Alex Skidanov (alex.near)
@AlexSkidanov
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Co-founder @NearProtocol, a sharded blockchain with an emphasis on usability.
Joined August 2018
Evidently @github has banned all the Iranian users without an ability for them to download their repositories. A service like Github must be a public good and must not be controlled by a centralized entity. Another great example of why we as a society need to make web3 a reality.
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1/ An explainer from @mzavershynskyi on how the bi-directional bridge between NEAR and Ethereum works, and what assumptions it makes:. The most exciting (for me) details are in the short thread below.
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My presentation at @web3summit on blockchain sharding that covers sharding basics, attacks and attack mitigations, with all the recent progress that happened in the past year.
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A short thread on HotStuff vs Tendermint for Libra. 1/ LibraBFT uses HotStuff as the base for their consensus. I went through the paper today, and it appears to be practically unaltered version of the latest HotStuff that was accepted to PODC'19. Paper:
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1/ In the last crypto paper of this decade* we present a new construction called Doomslug that allows finalizing blocks for most practical purposes in a single round of communication, while still getting full BFT finality after two rounds of communication.
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In the episode 34 of Whiteboard Series I talk with @hus_qy from @iotatoken about their Coordicice effort, and their proposed sharding solution. Watch here: #IOTA $IOTA.
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Everytime I spend 15 minutes to rearrange the code to get around mutable borrow or lifetimes issues in @rustlang, I remind myself that those 15 minutes likely saved me 4 hours of debugging a core dump without symbols with a production crash one month from now.
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I wrote an in-depth overview of L2 approaches, including Plasma, State Channels, Side Chains and Roll-Ups, covering technical details and security guarantees. Thanks to @ben_chain, @gakonst, @skywinder and @tomclse for early feedback!.
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Epic piece by @brave shows Google leaks private info about the users to 3rd parties, with a unique id that allows them to then cross-reference their data. A good reminder that it should be our collective effort to rebuild the web without oligopolies.
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1/ We are close to building Blockchain apps that non-technical people can comfortably use. One year ago I was giving a talk about the importance of UX in blockchain applications. Today there's an app on NEAR that has hundreds of non-technical users.
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1/ At an average conference dozens of talks and a dozen of booths are competing for attention of the attendees. If you want to be noticed, you need to be creative. The best way to be creative? Make people do something fun with your tech!
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1/ @NearProtocol announced its $12.1M fundraise today led by Metastable and @Accomplices with participation from @ElectricCapital @PanteraCapital @multicoincap @scalarcapital @svangel @coinbase @ideo. Thanks @DanielGKuhn and @coindesk for covering.
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👀.
Coming (back) soon. 0de65393967d695638c1d0acdb080d878332ff36728d36e0ac4bd5d00e9f44e6.
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An overview of the new @IOTAtoken consensus algorithm, and a comparison of it to Snowball. TL;DR: IOTA consensus likely converges better, but depends on the randomness beacon. With access to such a beacon Snowball can be made to converge faster too.
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We are hosting an online panel on multi-chain protocols with core contributors from:.- Ethereum Serenity.- Cosmos.- Polkadot.- Near Protocol. Technical discussion covering current approaches and open problems. Apr 29.8am PDT | 17:00 CEST. Live stream here:
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The visualization of 5 transactions with synchronous cross-shard calls executing across 8 shards with a complex topology and message routing. A prototype by myself and @VladZamfir that got to top5 at #ETHDenver2019. The code is here:
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1/ Vitalik announced today that they consider using a slightly different approach to shard chains. The new approach very closely resembles Nightshade, @NEARProtocol sharding design:.
Here's that "reduced shard count, faster cross-shard communication" proposal I've been alluding to the last couple of days:.
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1/ NEAR was built with interoperability with other chains in mind from day one. From the ground up NEAR is designed to enable such interoperability. Now that other bridges, such as Wormhole, are announced, it's a good time to see how the designs differ.
1) Announcing: Wormhole - a secure, trustless bridge connecting Ethereum to Solana. 🚀.
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TL;DR: Avalanche paper has a typo which makes it unsafe, and that typo cripples into existing cryptocurrencies implementations. 1/ Few days ago I posted an article in which I showed few common misconceptions about Avalanche.
