Crypto and Defi Explained
Crypto and Defi Explained
I visualize The Rabbit Hole as a whimsical cavernous Fey realm full of bountiful harvests, perplexing creatures, and breathtaking views. It’s an exciting place, full of new concepts you don’t even have words for yet, inviting mysteries for curious minds, and the potential to change you and the world forever. It is well worth exploring. …
I’m seeing a major uptick recently in DePin (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) projects. The basic idea of DePin is to expand the sharing economy to computation. Rather than restricting compute providers to a few tech-oligarchs like Amazon the DePin movement is democratizing that access. BTC and ETH PoW were the early permissionless players for decentralized computation …
One of the cornerstones of permissionlessness is that each participant must have something at stake. The standard thing at stake for almost every protocol, whether on-chain or chain-adjacent, is some provably scarce token that is subject to some kind of slashing condition. I commonly see this referred to as stake but that term is often …
As part of my tokenomic consulting work I’m building a kind of meta-inventory of tokenomic patterns and anti-patterns in my head. This is akin to things like tvtropes for writers or design patterns for programming but for game-theory. I call the set of anti-patterns Moloch’s Toolbox. These are qualitative criteria amongst actors in an ecosystem that lead …
3/18/23 DID (Decentralized ID) systems are a hot topic right now. They are needed for everything from free to play games, social media networks, and airdrops to governance systems like OPs Citizens House. There is (rightly so) a lot of buzz and various takes on how to approach this topic. I think this is one …
This post is targeted at more of a developer audience than my usual writings. Whatever technical jargon is here shouldn’t distract from the point too much if you just skim past it and keep reading. Whenever I see the too-often FUD about some country evicting miners, KYCing wallets, or suing some company or other I …
I have a speech I give to people I introduce to crypto. I feel it helps to prepare them for the dangers they are going to encounter when they dive deeper, to give them some guided skepticism while not deterring them from exploring, and to keep them optimistic in the face of the toxic vitriol. …
10/26/2021 Let’s start with this: why do so many platforms nowadays have Liquidity Mining programs? It wasn’t always done this way; most of the older tokens such as MKR and LINK have never done this. So why did this catch on? Let’s consider this from the perspective of a DAO. The basic answer is so …
Back in my Defi Governance Endgame post I talk about the need for a new Sybil resistance mechanism to reduce the super-linear influence of capital on governance. The first has to do with a different solution to Sybil resistance than money… In the long term I think we’ll see a bunch of Legos taking the …
This is going to be a rant about the unfortunate end state of Defi if we continue along our current trajectory. The fundamental issue is that we’re using money for Sybil resistance. Simply using governance tokens as a vote count makes money correlate super-linearly to influence. Vitalk recently wrote about this problem and it has been bubbling on my …