1/ Crypto still faces a massive education problem.
This Fall, we've welcomed many new freshmen to
@StanfordCrypto
, and many have asked me how to get started.
So we've put together a "Stanford Blockchain Reading List" on Crypto 101:
1/ We're teaching
@Uniswap
fee switch design as Stanford course curriculum.
On Friday, I had the privilege of lecturing on Uniswap Governance for Stanford's "CS 352B/LAW 1078: Blockchain Governance", looking at UNI delegation, the Wormhole Controversy, and the Fee Switch.
Unichain launched with many Uniswap DAO delegates in the dark. In one swoop, Unichain has:
- aligned equity bags
- basically killed the fee switch, the DAOs most promising idea
- functionally mutated the โimmutableโ ERC20
decentralization has been unburdened by what has been
PSA for Stanford students:
Dan is teaching a new ZK class in the spring (either as CS 355 or a new course), and promised to bring cs251 back for next year
LAW 1043 is a close replacement taught by Prof Jeff Strnad, and open to undergrads. DM me for enrollment details
Iโve been sitting at โThe Lost Draftโ, a coffee shop in Brooklyn for the past hour - every third customer here is using
@blackbird_xyz
Insanely bullish.
The Story Continues. Some updates since our fundraise:
โก๏ธAI: Building an SDK with one of largest foundation model companies
โก๏ธConsumer: Creating a Midjourney killer to reimagine prompts as images
โก๏ธIPFi: Incubating economic primitives, unlocking staking on IP Assets
Watch the
1/ Mass adoption for NFTs may be far closer than you think.
I spent 3 months studying abroad in Paris, researching Product NFTs, digital luxury, and attending
@nft_paris
Here's my thesis on Luxury in Web3 - or when watches become NFTs
[TLDR in Thread]
Just dropped โThe Ideology of Web 3โ, this weekโs article for โFishy On-Chain.โ Itโs a sister article to last week, and talks about Web 3 โverticallyโ through three ideological pillars: trustlessness, permanence, voluntariness.
Happy Fishy Friday! ๐
gm! Announcing our new club leadership for '24-25 ๐
President: Jay Yu
@0xfishylosopher
VP - Research: Kole Lee
@kolelee_
VP - Finance: Austin Bennett
@AustinB31415
VP - Community: Kevin Hsu
@kevinhsu1008
Excited for the new year! ๐๐๐
1/ Yesterday I was honored to be featured in
@time
magazine as an end-user for
@blackbird_xyz
After 20+ checkins, 17k+ FLY collected, and using both the Summer and Breakfast Pass, here are my takes on Blackbird UX ๐งต๐
Article:
.
@0xfishylosopher
of
@StanfordCrypto
presents fascinating research, identifying political party-like clusters in DAOs. His work seems highly relevant and promising to simplify delegation processes and increase transparency in delegated voting.
Dashboard:
1/ People often say that in Web 3, everyone can create their own currency. Thatโs true, but hereโs the catch: not everyone can create their own liquidity.
2/ Over the past 8 weeks, this hybrid CS/LAW class has covered a variety of Blockchain Governance topics from both a theoretical and practical perspective, including delegation, quadratic voting, wrapped/unwrapped DAOs
Syllabus:
3/ I presented Uniswap as an example of "DAO Delegation in Practice," and described our role as Stanford Blockchain Club in this process.
This began with a discussion of Uniswap's overall DAO Governance Process.
It was my pleasure and honor to interview
@cdixon
of
@a16zcrypto
(and fellow PHIL major) on his new book โRead Write Ownโ - one of the most consequential books presenting the crypto story. Check it out here!
As a bonus, I was able to find out who his fav philosophers were ๐
๐ Stanford Blockchain Review, Vol. 4 No. 5
#35
- "Read Write Own" by
@cdixon
of
@a16zcrypto
. We at Stanford Blockchain Club are honored to invite Chris Dixon for an article and an interview on his new book Read Write Own
Article:
What is Privacy in Web3?
