smart contracts | decentralization @dabdab@infosec.exchange
Joined August 2021
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It’s interesting how the one half of America loved EV, saw the point of investing in space exploration. And the other half love monster truck shows and whatever this is.
And how one man successfully marketed himself and his company to both halves.
dabdab.eth retweeted
the best place to trade on Hyperliquid.
Hyperliquid built the exchange.
HyperLink is building the broker.
We raised $2.5M from @Alliance @NorthIslandVC @hi_Reverie @Node_Cap @breed_vc @smartestmoney
Lowest fees. Private flow. Best execution.
Last month: $254M routed, 0.1% of Hyperliquid volume.
Next: 10% of HL.
dabdab.eth retweeted
The SEC confirmed it.
rETH is not a security.
Delivering consistent returns for 5 years - @Rocket_Pool is the decentralized home of staking.
Just use rETH.
The SEC filings today, filled with factual errors and misleading statements, show concretely that the agency's incompetence is endangering investors.
The most decentralized dApp on Ethereum is Rocket Pool - it has more home stakers than Solana, Gnosis, Polygon, Avax, everything but Ethereum itself.
In a sea of charlatans, Rocket Pool has pioneered true decentralization.
In this post, I will first explain why I believe $rETH is NOT a security by analyzing all of Howey, Reves, and the FIT21 criteria. Next, I will explain several factual errors that the SEC has made in its lawsuit against @Consensys with evidence. After this I will say why Consensys will likely win on summary judgment by analysing the Coinbase victory.
Finally, I will explain how, just like tornado cash, Rocket Pool is unstoppable. Neither the Rocket Pool DAO, nor Rocket Pool LTD., nor the SEC, nor any US or international court has the power to stop people from running nodes at home or holding $rETH in their wallet.
Permisionless. Decentralized. Censorship resistant.
By the end of this thread, I hope you walk away with the knowledge that the SEC is hollow, Ethereum is the future, and Rocket Pool is enabling it.
If you prefer a single long article, check it out - mirror.xyz/jasperthefriendly…
1/16
This is bullish for ethereum:0xae78736cd615f374d3085123a210448e74fc6393 isn’t it
Some bangers from the SEC today:
1) buybacks do not make a commodity token into a security
2) liquid staking tokens for commodities are not securities
sec.gov/about/divisions-offi…
dabdab.eth retweeted
It's only dead if you give up
I'm not giving up on privacy. I'm doubling down.
firefly.social/post/x/210138…
dabdab.eth retweeted
Singapore — developed country.
Korea — underdeveloped country.
Why?
Korea also gives people various forms of support, such as living-cost subsidies and consumption vouchers
But Korea ultimately collects taxes and redistributes them, or issues government bonds and takes on more debt when there isn’t enough money.
Singapore, on the other hand, returns part of the profits generated by investing the assets the country has accumulated over a long period of time.
Singapore manages long-term national assets through institutions such as GIC, Temasek, and MAS.
- GIC’s average annual nominal return over the past 20 years: around 5.6%
- Temasek portfolio value: S$518B
- Temasek’s 20-year annualized shareholder return: around 6.8%
- NIRC contributed around S$28.5B to the government budget in 2026
- Investment returns account for roughly 20% of Singapore’s annual government spending
- Only up to 50% of the expected long-term investment returns from national reserves can be used by the current generation, while the rest is preserved for future generations
More importantly, even though Singapore may appear to have a high level of government debt, it also holds financial assets that exceed those liabilities.
Korea thinks about how much more tax it can collect from its people.
Singapore thinks first about how to grow the assets the country already owns.
Woke up to the Singapore government airdropping $500 cash into my bank account
Yes, again! I have no idea how many times this has happened already this year
Best government benefits ever?
dabdab.eth retweeted
One positive consequence of all the recent detailed thinking about transaction formats - not just 8141, also "future of state" discussions eg. UTXOs, PBT, keyed nonces, and also recursive STARK mempool - is that we have a much more explicit understanding of how transactions have "actions" and "dependencies", and we can engineer around optimizing the two separately.
An action is an effect that a transaction has.
A dependency is a fact about the transaction and/or the state that must be true for the transaction to be valid.
eg. a signature is a dependency, a Merkle proof of a UTXO is a dependency, a ZK-SNARK (or STARK) is a dependency, a call that sends ETH is an action
Dependencies can be processed in parallel. Dependencies that involve state can be reasoned about by a mempool, especially if the specific state accessed is statically declared. Dependencies that are pure (no state calling allowed) can be processed once at the mempool layer and never need to be processed again - and potentially even replaced with a STARK verifying them, allowing not just execution but also data to be elided.
In principle, dependencies and actions can all be expressed as calls (if needed, calls to precompiles). This would make the transaction format itself very bare-bones and minimalist (a list of calls, flags for the type of each call eg. dependencies would be static or pure calls, and origin, nonce, etc) and allows maximum cross-compatibility even if different EVM chains have different features.
In 2015-era Ethereum, thinking explicitly about these differences was not very important: execution was execution, there were few enough transactions that we could process them all serially, and single-key ECDSA accounts were good enough for everyone.
