ncitron.eth
@NoahCitron
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building open source public goods @a16zcrypto
Joined September 2020
Helios is becoming a multichain light client for Ethereum. It has become clear that light clients are fundamental to Ethereum scaling. A future with thousands of rollups doesn’t feel far away, and the closer we get, the more critical rollup interoperability will become. 🧵👇.
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Today we're announcing Helios, a fast, portable, and secure Ethereum light client written in Rust. Helios syncs in two seconds, uses no storage, and provides trustless access to Ethereum. Code: Post: 1/8.
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Introducing Magi 🟠, our brand new OP Stack rollup client written in Rust. We've been working on Magi to help improve the client diversity and resilience of the entire OP Stack ecosystem. Lets dive in. code: blog:
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A few days ago, @samczsun pointed out that @indexcoop's Rari pool 19 was being attacked. While this was indeed an attempted oracle manipulation, the attacker ended up failing miserably and lost 68 ETH. Here's a breakdown of how it went wrong for the attacker:.
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Life update:. I'm joining @a16z crypto as a research engineer!. Super excited to solve difficult problems with some of the best investors, engineers, and researchers in the space.
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Hello wallet friends. Vitalik wants you to run light clients. My DMs are open.
@NoahCitron and others working on helios are heroes. It's an indispensable part of the ethereum dream that you should be able to access the chain (read and write) without needing to trust centralized third parties. Looking forward to seeing wallets incorporate helios.
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The challenge that launched a thousand lines of code and created one of the strangest looking blocks in Ethereum's history. @mg_486662 and I cracked the IAmTheOptimizer challenge, here's how we did it. 1/10
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Learn cryptography in public with me! . To learn more about the cryptographic primitives we rely on, I'm implementing a few of them in Rust. Each module will have it's own readme explaining how it works and anything I learned along the way.
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$DPI is just 9k $COMP and 500k $UNI away from being able to make governance proposals on its own. @indexcoop is rapidly becoming one of the most influential voters in the entire DeFi ecosystem.
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A 1000 ETH buy of $DPI on @Uniswap V3 executes at just 3% slippage compared to 23% on V2. Both pools have nearly identical TVL. The fact that protocols are still doing LM on V2 is astounding to me.
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I'll be speaking about the future of light clients @EFDevcon!. Excited to see you all there!.
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Ok bud
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This was probably the best way this situation could have shaken out. A bot made some money, and a bad actor lost some. Huge shoutout to @samczsun for noticing the attempted attack and to the @RariCapital team for responding by disabling BED as collateral on pool 19.
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Holy crap I can't believe I just proposed that $DPI gets added to @AaveAave . I love my job.
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Just another day as an open source maintainer in a post airdrop world.
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I've been meaning to learn Cairo for a while, so as a first project I built a merkle distributor so projects can easily do airdrops on @StarkWareLtd's StarkNet!. Definitely check out the code if you want to get a feel for Cairo.
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Alright who's going to shove eth rollup data into the taproot witness first to piss the bitcoiners off?.
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Super excited to be starting at @indexcoop full time! Huge shoutout to everyone who smacked those yes votes on IIP-66 to make this happen.
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Check out the GitHub, which includes installation instructions that can get you using Helios in five minutes. Feel free to check out the code. We'd love to see community contributions, and intend to keep working on Helios ourselves. We can't wait to see what you build. 8/8.
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Today we released Jolt, our new zkVM! While we've highlighted its performance characteristics, I want to show off its incredible developer experience. Using Jolt is as simple as adding #[jolt::provable] to your Rust functions.
1/ We're excited to share the initial release of Jolt, a new approach to zkVM design. Early benchmarks indicate it outperforms RISC Zero by ~6x and SP1 by up to 2x. Major optimizations are still in the pipeline.
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Ethereum scaling to 0.5 mb/s of throughput in 2025!. Assuming 100 bytes (compressed) for an average transaction, this brings the total throughput of Ethereum's rollups to 5k TPS!.