1/ This is probably the biggest open q in Web3. My personal thoughts are that we need to split this into 3 conceptions:
1. Network Level Privacy
2. Protocol Level Privacy
3. User Level Privacy
TLDR in ๐งต
As we vote on DeFi Education and Uniswap Fee Switch proposals this week, I'm proud to say that
@StanfordCrypto
is pioneering the way in bridging together industry and academia.
1/ gm everyone! Happy to announce that the side events registration portal for
#StanfordBlockchainWeek
'24 by
@StanfordCrypto
is now open!
Register here to be included in our official catalog of side events (TBA soon):
Link:
See you all in NYC Aug 5-9!
2/ The reading list is primarily based on blog-post content we've published on the Stanford Blockchain Review, and intends on providing a crash-course overview of the most important topics in crypto
3/ We walk through 5 modules:
1 - Why Crypto? What is Web3 about?
2 - What do Crypto Apps look like in our daily lives?
3 - What does Decentralization look like? Case studies in DeFi, DePIN, and DAOs
4 - What infrastructure powers these apps?
5 - Where are we today?
Glad to see our work on Voting Bloc Entropy (VBE) at
@initc3org
being highlighted by
@CoinDesk
!!
While decentralization in DAOs is hard to get right, we believe that having the right metrics such as VBE is essential to better governance
A recent token heist at Compound DAO revealed the weakness of current DAO governance voting. There is a better way, say Andrรฉs Fรกbrega,
@0xfishylosopher
, Amy Zhao, and
@AriJuels
@initc3org
.
Opinion.
Fun fact: just found out that Stanford's Green Library has a web3 exhibit in Hohbach hall
It talks about using cryptographic & on-chain primitives to capture, store, and verify the authenticity of journalism photos and combat deepfakes
1/ NFTs may be going through a bear market right now, but in the long-run this allows NFTs to be tied to social value rather than speculations.
For NFTs, this not the end; no, it is not even the beginning of the end; but it may be the end of the beginning.
4/ We hope that through this open-source resource, we can better inform the world on what crypto actually means, holding true to the
@StanfordCrypto
mission of bridging together education, research, and industry.
4/ We then walked through several key votes and proposals, such as Prop 24, which created the Uniswap Foundation
@UniswapFND
and discussed the Foundation's role as a facilitator in governance
Had a great time chatting with Heath on USDCโs history, product, and future!
Stablecoins are one of the most important innovations that we have made as an industry
๐ Stanford Blockchain Review, Vol. 5 No. 10
#50
- โUSDC and the Future of the Dollar".
@0xfishylosopher
of
@StanfordCrypto
interviews Heath Tarbert, Chief Legal Officer and Head of Corporate Affairs at
@circle
and former
@CFTC
chairman on USDC's future.
@ManInBlackie
The most innovative part of the original fee switch is tying staking to delegation, to increase UNI used in DAO voting (See Unistaker). The UVN seems to supplant this with a more traditional PoS-style staking mechanism, with no benefit enhanced governance. Sure, you earn some
Gm! Starting โFishy On-Chain,โ a long-form blog talking about the technological + philosophical implications of Web 3 side by side. Frenz plz support :)
TLDR in thread, WAGMI ๐งต
๐ The Ultimate Narrative of Multi-Dip Staking
1/ As the Shanghai upgrade draws near, I took a deep dive into the coalescing narratives around liquid staking, the Shanghai Upgrade, Eigenlayer, Cosmos IBS and more.
Here are my takeaways: ๐งต๐
Congrats Daniel!
Itโs been an absolute pleasure seeing how Nexus has evolved over time - Iโm always amazed by the technical mastery and genius behind Nexus VM :)
To many great things and many more SF dim sum runs in the future ๐
The future of the Internet is verifiable.
We are beyond excited to partner with industry giants
@ravi_lsvp
,
@veradittakit
,
@lstephanian
,
@hosseeb
to scale zero-knowledge proofs to unseen levels of compute power.
