What a wild day yesterday was. While having a network outage is never ideal, seeing ~400 individuals across the world, all across different time-zones co-ordinate to manually restart the network never ceases to blow my mind ♥️
Some highlights below:
🥷Calling all shadowy super coders! This coming weekend
@solana
will be sponsoring
@allesctf
‘s annual CTF challenge, and they’ve prepared 4 especially difficult Solana specific challenges for y’all. Learn more and/or sign up here 👉🏻
GM ponpu fam! Introducing NFT Stake Locking, Inspired by the pioneering work led by
@CurveFinance
and
@iearnfinance
, we're bringing over a battle tested concept from the OG DeFi arena and introducing it into the NFT world to launch our utility token $CIETY. Read below for more👇
I see this kind of feedback pretty often, and while it’s true that Sollet’s UI/UX is lacking now compared to other solutions, it’s under-appreciated that it was a first mover when not many alternative options existed a year ago, and was pivotal to making Solana what it is today.
1/ Congratulations to the
@MagicEden
team for their recent raise of 130M
To me, Magic Eden has been a project that has been years in the making
I've known
@0xLeoInRio
since we were kids in Melbourne, and he's always been switched on.
4/ This is just the beginning, in the coming weeks Wormhole will be looking to add support for Terra as well, upgrading it to a 3 way cross-chain bridge. And I’m sure there’ll be more to come thereafter.
1/ Hang in there
@MeherRoy
! Learning from you on the
@epicenterbtc
podcast and hearing your excitement and passion in those episodes was one of the key drivers that convinced me to go into crypto full time several years ago
I have been able to visit
@MeherRoy
a few times. He started his chemotherapy and is handling it with great strength. He also started a blog so people can follow along his journey:
2/ Details from initial test transactions on Mainnet Beta using the bridge show:
- ETH to Solana = 70-80k gas (~$15 @ 150 gwei) in ~20 seconds
- Solana to ETH = 180k gas (~$50 @ 150 gwei) in ~24 seconds
The team at
@allesctf
and
@NeodymeLabs
are amazing, and have spent the last year peer reviewing the
@solana
codebase. They recently shared some of their learnings here:
PSA: If you're looking for or organising satellite events around
@solana
's Breakpoint Conference in Lisbon you can find it all here.
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
3/
@certusone
first announced the bridge in Q4 2020 with a minimal MVP available on testnet. Today, it’s live, fully audited and ready to support any cross-chain transfers between ETH and Solana.
6/ Now 9 months later, they're now dominating the NFT market on Solana.
I couldn't be more proud of the entire Magic Eden team.
They've worked incredibly hard to get here and are only just getting started.
It's hard for anyone not to respect
@synthetix_io
,
@kaiynne
and the core contributes as they undertake this transition to
@optimismPBC
, and their careful consideration on how to approach it. Some notes below...
@IDrawCharts
I think about how we can help developers/the ecosystem to take it to that next level, and I suspect the key is encouraging more open source development, allowing new teams to quickly iterate off each other, and challenge themselves to constantly improve.
1/ Announcing the Solana Foundation x
@ProjectSerum
DeFi hackathon!
🏆 Up to $400,000 in prizes
🌍 Anyone with an Internet connection can join
🗓️ Runs Feb. 15 - Mar. 1, registration is now open
Sign up & learn more at
Staking rewards are now live on Solana Mainnet Beta. 🎉
Congratulations to the entire Solana ecosystem for reaching this milestone in censorship resistance and decentralization.
You can learn more about this community-led effort here 👉
1/ Staking derivatives have been one of the more exciting DeFi primitives, and I'm particularly excited on how they'll play out on Solana versus other ecosystems for a few reasons
Over the last 3 months, we have made rapid progress behind the scenes. This is the story of our journey in building the liquid staking solution for the fastest blockchain in the world
#Solana
@LidoFinance
@solana
@joemccann
@solana
@ethereum
While I love how this might portray on the surface I think this can be misleading. Solidity and ETH DeFi has been around longer, more open source projects on ETH vs SOL, some SOL exploits don’t seem to have been accounted for as others have pointed out.
1/ A lot of great points here, only comment is that I hope
@solana
doesn't come across as trying to 'hide' the trade offs. There *are* tradeoffs. Challenge is that people don't take the time to *understand* the tradeoffs and how they truly compare with each other _objectively_.
Something I’m a little concerned about given the recent interactions I’ve had with the BSC and SOL communities is that they seem to be genuinely gaining organic traction. Much more so than say EOS or Tron last cycle. I have some thoughts about this…
Pretty awesome to see NFT's on Solana start to intersect with the modern art space, they even have a Solana wallet integration so you can actually bid for the piece in SOL tokens too!
“WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE” by
#YusukeHanai
silent auction NOW on
The unique art piece consists of an installation work, a painting & animation, secured with
@solana
blockchain.
ENDS ON: 16 AUG 12am (EDT) /12pm (HKT)
@ARR_ltd
@DDT_Store
5/ Literally *within 2 weeks* of that conversation, he and his future co-founders (
@sidazhang
,
@ZhuoxunYin
&
@zhouzhuojie
) came back with an MVP.
*Another 2-3 weeks later* they literally had something that was ready to go live.
Fucking insane 🤯
@LidoFinance
@MarinadeFinance
Essentially stake in Lido/Marinade for yield, deposit stSOL/mSOL back into FTX and use as collateral to lever up on some derivatives.
Would also love to see others like
@mangomarkets
consider support for this as collateral too.
NFT projects are starting to adopt utility token cash flows in their project strategies to give yield/passive income to NFT owners.
🧵 This is a deep dive + analysis on current projects with utility tokens attached to them:
4 / We worked from the same office for a period. and one day we were discussing Web3 verticals that were ripe for disruption.