For 2025 we need Fusaka on L1 with PeerDAS, ideally with 48/72 blob target/limit. Let's aim to get a Fusaka testnet with these blob parameters running the day after Pectra goes live.
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Our solution is Helios, a light client that syncs in less than two seconds, requires no storage, and provides trustless access to Ethereum. Helios uses Ethereum’s new light client protocol to provide efficient access to the chain with the same functionality as a full node. 5/8.
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People think that profitable sequencers means that rollups will never decentralize them. They can build a decentralized sequencer that auctions block building rights (and uses an inclusion list for censorship resistance) while directing that revenue wherever they please.
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All of us are working towards a design that brings 1000x scalability via danksharding and rollups. Them: the core devs are so out of touch if we just double the gas limit all of our problems would go awaaaay!.
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Helios is very lightweight. Users will have no trouble running it on low-cost hardware and mobile devices. This makes Helios a prime target to integrate into other applications. Imagine if your wallet had a light client build directly into it. Helios can do this!. 7/8.
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Just realized Helios turned 2 yesterday. It's been a long journey but I'm excited to be pushing the boundaries of light clients into the L2 world. Huge shoutout to the 53 people who have contributed code to Helios! None of this would be possible without you.
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Helios works together with your centralized RPC provider to create a verifiably correct local RPC on your machine. A good mental model for Helios is that it converts a centralized RPC that you may not fully trust into one that is provably safe. 6/8.
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What are the best cryptography books for technical people who don't have degrees in math?. Looking for something geared towards people like myself who understand calc/diffeq/linear but get lost the second you start talking about groups and fields.
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We’ve started by implementing a light client for the OP Stack based on signed sequencer preconfirmations, meaning Helios can now sync on Optimism, Base, Unichain, World Chain, and anything else within the Superchain ecosystem.
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One of these arb bots saw the opportunity created by the attacker and minted 4,900 BED from the underlying tokens and sold it into the Uniswap pool, ruining the attackers plans. This arb ended up yielding 68 ETH, taken straight from the attacker.
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If you want to help build the future of light clients, my DMs are open.
An important step. Some important next steps:. * Helios (or alternatives) being integrated into user wallets, on mobile and desktop.* L2 configs moving onchain (first step: ).* L2 configs including specification of state proof verification rules (a.
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Most users currently access Ethereum using a centralized RPC provider. These are nodes run by companies in the cloud, providing convenient access to chain data. When a wallet fetches your account balance, odds are its routing this request through a centralized provider. 2/8.
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Earlier today, ETH2xFLI simultaneously used Uniswap V2 and Sushiswap during a rebalance!. It routed 34 ETH through Uniswap and 53 ETH through Sushiswap. Computing the optimal split was done entirely on-chain. Just one of the many ways we are making FLI safer!.
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I know what I'm working on tomorrow. Thanks for the feature request @VitalikButerin.
One way @a16z Helios could meaningfully improve things on user privacy and gain more adoption is by combining multiple useful features into its proxy: in addition to its current light client features, also route user requests through Tor.
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I have a midterm tomorrow and another on Tuesday but instead of studying I'm coding up an @AaveAave governance proposal and watching the Superbowl.
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Just read the @feiprotocol turbo contracts and I'm so bullish. This is going to be a new DAO primitive.
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nobody uses ethereum because too many people are using ethereum.
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If you work on wallets and want to talk about this, my DMs are open.
@killerstorm @ChrJentzsch @NoahCitron and co have been doing heroic work on Helios. We need to see it getting integrated into browser wallets asap.
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Check out our demo, which shows Helios syncing on Ethereum, Optimism, and Base, all from within the browser:. For the full blog post, head to:.
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While these providers are convenient, users have no way to know that they are being served correct data. You just have to trust that the provider is being honest. In the blog post, we even describe a mechanism in which malicious providers can steal funds from their users. 3/8.
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New Jolt feature just dropped!. Jolt programs now support using the Rust Standard Library!. This means that nearly all existing Rust programs are compatible with Jolt, opening up the door for new applications that make use of Rust's full ecosystem.
