0x7181be7f573079305316257ef19e8b5cbf553821ebc27845596b305031f3c5ed

ENS Labs built something significant on the backs of a huge community of enthusiasts that deeply cared about the protocol independent of whether they got paid for their work. and are now robbing everyone that participated in that. not of money they expect to receive - but of time invested and integrations built.

Imho you're missing the point. Just like a blockchain, ENS generates revenue by design. Blockchains take transaction fees to safeguard its working, ENS take registration and renewal fees to ensure the protocol is usable long term. If either didn't take fees, they would not work. This makes ENS is entirely distinct from other internet protocols like "Signal" or foundations like "Mozilla". They don't generate revenue based on their usage. The comparison with Mozilla is especially hilarious, since sadly they're doing a terrible job and Firefox is dying. 10 years ago they held over 30% market share, now they are below 3%. For any revenue generating protocol you have to figure out where that money goes. When ENS was profitable, and all fees went to True Names this was the biggest valid critique of ENS. To become an internet level protocol you have to distribute these to the network enabling the protocols existence. BTC and ETH distribute it to those who run the network. What does this mean for ENS? ENS should distribute its revenue to those who enable users to interact with it in valuable ways. Labs has been doing this quite badly for the last few years. There are almost no significant integrations, there are very few application level improvements. The main mechanism through which valuable integrations and applications are developed are through the Service Provider program. Labs doesn't like this, for obvious reasons. They see other teams as inefficient and bloated. Meanwhile they are bloated themselves. Most of the fees generated, actually MORE than the fees that the protocol generates are going to ENS Labs. In the past the DAO has approved every budget request of ENS Labs, but their inefficiency is becoming obvious, raising the question whether that should be the case. For example, a budget of close to $10m/y was requested for the development and operation of a new L2, and there is no change to this even though that project is canceled. Why should the DAO continue to pay ENS Labs the requested amounts? Instead of seeing things realistically and downsizing (there is much less to go around), Labs wants to increase its spending, and to ensure they are well funded for a long time, cut others out of the pool. This would bring us full circle back to the True Names non profit days, where one entity runs the entire protocol. For early development, and as long as the entity actually builds efficiently, that's fine, but it nullifies the notion of the protocol being internet scale, independent, and decentralized. The success of ENS would be limited by how well Labs executes, and how it is seen as such (!). Decentralization story telling and branding matters: I and many others are excited about ENS as an unowned internet level protocol that by design will survive forever. If we're just paying a single entity (for profit or not), its brand as an internet protocol goes away. Integrations that would have happened don't happen. ENS dies a slow death. Alternatives exists. True competition (everyone should be equal to the DAO, Labs should be an SP like any other), retroactive funding (don't fund things that have no proven value, do so retroactively), and general downsizing (lower spend across the board / redirect to actual value ads) can fix this. One of the best ideas in the last few years is the revenue share / referrals. Applications would be incentivised to implement best in class ENS integrations and drive ENS adoption because they are economically aligned with that happening. Nicks counter argument is that all this is unnecessary because users can just use the ENS App built by Labs. He is missing the point: ENS is valuable because integrations, not because the ENS app. And there are currently no incentives to build good integrations. Without more and better integrations, ENS dies a slow death. ENS as a protocol (DAO) shouldn't spend significantly more than what it makes. It should only fund true value adds, when the value add is proven and there is actual ecosystem need for it. The mechanism to decide that should be a DAO. Even if friction is high. That's the point. And most importantly: ENS must not loose its brand as an internet protocol vs a random non profit open source project that users have to pay for to use. It's like expecting a blockchain to work when all transaction fees go to one entity.

It's like we dug up a powerful alien artifact and society is humping it while taking selfies

The soul of Ethereum was Cypherpunk. It _is_ Cypherpunk. It will always be Cypherpunk. You can chase your glossy, VC-driven narratives, build your fancy protocols, but the ones that will endure are the ones that preserve our privacy, defend against censorship, and stand tall in the face of tyranny. Those are the projects that will outlast all the distractions, all the fleeting trends. Because principles do fucking matter. Because this is our fight, it's my personal fight, it's our soul. Cypherpunk will always rise. And in the end, Cypherpunk will win.

Yea, happy to weigh in. Ethereum focuses on having a robust, credibly neutral base layer which sometimes comes with the tradeoff of having to do more research and implementation to increase throughput Blockchains that don't prioritize being credibly neutral and removing centralization pressure can move faster on increasing throughput and this is where you probably see a lot of the "better tech" conversation come in Any brand new blockchain today can come in and ostensibly have much better throughput than Ethereum but they don't have the censorship resistance that Ethereum is building and maintaining at its base layer There's an abundance of very impressive research coming out of the Ethereum ecosystem on how to maintain and improve this censorship resistance without constraining its throughput in future upgrades Being a credibly neutral tech that guarantees censorship resistance is the entire point of blockchain. If one class of users can influence the base layer of the protocol more than any other users, trust in the tech breaks down, institutions aren't willing to use it over their proprietary stacks, and we have nothing more than an ultra-complex, incredibly inefficient database masquerading as a blockchain And if you want the easier argument - Ethereum has still never had any downtime. It has multiple, well-adopted implementations of its software to protect against bugs. Other top chains can't say the same.