At the time NFTs was still nascent on Solana and UI/UX for marketplaces was still really janky.
So naturally I suggested he build an NFT marketplace
2/ Realising his talent, I first tried to convince him to leave Google and join us at
@solana
*back in 2019*. It was me,
@aeyakovenko
and him in a room, explaining Solana's vision, and Proof of History.
Suffice to say, we were unsuccessful haha
14/ All this is to say, *spread out your stake*!
Your decision matters, and they define the censorship resistance and culture of the network.
So choose wisely, I know I will be!
2/ You and
@crainbf
always had this amazing ability for being able to break down the most complex concepts into something that even a pleb like me could understand
5/ But here's a thought experiment, imagine this scenario
@kaiynne
:
- Solana @ 500 nodes, ETH @ 15,000 nodes
- But behind the nodes, is the same number of *human s* operating them
- Staking power distribution identical
- Same hardware req. differences
3/ Fast forward to 2022,
@0xLeoInRio
reached out saying he was ready to leave Google to join a Web3 company (spoiler: not Solana). Regardless I ecstatic to see him take the leap.
So I introduced him to the team at
@FTX_Official
, which he ended up joining soon after.
13/ Before I get cancelled lel. I’m not saying Solana is just as decentralised as ETH 2.0, there is definitely more friction there - but I think the friction is specifically around technical and operational complexity, not due to capital requirements.
@econoar
I don't care if you hate on the protocol, but please don't disrespect the nodes dedicating their time + resources. They're the ones that took on the thankless job to support initial PoS protocol like
@cosmos
and
@solana
and now
@ethereum
2.0. They share the same ethos we all do.
@Fiskantes
@Mable_Jiang
@aeyakovenko
@orca_so
It still leverages Serum swap's pools. So the liquidity and fees there are shared with Serum swap. But it doesn't place orders on the order book like Raydium does.
7/ Beyond
@LidoFinance
expansion into Solana through the good folks at
@ChorusOne
there are also other great teams exploring a similar vein, such as
@MarinadeFinance
and
@gopartyparrot
including the new Stake Pools from the Solana Foundation
We are in the business of foot gun elimination.
With Anchor v0.16.0, I'm happy to say that all the common vulnerabilities outlined in this excellent article are addressed by idiomatic usage of the framework.
@IDrawCharts
I agree that to date in terms of products there is more to be explored. At the same time I do also see this as a natural process in the evolution of the ecosystem. Imitation first, then iterate and refine into specifically enabled products that maximise Solana’s features.
A great review of
@ArweaveTeam
for those who want to understand the technology that powers it. And how it compares to the others within the blockchain space.
All in all, I'm super excited to see this play out. I'm confident in the
@synthetix_io
's teams ability to work through these hurdles and drive the space forward and adoption for L2's like
@optimismPBC
in the process
@IDrawCharts
Several of the more prominent projects are still closed source and I appreciate why that’s the case, but hope we can shift away from that. Solution likely a function of better Solana specific security education for developers + more auditors + appreciation that code is not a moat
Thanks again to the
@allesctf
team for preparing some Solana related challenges for their recent CTF. For those who missed it, some write-ups from the amazing participants that managed to solve some of these challenges have been linked below:
🥷Calling all shadowy super coders! This coming weekend
@solana
will be sponsoring
@allesctf
‘s annual CTF challenge, and they’ve prepared 4 especially difficult Solana specific challenges for y’all. Learn more and/or sign up here 👉🏻
This is such a great initiative. We’ve been thinking about this a lot at
@solana
as well. I believe blockchain and DeFi focused CTF’s will help bring many new researchers into the blockchain space in an engaging and meaningful way.
Paradigm CTF starts in a little over 24 hours.
The competition will initially start with 8 challenges.
9 more will be revealed over 3 8-hour periods.
Register now:
As for whether L2 users should have exposure to the L1 debt pools - that's an interesting question. How do you value the risk users are taking by being the initial batch to mint sUSD on L2 - is that sufficiently risk adjusted such that no exposure to the debt pools is needed?
@IDrawCharts
@mangomarkets
i often get cringe reactions to similar criticism. calling me a "hater" etc
in the end, fake communities, grifts, low-effort projects should be called out
5/ Here’s an example: TRON has ~1.3k nodes. But almost all of them are operated by a single entity. It’s centralised AF. It wouldn’t really move the needle regardless of how many different nodes you delegated to.
Initial migration plan:
- Deploy contracts on L2 without exchanges
- Take a market driven roll-out (i.e. migrate features from L1 to L2 in line with user-behaviour/demand)
- Allow users to mint sUSD on L2 and earn SNX
Woohoo! Can't wait till Wormhole officially goes live on Mainnet Beta in the coming week. Big thanks to all the Guardian nodes supporting this launch. 🤟
Considerations (1/2):
- Should SNX on L1 be shut down entirely and migrated to L2 at once instead of progressively?
- Is the risk adjusted yield appropriate for those earning SNX in return for minting sUSD on L2 if they have no exposure to the debt pool?
6/ Operators running multiple nodes isn’t always a bad thing though. Consider this example: ETH 2.0 which currently has ~86k nodes, where it's not uncommon that operators also run more than one node. Still, most agree ETH 2.0 is the gold standard for PoS decentralisation.
4/ There's no doubt in my mind that ETH is the ultimate representation of a smart contract platform optimised to the wall for decentralisation, and I think that's extremely important.
@TheCryptoDog
Yah it's pretty brutal. Hope you manage to work something out mate. Canada could still mean you do 2 weeks though if you haven't got the PCR/Anti-Body test ready.
Here were all of the Solana related challenges for anyone that wants to try their own hand at solving them:
- (0 Solves)
- (2 Solves)
- (23 Solves)
- (2 Solves)