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We've added @LineaBuild support to Helios!. This makes Linea our second supported L2 with more to come soon. Huge shoutout to @0xTeam0 @realbarnakiss and the rest of the @malda_xyz team for building the implementation!.
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a light client.
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Recently @mg_486662 and I cracked the IAmTheOptimizor challenge by @0x_Beans. We've released a blog post detailing the challenge, our solution, and an informal proof that we can't be beat (for now). Check it out here:.
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$INDEX is now ~35% backed by liquid assets sitting in the @indexcoop treasury and associated multisigs.
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Users have traditionally solved this problem by running their own nodes — a time and resource-intensive endeavor that, at the very least, requires a constantly-online machine, hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and around a day to sync from scratch. 4/8.
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Ok but what if instead of building trustless systems we just went to therapy and started trusting more.
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Current proposals to make rollups interoperable — such as Optimism’s Superchain and zkSync’s Elastic Chain — will rely on the existence of secure light clients for rollup operators to validate incoming cross-rollup messages scalably.
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Instead of fighting about gas golfing why don't we just support the good people contributing to @solidity_lang and @vyperlang who are working on code optimizers so that we never have to think about gas golfing again.
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Optimistic rollups are probably the better solution for extremely high throughput and low composability applications such as onchain games due to the proving overhead of ZK. ZK probably still wins out for more monolithic usecases where composability matters though like DeFi.
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My third PR to an actual piece of core Ethereum infra broke Prysm on the Medalla testnet, wrecking the last testnet before the beacon chain launch. I think the incident nearly delayed ETH2. Five years later I think I've done ok. Ship that PR, you can't mess up worse than me.
If you're ever scared of starting out, just remember that @tkstanczak began his Nethermind journey back in 2017 by trying to fix a typo in the Ethereum Yellow Paper (rejected&closed) - and now look at him!
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How do we make mobile blockchain safe for all?. Check out our team's big ideas for 2023:.
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The block is 15735631 for those who are interested. 27 total transactions.
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If @rainbowdotme adds snapshot voting to their wallet I would be like 10x more involved in governance. When y'all adding this @mikedemarais?.
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New Magi feature just dropped 🟠. We've added full support for Optimism's p2p networking layer! . This will allow all Magi nodes to sync to the "unsafe" head, which includes blocks that have not yet landed on L1.
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We just released Helios 0.5.2 which adds support for the Dencun hardfork and sets the required configuration fields for Goerli!. If you use Helios with the Goerli network, be sure to run heliosup before the fork tomorrow.
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@VitalikButerin @a16z Good idea! Will look into the implementation. I just wonder if Tor is fast enough to fetch all the proofs in a reasonable amount of time?.
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Right now, rollup operators need to run full nodes for every chain with which they interoperate. With Helios for L2s, they can run an efficient light client instead.
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@adamscochran I wouldn't really call this a liveliness failure. The chain is basically operating in longest chain mode (technically LMD-GHST but close enough). If the lack of finality caused large reorgs, one might call this a safety failure, but that didn't happen so. .
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So what is Magi? It takes the place of a consensus client (often called rollup client) in the OP Stack, and works alongside an execution client such as op-geth to sync. Currently, OP Labs maintains op-node, the reference implementation. Magi performs the same functionality.
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Are there any rollups that plan to decentralize their sequencer using Tendermint to elect the leader? Seems like a nice shortcut to removing single sequencers.
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New Helios version is out!. Version 0.8.6 enables pectra on Ethreum mainnet. This is a required upgrade for all users using Ethereum mainnet by May 7th.
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We can’t achieve the full scale of crypto’s potential – trustless interactions between billions of people around the world – unless every user and node is able to efficiently verify their data regardless of blockchain, hardware, or internet speed.
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The OP Stack is just the beginning. We’re going to be exploring more robust verification mechanisms, building better tooling for using Helios on the browser, mobile devices, or anywhere else we could imagine someone needing a light client.