It's an honor to work with such a dream team
@JensGroth16
1/ gm! We're really excited to announce that Stanford Blockchain will be hosting BASSLite at ETHCC Brussels on July 9th, 9.30am-12:30pm
Register here:
[Agenda in ๐งต]
5/ Following this, we discussed the Wormhole Controversy of Prop 31 in Feb 2023, and what this reveals about some of the challenges of decentralized governance in practice
We had a blast last week for SBC in NYC!
Thanks to everyone that joined us for BASS, SBC, and all the other wonderful side events hosted in NYC last week.
Big shout-out to our friends at
@initc3org
for putting the conference together!!
Until recently, there has been less innovation on the execution / settlement / aggregation layers relative to the da / sequencing layers as a part of the modular stack. Exploring these dynamics lately and published thoughts in a recent piece
Full post / link in bio
what really needs to be on-chain for an "on-chain game"?
- tradeable assets
- game states that have cascading multiplayer effects
- personal collections/milestones (highlights reel)
seems everything else would make more sense off-chain?
Today, we're announcing the next step forward in onchain governance: The Tally Protocol.
The Tally Protocol fully actualizes the value of the systems that token holders own and participate in.
The Tally Protocol unlocks the economic potential of governance tokens by providing a
Why am I still bullish on crypto?
To wrap 2023, here are 5 reasons why I still think crypto is the most venture-backable โfrontier industryโ ๐ ๐งต
This upcoming Spring Quarter, we're excited to be hosting two blockchain classes at Stanford:
1. "MS&E 447: Blockchain Entrepreneurship" speaker series
2. "CS 352B/LAW 1078: Blockchain Governance" discussing DAOs from a technical/legal/social science perspective
See you there!
Some thoughts on Appchains ๐งต ๐๐
1/ What are appchains? Essentially, they are blockchains that support one specific application. Appchains are like ASICs to Ethereum's CPU. There are 3 exemplary approaches to appchains:
1. Cosmos
2. Hyperledger Fabric
3. Rollups-as-a-Service
Stanford just hosted a hackathon. Over 1000 students from around the world came to build for 36 hours straight.
The reward? $100k+ in prizes.
Here are the winners and crowd standouts we saw at TreeHacks โ24
@hackwithtrees
(๐งต):
1/6 Why do student clubs die? (an investigative ๐งต)
Today's surprise:
@StanfordCrypto
ran a Newsletter/Magazine on Medium last year pretty similar to Stanford Blockchain Review with high qual articles โ but then it died ๐๐
Curious on everyoneโs single favorite short work/essay etc. (something you can read in a single sitting)
Mine is still undoubtedly Samuel Beckettโs โKrappโs Last Tapeโ. Absolute gem reflecting on how we grow reflect and remember
6/ Finally, we discussed the new Fee Switch proposal design brought forth by
@eek637
in Feb 2024, discussing how the Unistaker protocol both rewards UNI stakers and incentivizes protocol governance.
1/ Memes, Dreams, and Get-Rich-Quick Schemes - A lighthearted piece on the recent $PEPE craze, and the value proposition behind so-called โuseless" memecoins:
TLDR ๐งต๐
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of working with
@GuthL
of designing ZKThreads during an internship with
@Starknet
Incredibly thrilled to finally see this come to fruition. This is a major step to creating scalability solutions with native interoperability.
Finally, after months of back and forth, I am super excited to introduce a new scaling concept in the set of ZK-based scaling solution available in the industry
โจโจโจ zkThreads โจโจโจ
For the meat:
๐งต
ppl inside crypto know that the space is building some cool stuff but ppl outside crypto still think itโs a scamโฆ. what would it take to change this?
Yes, college students have lost their ability to read. I have taught lit for 24 years; the threshold started to decline in the late aughts and nosedived during Covid. A thread with observations + how I get my students to read ALL (or at least most) of the reading I assign: ๐งต
this is true for any early/nascent industry where a career ladder pecking order etc has not yet been codified
an incumbent (eg. A Google/BigTech PM) is on the same (if not slightly worse) playing ground than an undergrad/new grad
Crypto is the best space for proactive smart kids -
People who get into rabbitholes for no reason other than itโs interesting
People who enjoy building and learning things on weekends just for fun
People who research through problems and write long-form pieces
It gives
๐งต Biggest week in Uniswap Protocol Governance... ever?
