Alex Evans
@alexhevans
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Thrilled to finally announce what we’re up to! Our first $560m venture fund @baincapcrypto will invest in open protocols as well as the companies that facilitate their development.
Welcome to Bain Capital Crypto – backing renegades and pioneers building the next generation of open internet infrastructure. We’re excited to share what we’ve been building.
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The Accidental Computer with @GuilleAngeris on prover acceleration via DA encodings. In short, proofs-of-encoding (such as ZODA) perform much of the work of a code-based PCS, making it cheap to “embed” verifiable computations over data posted to a DA layer
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ZODA. Joint work with @nico_mnbl and @GuilleAngeris (with help from @NashQueue, @sanaz2016, and @jadler0). A minor tweak to the encoding procedure makes data squares like @CelestiaOrg’s provably correct, opening a path to both higher data throughput and lower-latency light nodes
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Between @UniswapProtocol and @BalancerLabs, @ethereum is now home to nearly $100M worth of LP shares. We now have LPs with uneven weights, multiple assets, and even weights that change over time. What can they offer liquidity providers? . New paper:
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Couldn't be more excited to welcome @kobigurk, @AndrijaNovakov6, @weijie_eth, @nico_mnbl, and @grjte to the @BainCapCrypto team.
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New paper with @GuilleAngeris and @tarunchitra on Replicating Market Makers. Pick the (concave) payoff you want for your LPs and this result will give you a custom CFMM.
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Zero Knowledge Proofs: Now you know I know but you know only that I know and if you want to know how I know, my consulting fee is $5k/hr.
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With nearly $7Bn in liquidity across @UniswapProtocol, @SushiSwap and @BalancerLabs, what are LPs getting for their capital? How should we set fees to maximize LP value?. We explore this problem in a new paper with @tarunchitra and @GuilleAngeris.
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Surreal to see Scroll go live!. This is an insane technological achievement and the culmination of years of research and engineering work. Huge congrats @yezhang1998, @shenhaichen, @SandyPeng1 and the whole @Scroll_ZKP team!.
After more than two years of building, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Scroll Mainnet. As we open the doors to Mainnet, we want to take a moment to reflect on our journey thus far 💛
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I am pleased to announce I have been acquired by @tarunchitra and @GuilleAngeris M&A protocol for an undisclosed amount.
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To give you a sense:. Even in late 2021, we (like most reasonable people) didn’t believe a performant, bytecode-compatible zkEVM was possible. In October of that year, @shenhaichen came by @BainCapCrypto and drew up an early version of the Scroll system with me and @GuilleAngeris
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Exceptional work from the squad characterizing a new class of application-specific lending mechanisms that are taking over perpetuals markets.
⚠️ New week, New Paper. Q: What was the best way to profit market volatility in DeFi over the last year?. A: @JupiterExchange's JLP pool. How does this pool work? Is this yield real? Is it safe?. @theo_diamandis, @RiskRinger, @perpsjesus, @ns_gauntlet, and I explain!
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New post with @GuilleAngeris and @nico_mnbl on DA. Leveraging the interaction inherent to DAS can make FRI-based DAS protocols more efficient.
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The pace of development around @CelestiaOrg is a great example of a simple protocol engendering complex emergent behavior at the edges. We @BainCapCrypto are thrilled to work with and support the incredible builders in the Celestia ecosystem.
Today, we announce our $55M raise to launch a modular blockchain network so that anyone in the world can easily deploy their own blockchain.
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While there's a lot more to do, today we get to celebrate the mathematical and engineering brilliance of the Scroll team as well as the entire ZK community whose work made this possible (incl the brilliant teams and individuals that’ve been contributing to Halo2 in recent years).
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Inspired by @valardragon’s challenge, we’re benchmarking ZODA and its variants up to 1GB/s of data throughput. We hope to have some early results soon.
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This is a massive achievement from the @CelestiaOrg team and a defining moment in the transition to modular architectures. Congrats to @musalbas, @jadler0, @KreuzUQuer and the whole group on the launch.
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In part I of our analysis of curvature in CFMMs with @GuilleAngeris and @tarunchitra, we discuss what happens when a CFMM dominates the liquidity of a trading pair.
