a quick recap, account abstraction enables the use of smart contracts as wallets (as opposed to EOAs).

It provides a standardized way for smart contracts to act as a wallet and handle transactions.

EOA: public/private key pair.
Smart Contract: any valid EVM code.

(2/24)

Vitalik just proposed EIP-7702.

It's one of the most impactful changes Ethereum is going to have... EVER.

So, here's everything you need to know about how it works and how we got here: The new EIP-7702 proposal is surprisingly short! Leaving some people confused as to how this is going to work.

To understand 7702, there are first three other proposals that it mentions that we'll walk through:
1/ EIP-4337
2/ EIP-3074
3/ EIP-5003

(1/23)

Ethereum L2s have now reached over $20B TVL.

But users still have almost no way of performing cross-chain L2 transactions.

I spent the past week reading about how different kinds of sequencers (and Polygon's AggLayer) are being built to solve this.

Here's everything I learned: First, what even is a sequencer?

Rollups consist of several components, but all of them include some kind of sequencer that performs 2 critical tasks:

1/ Read transactions from the L2 mempool & execute them
2/ Batch transactions together, and send the batches to L1

EigenLayer just crossed $1 billion in deposits.

So, is restaking the future of Ethereum? Or just another overhyped narrative?

I spent the past few days reading through the EigenLayer whitepaper & founder Sreeram's interviews.

Here's everything I learned: To understand EigenLayer and restaking, we first need to quickly re-cap Ethereum's consensus mechanism.

After Ethereum's "merge" event in September 2022, Ethereum swapped from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.

EVM parallelization is the hottest new narrative.

So, is it all hype? Or is innovating on the EVM something we'll continue to see throughout 2024?

Here's everything you need to know: Typically, EVM-based blockchains have a bottleneck; block proposers and validators verify every transaction in sequential order.

One by one.

This is because transaction X may depend on transaction Y which may depend on transaction Z, etc. etc.

Inscriptions are responsible for ~90% of transactions on many EVM chains this week.

Is this just another crypto FAD? Or are inscriptions actually genius, and here to stay long-term?

To find out, I spent the past few days exploring them.

Here's everything I learned: The Bitcoin blockchain doesn't support smart contracts; meaning there's no way to create tokens such as NFTs on the Bitcoin network.

That is until earlier this year, around April 2023, when something called Bitcoin "Ordinals" started to gain traction.

"Blast is just a 3/5 multisig..."

I spent the past few days diving into the source code to see if this statement is actually true.

Here's everything I learned: Let's start at the beginning.

A fresh wallet, 0x52c31 deploys two contracts:

1/ 0xa01: The Blast Deposit Proxy Contract
2/ 0x5f6: The Blast Deposit Implementation Contract

If you aren't familiar with these "proxy contract" setups, np, we'll come back to this later.

(1/24)

We all know Layer 2s batch transactions together and send a single transaction back to Ethereum.

But what *actually* gets posted to L1?

I followed a transaction all the way from being submitted on Polygon zkEVM through to being part of a ZK proof on L1.

Here's what I learned: The full flow of transactions can be broken down into 5 steps:

1/ Submitting
2/ Executing
3/ Batching
4/ Sequencing
5/ Aggregating

(1/25)

I spent the last week building a dApp on every ZK-EVM.

I tested out Polygon, Linea, Scroll, Taiko, Era and more, documenting every step of the process.

Here's everything I learned: ZK-EVMs are all aiming to achieve the same goal; to make Ethereum more scalable and grow the overall web3 space.

If you don't know what a ZK-EVM is, they batch transactions on "L2" (layer 2) together and post a "validity proof" of that batch back to Ethereum "L1".

(1/50)

Zero-knowledge proofs are powering the next wave of innovation in web3.

I spent the past week reading hundreds of resources about:
◆ How ZK proofs work
◆ ZK-SNARKs & ZK-STARKs
◆ zkEVMs and Ethereum's ZK rollups

Here's everything I learnt 🧵: To start off, what is the goal of a ZK proof?

In one sentence: ZK proofs allow you to prove something without revealing the thing itself.

This has several real-world applications, such as verifying your age without providing your full license/passport information.

(1/39)

Polygon has made a proposal to change its PoS chain to become a zkEVM validium.

◆ WTF is a validium?
◆ What's this mean for Polygon?
◆ How's this different from the zkEVM Rollup?

Let's explain it in simple terms 👇 Over the past few years, we've seen many different solutions come out to address the same problem: Ethereum's scalability.

We've seen sidechains, rollups, plasma chains, and more to enable users to more easily experience web3 by creating lower fees and higher throughput.

(1/17)

Is Fortnite doing NFTs? 🧐

Fortnite just dropped 2 skins, 7 items and an island called "Airphoria" in partnership with Nike and @dotSWOOSH.

How do NFTs fit into this though?

..🧵 To answer the original question: the skins and in-game items are not NFTs.

Fortnite already has an established in-game item shop and in-game currency, it would be a massive investment for them to rework this to include on-chain skins.

(1/9)

I just fixed web3 onboarding...

I created an app that has:
◆ No wallet requirement
◆ No transaction approvals
◆ No gas fees

Powered by the new EIP-4337 account abstraction.

Here's how: I strongly believe that wallets, as we know them today, will be heavily abstracted away from users in the near future.

The barrier to entry when it comes to interacting with web3 apps is insanely high, involving KYC, purchasing & transferring of funds, gas fees, approvals, etc.

Want to make a play-to-earn crypto game?

I built an open-source repo you can use, where you:

- Mint an NFT "Miner" Character 👷
- Buy a "Pickaxe" NFT from the shop ⛏️
- Start mining to earn ERC-20 "Gold Gem" tokens 💎

🧵👇 Mega thread of resources and links below! Firstly, our NFT character

Our miners are ERC-1555 NFT tokens, meaning they're "semi-fungible".

This means that we can have multiple "copies" of the same NFT!

I used @thirdweb_'s Edition Drop contract to lazy-mint the character NFT and allow users to mint them for some MATIC!