Last year we were looking into Avalanche, considering to use it in @NearProtocol. Finally published a blog post with what I believe are some common misconceptions about the paper.
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An Epicenter episode with Illia and I. Talked about sharding, account model, onboarding non-crypto users, current ecosystem and many other topics. If you are new to NEAR, or have been around but want to learn more, make sure to check it out!.
🚀NEW EPISODE🚀.@crainbf chats to @AlexSkidanov and @ilblackdragon, founders of @NEARProtocol, one of the first sharded blockchains. Hear about the recent launch of @auroraisnear, NEAR's EVM shard, and how their sharding solution works with smart contracts.
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But how many people believed in what Ray was saying enough to go all in and name their company after his book 🤔
@PeterDiamandis True, Ray was remarkably accurate.
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How I broke solana's stake hash. A description of a vulnerability we discovered in @solana back in January that allowed tricking a warp-synced node into accepting state with arbitrary changes as canonical.
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We are starting a series of short videos in which we talk about interesting components of @NEARProtocol. The first episode covers cross-shard transactions in NEAR, specifically how we execute two-hop cross-shard transactions in exactly two blocks time.
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We just published a new post that compares Doomslug with Tendermint and Hotstuff. It also dives deep into how Tendermint and Hotstuff work, and how they relate to each other and PBFT. Great resource if you want to learn more about BFT consensuses.
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NEAR Foundation has unstaked its nodes today, and thus NEAR mainnet is fully community operated now!. The next step is for the community to exercise their governance power and vote to enable transfers and block rewards. Many more milestones ahead!.
Major milestone: As of today, the NEAR Foundation has spun down its nodes, making the NEAR Protocol MainNet fully community-run. Learn more:
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Private transactions on Ethereum for $3 worth of gas, and can be reduced with small changes on the protocol level. Super exciting.
Zether (by @benediktbuenz, Dan Bohen et al.) is the first privacy mechanism built specifically for Ethereum, i.e. account-based smart contract platforms. Hides both sender/recipient and the amount. No changes to Ethereum required. Practical today. 👌.
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Three of the recent votes on Aragon were decided by one whale. In all three cases the community was in favor of one decision (in one case with 80% votes for it), and then just one vote changed it to the other. Still lots of work ahead for the onchain governance.
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As of today, @zilliqa officially ended its bootstrap phase and enabled payment transactions on the mainnet. Thus Zilliqa is officially the first (known to me) sharded blockchain that went live. Competition is exciting! :).
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1/ We finally published our Sharding paper yesterday:. We started research on sharding from the first day @NearProtocol started in August 2018.
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We published the second part of the deep dive into blockchain sharding, this time covering problems that do not have a satisfactory solution. Thanks to @drakefjustin, @zmanian, @QuaintM, @danrobinson and Alistair Stewart for review and feedback!.
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1/ We just published a paper with an ongoing research at @NEARProtocol on using Proof-of-Space-Time as a Sybil resistance mechanism. While NEAR will use Proof-of-Stake at launch, long term we are not comfortable with relying exclusively on Proof-of-Stake.
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Demo by @VladZamfir on extending CBC sharding to arbitrary rotations. Would not have existed today if Vlad hasn't told me two days ago it couldn't be done in time :). Original write-up on the CBC sharding: New epic CBC paper:
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The best overview of $EOS security model I've seen so far.
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Modern PoS protocols need a source of unbiasable randomness. @dfinity pioneered the idea of using threshold signatures as such a beacon. We just published a new blog post that in very simple terms explains how such beacons work:.
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Last year we were looking into Avalanche, considering to use it in @NearProtocol. Finally published a blog post with what I believe are some common misconceptions about the paper.
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Tweet storm about blockchain randomness. 1/ We published a short paper today that describes our randomness approach, and an accompanying blog post that digs deeper into randomness in general, why it is important, and covers existing approaches.
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If you think about it, @polkadotnetwork and @cosmos work in the space of "blockchains and dapps as a service", or BADaaS 🤔.
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1/ I will be live-coding two core features of @NEARProtocol next week. Every day from Oct28 till Nov1 from 8am-noon and 1pm-4pm PT I will be streaming from my dev machine here:. walking through our code base and implementing some hardcore low level stuff
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A conversation with @PrimeIntellect about their 10B parameter model Intellect 1 trained on machines spread out across the world. Very fun and at times gets pretty technical.