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Super excited to have joined @jmonegro @cburniske @mlaultc & @BradUSV at @placeholdervc. Wrote a short intro here:
Welcome @alexhevans, our resident cryptoeconomics researcher
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Thrilled to be working with @luketchang and @sebastienladuca as they make onchain privacy mainstream.
1/ We're excited to announce our $6M seed round co-led by @BainCapCrypto & @polychain with participation from @VitalikButerin and other members of the Ethereum community. This round will fund the deployment and continued development of private accounts on Ethereum.
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@nico_mnbl @GuilleAngeris @NashQueue @sanaz2016 @jadler0 @CelestiaOrg Blog: Paper: In blockchain designs, we often trade-off throughput with trust-minimization. Hashing-based constructions might allow us to get more of both.
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Excited to deepen our collaboration with @IrreducibleHW alongside our friends @gakonst and Paradigm. @radi_cojbasic and @jimpo_potamus are assembling a remarkable team that will make verifiability ubiquitous.
🚀Big news! We’ve raised a $24M Series A, co-led by.@paradigm and @BainCapCrypto, with support from.@fenbushi, @l2iterative, @robotventures, and top angels like @AnnaRRose, @_bfarmer, @dlubarov,.@sinahab, and @varunsrin! .
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On a long enough timeline, @sunnya97 is always right.
The last phase of Endgame is the launch of a native blockchain for Maker with the codename NewChain. It will make the ecosystem more secure and efficient. After some research, I believe the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChain.
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For those curious about the theoretical background here, I would recommend this (slightly dated) discussion of velocity in monetary economics:
Really commendable work from @alexhevans on #cryptoasset valuations, providing a meaningful extension (and revision) of prior MV=PQ work that @wintonARK & I have put out.
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The secret @GuilleAngeris plot against quantfinance textbook cos is revealed
@arjunblj diffeq giving you a hard time, eh?.
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Exceptional work from @jason_of_cs, @ciamac and @Tim_Roughgarden providing a more general framework for reasoning about fees in CFMMs.
1/ New paper “Automated Market Making and Arbitrage Profits in the Presence of Fees” by @jason_of_cs @ciamac @Tim_Roughgarden
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We've been obsessed with @dualityxyz for well over a year. Excited for @eljhfx, @NicholasEvans14 and @RonMiasnik to share more of their gigabrain work.
Today, we unveil Duality, the DEX that gives Liquidity Providers superpowers. The next generation exchange is now coming to Cosmos.
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🎙️This week, @annarrose + @kobigurk chat with @alexhevans + @GuilleAngeris about their paper - Succinct Proofs in Linear Algebra. They cover the use of randomized reductions in zk proofs, the security of FRI + applications of the framework in other systems
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apes can barely write a smart contract while the beeVM can simulate parity circuits and no one is talking about it.
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Welcome, @pchopra28!!!.
~~Life Update~~. Super excited to have joined @BainCapCrypto as a principal on the investment team!.
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@valardragon Huge thanks to @musalbas, @valardragon, @tarunchitra, @kobigurk, @weijie_eth and @JacobArluck for their help and feedback in constructing ZODA.
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A simple axiomatic theory of CFMMs using just sets, geometry and pictures!.
New paper with @theo_diamandis, @tarunchitra, @ks_kulk, and @alexhevans on the geometry of constant function market makers is (finally) out! It’s even got pretty pictures and everything!. Check it out at:
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A key trick that gives us the "S" in SNARKs comes from the simple procedure: Encode, then sample randomly. True to the @GuilleAngeris brand, we demonstrate many such reductions using just linear algebra and basic probability.
Well, here's our first (official) forage into the Unknown™ Lands™ of ZK™ ! (Work done with @alexhevans).
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The human species is getting quite good at client-side proving.
Speeding up finite field multiplications in WASM is crucial for client-side ZK proving. For privacy-focused apps, it can make the difference between great UX or user attrition.
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Super fun chatting with @_patrickogrady. Patrick is a deep distributed systems thinker and is piloting this series to host explicitly technical conversations – check it out!.
How Things Work #0: ZODA and the Accidental Computer. Today, we explore how Data Availability Sampling (DAS) can scale blockchains with @alexhevans and @GuilleAngeris from @BainCapCrypto. Turns out, you can (somehow) embed verifiable computations over data in DA into DA 🪄.
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DeFi recreating Wall Street so faithfully they even included weekend @MTA delays.