100 ETH were assumed lost but could eventually be recovered. Here's what happened, how it became a happy ending and what's needed to prevent this from happening again. Context A user of Safe{Wallet} wanted to bridge 100 ETH from Mainnet to Base. But then they realized that they can't actually access the funds on the Base. The Safe on Base had a different set of signers than their original Safe, meaning they had no control over it. How can this happen? Unlike EOAs (Externally Owned Accounts), smart accounts like Safe are governed by deployed smart contract code. It's technically possible to deploy a smart account with the same deployment config (same signers) on different chains at the same address (using counterfactual deployment). So normally bridging to a chain where the smart account is not deployed yet is merely an annoyance as the user first has to deploy the smart account before they can access the bridged funds. But this case was different. The user used their @Safe smart account since 2020. The smart account version from back then (v1.1.1.) was not yet written with multichain in mind, so it was possible for anyone to deploy a smart account on a different chain with completely a different config at the same address. Something that has been changed since the v.1.2.0. version. Rescue Once the Safe team became aware of the incident, @tschubotz took immediate ownership. He examined the Safe on Base and noticed that the address had been deployed by an account that had preemptively deployed many other v1.1.1 Safes on Base. Through further onchain analysis, the trail led to @protofire. As it turns out, the Protofire team was aware of this edge case for older Safes and white-hat deployed Safes to frontrun a malicious hacker taking advantage of it. So just two hours after the incident was reported, there was hope that the funds could indeed be recovered. And few minutes later, a first test transaction and then a full transfer of the 100 ETH back to the user could be done. This is commendable anticipation of @protofire, strong leadership from @tschubotz and fantastic support by the wider @Safe team to get the funds safely back to the user. 💪 Learnings The root cause was the use of an older Safe version (v1.1.1), which didn’t account for multichain deployments. Since version v1.2.0, Safe includes protections that prevent conflicting deployments across chains by modifying how the CREATE2 salt is constructed. To bridge, the user chose the native bridge integration which is essentially a @lifiprotocol widget but with some optimizations for smart accounts. For example, the bridging feature warns users explicitly if there is NO code at the destination chain, meaning that no smart contract was deployed there. However, there was no warning in place for there being different code deployed on the destination chain. This additional layer of protection has now been introduced to cover the edge-case for old v.1.1.1. accounts. The deeper fix lies in improved keystore infrastructure (like keystore rollups) that can guarantee a consistent account config across chains. Until then, deployment behavior will remain difficult to reason about for developers and end-users. Finally, we are still at a point where users are expected to do test transactions before moving bigger funds. This is not scalable and shouldn't be expected from users. There needs to be more innovation around hooks, guards, and other safety mechanisms that allow strong protections for users. I'm glad this case could be resolved with a happy end and there is important learnings for wallet developers, especially ones using smart accounts. But it also clearly showed once again that a lot more work is ahead of us to truly make self-custody easy and secure for everyone.

Yes, very much yes. I do remember that Nixo. 😉

The King of the North ⚔️

The Gnosis team and ecosystem are like that quiet best friend that never lets you down and always seems to be the source of your most memorable adventures… Early owl gets the worm.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining as a cofounder of @etherealize_io to help onboard the world to Ethereum I’ll be at the helm of the ship alongside @vivekventures and the incredible team he is building

It’s always great to hear Erik articulate these concepts. Our Principles. We don’t do this because it’s easier.

ACD call today spoke of the hardware requirements again (EIP will be finalized in a week) - my suggestion was that we aim to keep validators net profitable after hardware costs within 6-12 months (we're currently at 4 months to make up hardware costs) There was pushback today on that suggestion because "what if LSTs push up to 99% ETH staked and rewards go to zero, we can't be expected to decrease the hardware requirements" First - this is a legitimate flaw in the proposal but, second, suggests to me that Ethereum researchers have decided that it's inevitable to have to optimize the network for the eventual scenario that it just won't be economically rational to run a validator, unless it's professionally as an LST operator. If that's the direction we're going in, we should at least be aware and explicit that it's where we're headed: our current trajectory leaves us with an LST-only scenario and nodes run from home are purely hobbyist or development-related endeavors and certainly not profitable. imo, we should be choosing where we're headed, not let our network's direction be defined by capitulation or inability. If this is where we need to go, then that's that and we should be explicit about it. If it's not a good direction, then we're not being forthright about lacking the creativity to develop a solution that keeps solo stakers existing. With inclusion lists and the ability to run a (zero rewards) node from home, it certainly doesn't kill Ethereum's original intent of censorship resistance and universal auditability, but it looks a lot different than what it was aiming for with at-home validation. This kills the solo staker.

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle. The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness. The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy. The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from. ~ Ben Horowitz

Please, help this ratio become epic. 😂

Absolutely incredible. Promise made, promise kept. 8 years in the making.

“Malicious MEV is organized theft, plain and simple, with powerful entrenched players systematically extracting value from normal people.” Read more in my recent editorial about transaction privacy, decentralization and encrypted mempools: crypto.news/transaction-priv…