NEAR AI Office Hours #27 w @johannes_hage co-founder of @PrimeIntellect - Find compute. Train models. Co-own intelligence
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In the past few months we helped 3 businesses building on @NEARProtocol raise $2.5M. We want to scale it. If you want to build a business around Open Web, apply for our accelerator: We help with marketing, tech, BD, and have a dream team of mentors.
Please let all of your friends know that if they want to ideate or build a blockchain business: we are happy to help!
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Интервью с Елизаветой Осетинской на офигенном канале Русские Норм. Рассказываю много про ранние дни NEAR.
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We were arguing today if "multicoin" and "polychain" are semantically the same thing. We concluded that no. Eg @polkadotnetwork is a polychain but is not a multicoin, Ethereum with all the ERC20s is a multicoin but not a polychain and @cosmos is both. @multicoincap @polychaincap.
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A new blogpost after quite a bit of silence: an overview of problems with Blockchain usability, and how those problems can be solved:.
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Hacked a PoC of #sharding with atomic crossshard transactions with @VladZamfir and @adiasg at @ETHSanFrancisco. Code is available here: writeup is coming.
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@PeterInAsia1 @hus_qy @fuserleer @radixdlt @NEARProtocol @iotatoken @DavidSonstebo @DomSchiener We have already recorded the episode with @hus_qy, it will be published next week!.
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1/ Very exciting announcement today from @dapper_labs revealing their new blockchain protocol @withflow_. Few thoughts below in the thread.
1/ Introducing Flow - the blockchain for open worlds.
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We partnered with @ZeroPoolNetwork to add private transactions based on zk-SNARKs to @NEARProtocol. In this new blogpost I dive deep into technical details of how private transactions on NEAR will work. Some insights are also in the thread below 1/.
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Today @NEARprotocol announced it’s launch of the first phase of the mainnet. 1/ NEAR mainnet allows people to deploy production applications, with user experience matching that of web applications, assets from Ethereum, and low latency. More details 👇.
We are thrilled to announce the @NEARProtocol team raised $21.6M, led by Andreessen Horowitz. This is a major step towards the fulfillment of NEAR's mission, to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. "It’s time to build."
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1/ BerryClub application showcases how Access Keys in NEAR allow significantly more user-friendly UX. Once logged in with BerryClub via NEAR wallet, it adds a new key to the account that is limited to only calling the berryclub contract, and has an allowance of 0.25N
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We published a 10 minute video that dives deep into Nightshade (NEAR sharding design). I cover block production, approvals, separation of transactions into chunks, data availability, and finality. The video is here: Full paper:
Episode #4 of NEAR Lunch & Learn is here. In this episode, @AlexSkidanov gives an overview of how Nightshade finalizes blocks. Have an episode you'd like to see? Let us know >>.
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Here's a large insightful piece on @hackernoon that goes deeper into why we need decentralized web and how we can get there by my colleague @AliaksandrH from @NEARProtocol.
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A detailed overview of Ethereum 2.0 shard chains, for which the spec isn't published yet, reconstructed from conversations with @VitalikButerin and @drakefjustin
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1/ TL;DR. a) Without sharding blockchain ecosystem cannot get mainstream adoption;.b) Sharded chains, however, don't replace ETH1;.c) NEAR success depends on active development of ETH1.
7/7 His thread wants to inspire FUD that many could fall for. I was actually starting to think NEAR and Ethereum could be friendly and that NEAR has good intentions, but things like this from one of the most respected members of their community erases that. Do better.
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1/ An authoritative tweet storm on @cosmos vs @polkadotnetwork shared security / atomicity. Before we go, a reminder that you can learn more about the technical intricacies of the protocols in our whiteboard sessions with them:.
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If you missed the panel @nearprotocol hosted today with researchers from @ethereum, @polkadotnetwork and @cosmos, here is the recording:. Talked about open problems in multi-chain protocols: state validity, data availability, cross-shard txs and others.
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Just became an owner of a custom-made NFT art with Nightshade and Doomslug, if you get the reference :). By @FetusSquid on @ParasHQ .