I just proposed a large-scale upgrade to the system. Specifically, I believe we should upgrade the protocol so that its fee mechanism rewards UNI token holders that have staked and delegated their tokens. ๐ฆ
On the Digital Serfdom of Art ๐งต
1/ Today, the artistโs sovereignty is under the full-scale assault of modern tech monopolies. Big Tech platforms, derive their entire business model from divorcing content value from content creator.
2/ nonconsensus bet - compared with AI, healthcare, robotics, crypto is still considered nonconsensus (ppl still bet against the industry). higher upside since weโre still early, by probs ~2 cycles
๐ UniDay Recap! ๐
We're thankful to the delegates, developers, and community contributors who made UniDay in Brussels so special! Your energy & passion made the event in collaboration with
@Uniswap
Labs,
@JoinEdgeCity
,
@keighstone
truly unforgettable.
Highlights below! ๐ ๐ฆ
We're excited to share that we will be hosting on 4/12 the inaugural Stanford Blockchain Governance Summit, a whole-day in-person event dedicated to exploring the future of decentralized governance.
When: 4/12, 9AM to 6PM
Where: Stanford Law School
RSVP:
2/ It all starts with a EU law, which states that all durable consumer products (eg. handbags/watches) will need "Digital Product Passports," expected 2026.
DPP is basically a QR-code or NFC-chip โidentity cardโ linking to the product's supply chain info
๐ Stanford Blockchain Review, Vol. 3 No. 9
๐๏ธ "Arbitrum Stylus: A New Standard for Smart Contract Composability" by
@CryptoIsCute
and
@0xfishylosopher
discuss
@arbitrum
Stylus, whose EVM+ engine marks a breakthrough in smart contract composability
Been swamped with work recently, so havenโt done as many updates recently. Hereโs an article on zk-Sync and zk-Rollups that I wrote last week though. Enjoy :)
7/ In the long-run, the successful operation of a memechain would likely be more similar to the operation of a successful NFT community, such as BAYC, Azuki, Nouns or Doodles, rather than the operation of an actual L1 or L2 chain like Ethereum, Arbitrum or Polygon.
4/ But the story doesn't just stop here. Product NFTs are far more than on-chain JSONs. They are actually a new primitive for digital luxury, acting as a digital link between the brand, the physical product, and the end consumer. So what does this look like?
@bobaepicure
Its time for NFTs to be aligned with social value โโ that's their unique strength anyways... capturing social value that otherwise goes to waste in the rent-seeking surplus-profiting status quo
3/ distinct communal subculture - because of (2) there is a clear in-group out-group divide. its very easy to reach/bond/get help from power players in crypto + get cross references on ppl
๐ Stanford Blockchain Review, Vol. 3 No. 2
๐ "Mooreโs Law for Zero Knowledge Proofs" by
@0xroylu
from
@LongHashVC
discusses levers for performance gains, patterns for value accrual, and a hypothesis of exponential growth in ZK proof technology.
7/ Furthermore, appchains are also a key mechanism to institutional onboarding to Web3. Enterprise chains such as Hyperledger are considered outside of Web3, but they're still appchains! It's not a stretch of imagination to add in NFTs, DeFi, bridges to Web3
Itโs not necessarily greater interest, but itโs just ppl can make levered bets on liquids whereas purchases for NFTs are capped at fixed value. 37k minters > 35k holders.
NFTs are for collecting not for trading. Memecoins are for trading not for collecting. Two very different
Coinbase's creator economy ad should have been about memecoins, not NFTs.
"Collecting" images is not something that retail wants.
Just check the chain. 37k minters on the official Coinbase Miggles NFT who paid a total of $42k in fees to mint.
Meanwhile, the unofficial MIGGLES