“Human civilization is a massive experiment in coordination. Turns out, coordination is tricky. Kingdoms have risen and fallen, ancient religions so old they’re not known to man today have burned hot then sputtered out, nation-states have conquered and crashed, then conquered again. All of history has been a massive coordination effort.
Time and time again, people have tried different mechanisms to corral humans into working together for the common good. We’ve tried all forms: Monarchies, dictatorships, co-ops, democracies, republics, committees, and countless permutations. And while DAOs are just another form of coordination, they represent a unique opportunity: Coordination unfettered by demographic constraints.
Our situation at hand is markedly different from that of the coordination attempts of years past. Throughout all of human history, you had to be in power to try your hand at large-scale coordination. You had to be born with royal blood, deemed an ancient prophet, elected to office, or lucky enough to be in a constitutional convention to have any say in how societies organize. Human coordination—save for a few revolutions—has never been in the hands of the masses.
The Decentralized Autonomous Organization is the greatest governance and coordination experiment to gain real community traction in centuries.
We have—and are currently building—trustless, permissionless structures that allow anyone in the world to join an organization they believe in, put forth their talents, and earn money to do it. When I say anyone, I mean that in the strongest sense of the word: DAOs are agnostic to age, gender, race, ethnic background, economic status, nationality, residence, and any other demographic identifier that might prevent someone from working and earning money for something they believe in.
This is a big f—ing deal. These solutions aren’t just elegantly built atop code—they’re our first real shot at a universally equitable work environment. People have power in their hands, and this power is not being wasted. This power is busy building communities. It’s generating ideas. It’s shipping products.”
“Transaction fees on L1 have been very high for months and there is greater urgency in doing anything required to help facilitate an ecosystem-wide move to rollups. Rollups are already significantly reducing fees for many Ethereum users, however even these fees are too expensive for many users. This document describes a pragmatic path, which unlocks data space for rollups as quickly as possible and adds additional space and security over time.
Step 1: Tx Calldata Expansion
If we want to give a short-term boost to rollup capacity and reduce costs without requiring the rollup teams to do any extra work, we should just decrease the cost of transaction calldata. EIP 4488 should increase data space available to rollups to a theoretical max of ~1 MB per slot and decrease costs for rollups by ~5x. It can be implemented far more quickly than the later steps.
Step 2: A Few Shards
At the same time, we can start doing the work to roll out “proper” sharding. The first natural piece to implement is the “business logic” of the sharding spec, but avoiding most of the difficulties around networking by keeping the initial number of shards very low (eg. 4). This would increase rollup data space to ~2 MB per slot (250 kB per shard * 4 shards, plus the expanded calldata from step 1).
The sharding spec itself is not exceptionally difficult; it’s a boilerplate code change on a similar scale to the recently released Altair hard fork, and so it’s reasonable to expect it could be implemented on a similar timeframe to Altair’s implementation and deployment.
Step 3: N Shards, Committee-secured
Increase the number of active shards from 4 to 64. This would increase rollup data space to ~16 MB per slot.
Step 4: Data Availability Sampling (DAS)
Add data availability sampling to ensure a higher level of security, protecting users even in the event of a dishonest majority attack. Once data availability sampling is fully introduced, the sharding rollout is complete.”
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“While I’m extremely bullish on crypto in the coming decade, there’s a point for every crypto investor where they might have too much in it. Sometimes it’s good to take money off the table and make meaningful investments elsewhere so you’re protected in the instance of another multi-year bear market.
Many of us are all lost on the same question: “Where else would I put my money?”
The barbell strategy is an investment concept that suggests that the best way to strike a balance between reward and risk is to invest in the two extremes of high-risk and no-risk assets while avoiding middle-of-the-road choices.
Historically, storing cash in a high yield savings account would provide steady passive income, this strategy doesn’t cut it anymore. The average interest rate on a savings account is 0.06% APR. But worse, the total amount of US dollars in circulation has increased by 37% since 2020.
If your net worth did not increase by the same amount in that period, you lost to Jerome and the money printer – you need to generate a higher return than the rate the M2 money supply is expanding. Therefore, if you entrusted the U.S. government to preserve and grow your purchasing power with 10Y or 30Y treasuries, just as the boomers did for decades, you’re down by -23% against inflation.
Today’s cash strategy is to hold what you need for living expenses and perhaps a few months in liquid cash.