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You can now earn 0.73% interest paid out in $AAVE on @indexcoop's $DPI on @AaveAave now that AIP-47 has been executed. Not crazy high but probably the safest yield you can earn on $DPI right now.
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Huge shoutout to @mg_486662 for being the brains behind the operation. He figured all the contract optimizations. I just built the block builder. This was an awesome little project that took some serious engineering to get right. Our reward: being crowned the optimizers. 10/10.
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If any of this excites you, please reach out. Whether you’re building a wallet and want a light client to support your users, work on an L2 that's in need of a light client, or are a talented engineer interested in contributing, we want to hear from you.
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We hope to see others continue to work on implementations of other components of the OP Stack. Diversity across the board makes the protocol more resilient to failures. We'll have some more updates for you all in the future. For now, stay optimistic!. 🟠.
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Had a great time talking with @jessepollak and @rhhackett about all things rollups!. Definitely worth a listen.
Our new podcast episode covers the bustling area of “layer 2” rollups, a technology for scaling “layer 1” blockchains such as Ethereum. Featuring @jessepollak from @coinbase along with our very own @rhhackett & @NoahCitron. . ⤵.
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Please lord please give us verkle trees. The stateless stuff it opens up is cool, but it also makes light clients like Helios much more efficient. I'd expect Helios would consume nearly an order of magnitude less data post-verge.
Here's an overview of everything that's been proposed (so far) for Prague/Electra 👀. See the full thread on @EthMagicians 🧙♀️.
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Very cool page hidden in the depths of the @optimismFND website breaking down the entire diff between geth and op-geth.
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trying to restrain myself from running a light client on the a16z office coffee machine.
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Inspired by @sw0nt's challenge, I wrote up a little contract that when called, creates two copies of itself then selfdestructs using @huff_language. Feel free to give it (or one of its descendants) a poke on Goerli at 0xb427bfa9641245914d86ae4425d72294f72a45e4
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Recently found Decentralized Thoughts and it is quickly becoming one of my favorite crypto blogs. Definitely check it out for deep dives on consensus, cryptography, and distributed systems.
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I guess we don't deserve fourth amendment protections because we might be terrorists.
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Someone is borrowing $150k worth of $DPI and sold it to collateralize the position with $ETH, $MKR, $WBTC, and $LINK. Effectively betting that these tokens will outperform DeFi as a whole. Overall really cool use case of @indexcoop's $DPI on @AaveAave.
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Rust developers when we tell them we can prove all their programs with Jolt
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Narratives are dumb. Life is like a greedy algorithm. Make good individual decisions and you will find the global optimum outcome (usually).
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It's important to note that Magi is brand new, and shouldn't be considered a production-ready client. We are however committed to getting there eventually. It can already sync to both the Optimism and Base testnets, so feel free to give it a spin if you're brave!.
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This has been a big effort. Several people from the OP Labs team have been invaluable already. @refcells has been a contributor since day one and @protolambda, @trianglesphere, and @vex_0x have all been incredibly helpful in understanding the details of the OP Stack.
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None of this would have been possible without the OP Labs team and the broader Optimism Collective. They've built a great protocol, and have tirelessly specified it so well that we can build independent implementations of core components.
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Want to listen to me ramble about proxies and their evils for 45 minutes? Come listen to my a16z crypto startup school talk on smart contract design patterns!.
@NoahCitron @nassyweazy @riyazdf @PrimordialAA @dwr @alive_eth Smart contract design patterns w/ @NoahCitron .
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You guys might have penguin profile pics but do you have a @SetProtocol intern NFT? Setting the floor price for this baby at 1000 ETH
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@adamscochran Disagree. The validators have quite a good understanding of the current state, they just can't make a full guarantee that a reorg is impossible. The only way to reorg during a non finality event would be essentially a 51% attack. In other words, ETH looked like BTC for an hour.
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What are your favorite smart contract design patterns? Looking for everything including upgradability, modularity, auth, proxies, and all the little tricks people have come up with to build complex contact systems.
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