❗️❗️1) The Mesa order solver has gotten stuck trying to match up today's orders for the auction. The Gnosis team are prioritising the MTA mUSD pair for the solver. It has not yet submitted a price solution for MTA.
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8/ What about pools with dynamic weights?. For example, this pool from PieDAO adjusts weights as a function of volatility Here things get interesting!.
🔥 $USD++ is out in the wild 🔥. Very exciting to see this index going live. Huge props to @tarunchitra for seeding the idea of a weight function taking in consideration the divergence to peg. Currently with 0bps Swap Fees 😏.
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New bulletin from your local central planning committee on how to price your on-chain resource usage. Comrades @theo_diamandis, @GuilleAngeris, @tarunchitra and I relive the soviet optimizooor’s dream of efficient multi-dimensional resource pricing.
How should we allocate and price scarce resources on public blockchains?. @GuilleAngeris, @alexhevans, @tarunchitra, & I formalize the multi-dimensional resource pricing problem in blockchains and propose a simple price-setting mechanism!.
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It’s been super fun to work with @fulminmaxi and the glass chewers @bidflood. We’ve been extremely impressed with their research and engineering and are excited to see them deliver verifiably optimal prices onchain.
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I’m the Greek who rugged @tarunchitra and I’m quite pleased with the results.
Hanging out with Greeks and we’re trying to decide who the Greek god who is the champion rugger is… who do you think it is? Loki is our best guess.
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Efficient SNARKs over binary fields is a genuinely insane idea.
There's a new SNARK on the block. SNARKs based on towers of binary fields are the future of prover-efficient verifiable computing. Read here about Ulvetanna's research effort and our newly published Rust implementation, Binius.
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Welcome @mandyzcamp!!!.
Job update: I’ve joined the brilliant team at @BainCapCrypto as Partner and Head of Marketing. Their commitment to hands-on support for the best builders in crypto and research-driven investment theses is unmatched.
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@nico_mnbl @GuilleAngeris @NashQueue @sanaz2016 @jadler0 @CelestiaOrg ZODA offers a new path. The key insight is that fraud-provable data square constructions, such as that used by Celestia, already do most of the work of a hashing-based SNARK prover. With a small randomization tweak to the encoding, these constructions can be provably correct.
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Dr. @GuilleAngeris is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. He’s a brilliant researcher and an even better friend. Couldn’t think of a better person to head research in all of crypto.
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As a group, we pride ourselves on research and engineering excellence. We enjoy studying and developing protocols and products and love jamming with exceptional builders. We’re active from initial design through scale. You'll find our work on chain, in forums and in repos.
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When the plaintiff-side lawyers whipped out the Riemann Hypothesis in the exhibits, it was over for him.
Code is law getting tested in court.
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Excited to deepen our collaboration the excellent team at @RiscZero.
We're thrilled to announce that we've raised a $40 million Series A!.
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We owe a huge thank you to Vishruti Ganesh and @nayr_oac from @worldcoin for patiently explaining explaining GKR to us, @nico_mnbl, @prestonevans__ @reldev, Giorgos Zirdelis, and @realDanielShorr for their feedback on early versions of the note as well as @GiacomoFenzi for.
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We provide a simple construction that applies to proof systems that commit to circuit inputs. This may work quite well for some data-parallel computations that are suited to such proofs, such as:. - Payments (eg @payy_link).- Social media interactions where updates are computed.
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1/ 1-tweet TLDR:. If Uniswap/Balancer fixed-weight LPs had no fees, they’d lose value over time. The expected values of these losses depend on weights, vols and correlations of assets in the pool. With dynamic weights we can replicate derivatives (eg options) using Balancer LPs.
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I was just in London and saw more cars driving around with no one in the driver’s seat than in SF.
This is especially true in the UK.
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9/ We can use Balancer LPs to replicate derivatives like protective puts and covered calls. How? It’s surprisingly simple. Adjust the weight of the underlying asset to always equal Δ*Price/Value aka the elasticity or ‘omega’ of the derivative.
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Transitioning to a personal note, it’s an absolute joy to partner with @stefancoh. He’s a phenomenal investor and an incredibly supportive partner (and borderline enabler). Everything we’re announcing today is an idea he dreamed up over a year ago.
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The optimizooors @theo_diamandis and @GuilleAngeris have been working tirelessly for your routing pleasure.