That brings us to equity markets. The U.S. stock market has a long history of sustainable and moderate returns, so it may feel like the most natural alternatives for many crypto natives. The problem is that it doesn’t really fit into the barbell strategy. You have the high-risk box already checked off with crypto. You want something lower risk and uncorrelated. And in this risk-on environment, correlations are largely the same. If there’s some major market correction (see the COVID crash), crypto and stocks are likely to go down together. They’re both risk-on assets. You’re getting lower returns with the same correlation. Not worth it.
So cash, stocks, and bonds are largely out of the picture. What’s left? The best answer that I’ve found is real estate. And I think when paired with crypto assets, this could be the best barbell strategy heading into the next decade. Real estate, gold, and Bitcoin are all hard assets that have scarcity games. Like Bitcoin, real estate is a non-sovereign scarce asset. The key difference is that one is digital and the other is physical.
Stocks, bonds, commodities, cash—all of these are becoming increasingly less attractive by the day, especially for those with significant exposure to crypto. Either the returns are too low or the correlations are the same. Investing has changed. With the government beginning to abuse the money printer, you can’t rely on the same investments that made the previous generations their wealth.
The best barbell strategy for the coming decade is playing the two scarcity games, digital real estate (bitcoin) and physical real estate (property). The investors that can play these two games well may likely become some of the most successful individuals in the world in the coming decade.”
“The base, foundational layer of the metaverse is hardware. The metaverse is dependent on physical devices to access and interact with the metaverse.
Cryptographically secured microchips are a way for people to hold their own keys when it comes to hardware. ‘Through these chips you have a way to interact without an arbiter.’ By addressing individual ownership at the hardware level, these chips can then be embedded in virtually anything, for secure access to digital assets and digital lands.
Kong Land [DAO] intends to do this through “silicon locked contracts” (or SiLos) to address digital and physical asset ownership at the hardware level. SiLos are low-cost, durable, secure element microchips that are cryptographically linked to a smart contract on a public blockchain.
Embedding a SiLo microchip into any physical item transforms it into a crypto asset that can be verified on chain, as well as interacted with in real life. NFTs enable verified ownership of assets to port between the physical and digital, and back to physical, as well as genuine ownership of assets for interoperability between metaverses.
While traditional tech companies focus largely on bringing users into virtual worlds or augmenting reality with digital experiences, we envision a seamlessly intertwined metaverse that doesn’t rely solely on wearable headgear.
The rapid experimentation of blockchain-based DAOs as crypto-cities and states is demonstrating innovative ways to link the digital and the physical. Fundamentally, the battle between an open, decentralized, crypto metaverse and a closed, extractive, corporate metaverse comes down to the hardware, as to how people will access digital worlds.”
“The project is governed by a Creative Commons CC0 “No Rights Reserved” license, which means anyone can use the Nouns name and characters to create anything. It’s in the public domain.
There’s Nouns merchandise sold by someone who doesn’t own a Nouns NFT, for example, and derivative projects that have generated millions of dollars in trading volume—and that’s allowed. In the same sense, anyone could take the Nouns brand and style and create their own movies, books, and toys.
The Nouns creators, or “nounders,” like to think of the project as a protocol or application layer for others to build upon. Ultimately, the genuine Nouns are the originals, as proven by the publicly-viewable Ethereum blockchain.
You don’t need copyright anymore. In the same way that academic citations make the original paper more important, citation of Nouns in whatever form they come in—at least, this is our thesis—will make the originals more important and more valuable.
A lot of companies, I think, are going to be unwilling to make the transition—because they rely on this idea that their IP is a monopoly product. It will be very scary for them to have to compete in the marketplace, where other people can use the same IP that they can.”
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“Ultimately, much like how crypto exchanges function, in the future, there will be two types of stablecoin issuers: those that purposely avail themselves to regulated jurisdictions and offer transparent accounting, clear rules for redemption, and investor protections in one basket, and conversely, there will be other issuers which have a robust secondary market but remain functional without clear rules that may be synonymous with financial institutions.
Gregory said that the first basket will be the likely venue for regulated financial institutions engaging in crypto-specific financial products and the latter being more for cross-border trading from countries with stringent currency controls, peer-to-peer marketplaces and access to offshore exchanges.
There’s a real recognition that as these payment stablecoins grow, they could grow at internet scale relatively quickly.”
The Disrupt 