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The panel is in exactly 24 hours!. We will discuss, among other topics.- Storage explosion;.- Cross-shard TX atomicity;.- Thread models;.- State validity;.- Data availability;. If you have other topics you want us to cover, propose them in the comments!.
We are hosting an online panel on multi-chain protocols with core contributors from:.- Ethereum Serenity.- Cosmos.- Polkadot.- Near Protocol. Technical discussion covering current approaches and open problems. Apr 29.8am PDT | 17:00 CEST. Live stream here:
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Come see me 6pm today at the event with @solana, @NervosNetwork, @CodaProtocol and @harmonyprotocol. Myself and @aeyakovenko will have a heated discussion over sharding vs no-sharding. Might also get into adaptive corruption argument with Harmony 🤔. Should be lots of fun!.
@SFBWofficial Layer 1 presentations and blockchain architecture panel with @harmonyprotocol, @NervosNetwork, and @o1_labs .
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I wrote a detailed post on differences between @nearprotocol and @ethereum Serenity. As part of it I described some less known details of Serenity beacon chain consensus, e.g. that it reaches a byzantine consensus among ~400k participants!.
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Many know that a UTXO-based blockchain can be compressed with SNARKs. @CodaProtocol has a working implementation of it. Can we compress more complex state transitions with SNARKs? Here's a great tutorial from almost exactly two years ago that covers it:
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I will be presenting the new @NEARProtocol sharding design today 6pm in Santa Clara at @hackerdojo. Sign up here: We will have an extended conversation about scalability and sharding with @zmanian from @tendermint_team at the end.
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We've been spending a considerable amount of time recently thinking how to make a Proof-of-Stake protocol resilient to long-range attacks. Just published a write-up with one interesting idea, plus an overview of common approaches to LRAs used today.
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6/ Props to @k06a from @mooniswap for the design and major part of the implementation of the bridge. If you find it interesting, and want to get your hands dirty before it goes fully live, register for the Hack the Rainbow hackathon:.
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1/ We are looking for an outstanding systems person to join NEAR core chain team. The team today consists of 7 people, including. - two early MemSQL engineers -- one of the very few sharded databases that efficiently supports arbitrary cross-shard queries.
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The last bi-weekly update from @NEARProtocol is out:. - 126 Pull Requests from 20 people;.- New testnet launched;.- Nightshade is in staging: the next testnet will be sharded!.- Upcoming events in China and Russia;.- Three more whiteboard series episodes!.
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Here's the promised write-up on the Sharding PoC that I, @VladZamfir and @adiasg were working on at @ETHSanFrancisco:
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8/ Mintbase is not just an NFT marketplace. It's a developer platform, on which everyone can run their own NFT storefront. Learn more at Want people loving using your applications too? Build them on NEAR.
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Whiteboard sessions with deep tech dives to watch this weekend:. @cosmos: @SolanaLabs: @OntologyNetwork: Plasma Cash: #Ethereum Serenity:
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Stateless validation is NEAR!.
Nightshade 2.0 is now released to testnet! It is exciting to see the transition to stateless validation, which allows NEAR to both scale to more shards and also have much better single shard performance. Kudos to the team for delivering it!.
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NEAR hackathon starts in just 7 hours, and will last for one week. Register here: We have $7500 in prizes for solving some of the most pressing problems today, including:.- Best financial hack;.- Best social interactions hack;.- Best accessibility hack;.
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The episode with @polkadotnetwork is particularly interesting, and is probably one of the better ways to learn the end-to-end design of Polkadot. I personally find their approach to sharding to be very coherent, especially their approach to data availability and atomicity.
In the 14th Episode of our #WhiteboardSeries, we had Alistair Stewart from @web3foundation & @polkadotnetwork speaking with @AlexSkidanov on how the heterogenous multichain system of the #Polkdadot network works.🛠 🙌. Here → [VIDEO]. #FutureIsNEAR
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ETH USD going down has two positive effects:. 1. Reduces the interest in the space for short-term focused investors;.2. Consequently reduces the interest in the space for teams aiming to quickly raise money on hype from (1) and never ship.