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Our oracle defamation campaign continues on @zeroknowledgefm.
📣 New episode out - @AnnaRRose catches up w/ @GuilleAngeris, @alexhevans & @tarunchitra on their research of #CFMMs and #AMMs. They also revisit private AMMs - specifically their recent work on using differential privacy to achieve a more private system.
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P.S. Many thanks to @tarunchitra @GuilleAngeris @ObadiaAlex @hal2001 Akis Kattis for their feedback and edits to the paper.
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6/ In exchange for giving up some vol gains, LPs get . 1. Automatic, continual rebalancing to target weights (like ETFs) . 2. Information from traders on the price (oracle functionality). "Eliminate imperm loss" -> lose these properties.
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Also, none of this would have happened without @tarunchitra and @hal2001 who supported us throughout.
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6/ More than 500 $MKR burned from stability fees. If liquidation fees had gone to burning $MKR (as they will in MCD), these would have been 20X higher than stability fees. Unpaid (latent) stability fees were an additional ~650 $MKR as of writing
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@nico_mnbl @GuilleAngeris @NashQueue @sanaz2016 @jadler0 @CelestiaOrg In DAS, the proposer encodes some data. Light nodes sample random parts of the encoding. If the network responds successfully, light nodes can be sure data is available without needing to download the whole block.
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Couldn’t be more excited to work with @lyd_hylton . She’s one of the few crypto investors I’ve met with both the technical depth and commercial chops to work across the stack, from low-level infrastructure to end-user applications. Welcome, Lydia!.
1/ Personal update: I’m thrilled to announce today that I’m joining @BainCapCrypto as a Partner to help founders build the next generation of web3 infrastructure and applications. Excited to work with @stefancoh, @alexhevans and the rest of the BCC team! 🎉.
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As we pursue greater yield and capital efficiency in PoS and DeFi, what are the benefits of superfluidity and what are the risks? . @tarun and I spent some quarantine time digging in.
Big Short 2.0: PoS and DeFi are mortgage-backed securities!. @alexhevans & I tried to find grand unified theory for the financial derivatives hidden in PoS and DeFi ➡️ uncovered mathematical equiv. to MBSs. Why? Same payoffs and income inequality!.👇🏾.
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Finally, @tarunchitra has been shilling control methods in DeFi for some time now. I highly recommend reading his recent piece with @htkao on the topic.
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@nico_mnbl @GuilleAngeris @NashQueue @sanaz2016 @jadler0 @CelestiaOrg For DAS to be secure, light nodes need some way to ensure the encoding was correctly computed. There are two ways to achieve this: (1) Fraud proofs, where full nodes recompute the encoding and alert light nodes if there’s an error; (2) Validity proofs where a proof of correct.
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We hope these results help you find the CFMM (or Balancer or Uniswap v3 strategy) of your dreams.
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Let’s try something even more exotic. How about delta-hedging a log contract as part of synthetic volatility swap? There's a Logarithmic Market Maker for that
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We’re still actively researching, but we hope ZODA can be used to reduce trust assumptions and increase throughput by removing redundant computation in fraud-provable data square constructions or proving time in validity-proven ones.
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Surprisingly, the validity proof scheme and the fraud-proof scheme feature similar encoding times. No additional time is spent proving. Meanwhile, light nodes simply download samples and perform some simple local checks. No additional data is needed. Hence, zero overhead.
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Excited to see @nocturne_xyz bring privacy from the fringe to the mainstream.
1/ For crypto to reach its next stage of growth, it must be used less for speculation and become more like money. We believe privacy is a necessary condition for this to occur. @nocturne_xyz we’re excited to introduce a new primitive to the Ethereum ecosystem—private accounts 🧵
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Last but not least! Huge thank you to @fcmartinelli @richardchen39 @1HowardWu @gluk64 @AlokVasudev @apruden08 @clangfordvc @StephenKYoung @mattcharris @ajay_bcv @EnriqueSalem and many more for their references, mentorship, friendship and support getting this off the ground.
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A contract paying $1 if Trump is President in February is going for 9c on a prediction market. Does that mean that the PMs “give Trump an 9% chance of winning?" Not really.
Prediction markets *still* give Trump a 9% chance of winning, which is fricking insane. The election is over. He lost. The courts aren't ruling in his favor. Recounts won't overturn Biden's margins. GOP state legislatures aren't entertaining an end-around.
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Thank you to the incredible team at @placeholdervc for a magical journey over three years. I’ve learned an incredible amount from each of @chrisburniske, @bradusv, @mlphresearch and @jmonegro. I couldn’t be more thankful for our time together.
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Let’s say we want to (1) prove a statement over some data (2) ensure that this data is available (rollups do both today). Today, this data is typically encoded and hashed twice: Once by the DA layer and once by the prover. This is one of the most expensive parts of both.
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If the US loses its lead in chips, it won't be because we embraced open source. It'll be because our domestic semiconductor industry got better at lobbying and fearmongering of this sort than building chips.
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For all the efforts of some DA protocols like @CelestiaOrg to avoid building a computer, computation still surfaces in surprising ways.
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But what if you wanted a CFMM that hedges moves in price to second order, matching the delta and (negative) gamma of some payoff function? Enter the Quadratic Market Maker™
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7/ A useful heuristic (h/t @tarunchitra). Think of the relative losses of no-fee LPs as a convenience fee you pay arbers to rebalance your portfolio for you. The price of being passive vs actively trading your position. Fees may offset all or part of the loss, at a price.
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10/ While the set of financial contracts one can replicate with LP shares is constrained by leverage (elasticity), we can likely use an external lending market like @AaveAave to replicate levered products like naked options.
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@nico_mnbl @GuilleAngeris @NashQueue @sanaz2016 @jadler0 @CelestiaOrg Fraud-proof-based constructions assume each light node is connected to an honest full node and require redundant computation. Production validity proof schemes impose significant prover overhead and assume a trusted setup.
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The only black magic used here is Fenchel conjugacy. Pick the payoff, take a conjugate and out comes your new CFMM. This will work for any concave, nondecreasing, 1-homogeneous, nonnegative payoff, but maybe you can find ways to lend and short LP shares to do more.
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Nocturne is on mainnet!.
Nocturne v1 is now live on mainnet 🌙 the private vault UI is accessible at
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@placeholdervc @MakerDAO Huge thanks to @visavishesh his data and ideas have influenced every aspect of this work.
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Today, we mainly have Uniswap, Balancer, Curve and constant sum CFMMs. Their trading functions look something like these
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How about parametric replication of a covered European call? Here's a Black-Scholes Market Maker™ using different implied volatility and time-to-maturity assumptions
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We had to go through all five stages from denial to acceptance before agreeing that the idea might actually work. It's amazing to see the Scroll team take a crazy idea all the way to production.
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We’ve co-invested, collaborated on research, and been on @zeroknowledgefm podcast episodes together – huge thanks to @AnnaRRose for bringing us together.
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With these additions, we’re doubling down on applied cryptography. The performance and usability of these technologies is improving rapidly. Meanwhile, our ability to trust content, identities, and transactions online is weakening. It’s a good time to be investing in and building.
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4/ On a more political note, we might be focusing too much on imperm loss. Constant-mix portfolios also have imperm loss (aka negative gamma), but many still find them attractive. Why?.
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2/ The first result is due to arb, not necessarily imperm loss. In general, low vol, high positive correlation between assets -> fewer expected arb opportunities. This generalizes a result first noted by @GuilleAngeris @tarunchitra @_charlienoyes and others for Uniswap LPs.
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3/ A version of the result also applies to no-fee pools whose weights vary deterministically with time, such as. LBPs: Rollover Pools:
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We met @_weidai because he developed FLAX, an anonymous smart contract platform that preserves composability. Wei has a strong command of theoretical cryptography and a pragmatic approach to design and engineering–a dangerous combination. His impact has been huge and immediate.
Incredibly excited to be working alongside an amazing team @BainCapCrypto--I'm constantly impressed by the depth, breadth, and diversity of knowledge and experience of @stefancoh @alexhevans @GuilleAngeris @chofmann88 @theo_diamandis!.
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I know you degens are here for the Uniswap memes, but trust me the note is worth reading just for this proof.
Intuition:. 1. Convexity crucial for CFMMs — prior work shows this makes optimal arbitrage ‘easy’. 2. BUT: also guarantees uniqueness of price <> trade sizes (c.f. strict convex = unique global minima). @guilleangeris divined a proof using a separating hyperplane theorem
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