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10/ With all that being said, if I was designing Libra, I would choose Tendermint over HotStuff, since the benefits of HotStuff will not play any significant role in the particular context of Libra, and the higher maturity of Tendermint should be a more important consideration.
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@KyleSamani The problem is that there's no way to build any meaningfully scalable infra without sharding. The only non sharded protocol that can sustain any meaningful load is @SolanaLabs and the sophistication of low level optimizations that @aeyakovenko and the team put in it is insane.
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@AndrewYang @SatoshiLite If you want to build the future with Charlie Lee, you first need someone else to have built it.
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If you're in Berlin this coming Monday, make sure to stop by at the event that @NEARProtocol organizes with @Fluence_One and @cosmos. There will be some pretty cool tech demos!.
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I'm missing some fundamental security property of DPoS. Say Alice stakes $2, Bob delegates her $1M. The system security is $1M+$2. Is it not correct, however, that the cost of double spend is $2+eps, since it is the price at which reasonable Alice will sell her private key?.
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16/ The moral is: don't blindly trust papers, even if the papers are endorsed by high profile professors. Everybody messes up.
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We hosted a panel on #DeFi during NYC Blockchain Week with @MakerDAO, @UniswapExchange, @compoundfinance, @Balance_io and @synthetix_io. Covers where DeFi is today, plans for future, who are the users, how good is infrastructure, what are the metrics etc.
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3/ With the Rainbow bridge Ethereum and NEAR become fully interoperable. Devs who build on NEAR have access to all the assets on Ethereum, and developers who build on Ethereum can move performance or gas-fee critical parts to NEAR while keeping their Ethereum-native user base.
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C++ is truly a magic language. Say you have the following snippet in C++:. if (i >= 0) printf("%d\n", i);. `i` is int. Can it print a negative number?. As a matter of fact it can! See below for the full snippet and the explanation.
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1/n An interesting game theoretic issue in @iotatoken that I haven't seen discussed much before, which shows the complexities of orchestrating incentives of different parties.
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1/ Another interesting insight from DevCon: while Ethereum invests heavily into building VDFs, initially Ethereum 2.0 will be using RANDAO without VDFs for randomness.
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Episode #3 of our #WhiteboardSeries, in which we talk to Jun Li from @OntologyNetwork, discussing technical details of their protocol.
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A new Avalanche paper by Jessie, James and Meowth^w^w^w^w @el33th4xor and @kevinsekniqi. "Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT.Consensus through Metastability".
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13 projects that built on @NearProtocol at (not blockchain focused) @DeveloperWeek hackathon. Coming up @ETHGlobal's @EthParis, see you all there! We might have something absolutely epic prepared. Decentralized future is near!
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Want to learn about recent @cosmos hub launch, latest breakthroughs in blockchain sharding from @nearprotocol and see a demo of a decentralized database from @Fluence_One?. Join us.April 10 San Francisco: April 11 Santa Clara:
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Will be giving a talk at @web3summit this August on challenges in designing sharded blockchains. Will also touch on adoption and usability. Scalable blockchains only make sense if blockchains go mainstream. More projects like @argentHQ need to emerge.
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8/ Learn more about NEAR<>ETH bridge and its security assumptions and guarantees here:.
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3/ Preparing for the event, Mintbase asked 25 artists at a recent festival to participate in drawing a painting, which was auctioned yesterday. The auction was real-time, and fully on-chain. All the 25 artists immediately received their royalties the moment the auction ended!
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Office hours with Fireworks AI happening right now.
Or catch it on YouTube:.
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1/ It's called Nightshade, a very high level overview can be found here: A more detailed version in this video: It is relatively new design still WIP.
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TL;DR: A malicious actor with ~10% of stake can stall @PerlinNetwork Wavelet indefinitely. 1/ Perlin published their new design called Wavelet. The whitepaper is located here:
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7/ The advantage of NEAR and Mintbase is the ease of use. If you build stuff for people, people will love using it. Relying on centralized Eventbrite tickets for web3 events is a showcase of how unusable the tech is. Mintbase event shows that on NEAR, it is no longer the case.
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After 8 years in SF I saw dozens of people go through startups, went through one and started one myself, graduated from @ycombinator. With all this knowledge I wrote an article that covers many pitfalls one must know before joining an early stage company.
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