Ethereum's current scaling strategy, however, requires moving beyond that paradigm. Ethereum is beloved by many developers because the execution and state model is so dynamic and flexible. But dynamic and flexible is not friendly to scaling. Fortunately, >90% of Ethereum's activity by volume does not require anything dynamic and flexible. So, we require contracts, accounts and transactions to more explicitly specify what is dynamic and flexible and what is more statically-analyzable but more restrictive, and more statically-analyzable things get the lowest gas cost and thus scale the most. Effectively, learning from the best of both the 2015-era Ethereum model and a more Bitcoin-like model (reminder: Bitcoin has had what I call account abstraction since the beginning), and making a mixture of both (really, the full spectrum between both) available, with gas costs appropriate for the level of scale involved.
New state types, the recursive STARK mempool, keyed nonces, etc all go in this direction.
This all relates to transaction types, because a general-purpose transaction type is a very natural interface layer on top of which all of this can be implemented, and the current thinking around the EIP-8141 transaction type is going in this exact direction that is friendly to these kinds of future generalizations.
So in that sense, 8141 done well is not just a culmination of 10 years of account abstraction work, it's also preparation for the next few years of responsible decentralization-friendly hyper-scaling.
dabdab.eth retweeted
The two biggest factors in vibecoding success are core CS and written communication, which is precisely what I predicted 6 months ago.
China published the most uncomfortable paper on vibe coding.
ETH Zurich tested 100 developers in a controlled, commercial-grade vibe coding environment to see who actually succeeds.
The findings are brutal.
The researchers tracked computer science achievement, written communication skills, and general cognitive reasoning.
They wanted to see what actually predicts vibe coding proficiency when you never touch a line of source code yourself.
Two major predictors emerged.
Written communication proficiency mattered. The ability to structure thoughts and articulate intent unambiguously in text directly impacts what the AI builds.
But that wasn't even the main takeaway.
Computer science achievement was a massive, dominant predictor of success.
Even when researchers controlled for general intelligence and reasoning skills, CS background still heavily dictated who built working software and who completely crashed.
In fact, CS knowledge contributed roughly twice the unique predictive variance of writing skills alone.
Why? Because vibe coding isn't about writing code. It’s about debugging logic.
When an AI agent builds a complex application and quietly breaks an edge case under the hood, a non-technical user looks at the glowing UI and assumes it works.
They don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what logic to challenge. They lack the mental models to recognize architectural catastrophe.
You can prompt your way past syntax.
You cannot prompt your way past a fundamental lack of engineering intuition.
The hype told us that learning to code is dead because language is all you need.
The data just proved the opposite.
To truly master the vibe, you still need to understand how the machine thinks.
dabdab.eth retweeted
While you're bidding ZEC, just remember:
> Privacy bid will always be split between ZEC and XMR
> Also, ETH can have the exact same privacy as ZEC, eg Railgun
> Institutions will never bid ZEC
I hold some myself, but don't kid yourself by believing this is Bitcoin 2.0.
dabdab.eth retweeted
Two ways to earn yield with ETH on Liquity
1⃣ Liquity ETH Carry vault on @ipor_io
✅ ~8% APR paid out in ETH
✅ Grows $BOLD supply
2⃣ Open a leveraged trove / shift using @DeFiSaver
✅ 8000 $BOLD split pro-rata
✅ Depositors to the Liquity vault get a multiplier
links👇
dabdab.eth retweeted
Shame on you, @chainalysis.
Running a Tornado Cash relayer, earning fees from it, then helping prosecute its developer is a level of hypocrisy that deserves public scrutiny.
One thing before I start: everything in this post is public information from my own docket. None of it is new, and I'm not revealing anything you can't already find in the court filings yourself.
The retrial just got pushed to April 26, 2027. The order came down today (Dkt. 300). My acquittal motion is still sitting there, undecided. I honestly don't know when this ends.
Prosecutors are supposed to protect American interests and go after people who broke the law. A jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts against me. And still SDNY won't stop, because this case was never just about me. It's about setting an example.
Don't take my word for it. Tara La Morte, the chief of SDNY's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said it herself at a New York City Bar Association event (Law360, Feb. 23, 2024; filed on my docket as Doc. 25-2):
"We want the industry to take notice."
"What we're trying to do is sort of bring the industry into compliance, and I think Tornado Cash is an example of that."
An example. Out of a developer who wrote code.
At that same event, her deputy praised the government's blockchain-tracing partner, Chainalysis.
Here is what they didn't tell the audience. All of it is from the public docket in my case.
According to the trial transcripts, Chainalysis was running its OWN Tornado Cash relayer, and earning fees on the transactions flowing through it.
- Chainalysis's own lawyers admitted to "a relayer node that Chainalysis operated"; my subpoena sought documents on Tornado Cash relayer(s) "used from March to August 2022." (Dkt. 211)
- In open court, the prosecutor said it plainly: "I think the parties agree as to that part of the testimony, that the Chainalysis relayer earned fees." Same hearing: "there's zero evidence that the defendant was in any way aware that Chainalysis was running a relayer." (Dkt. 259, July 25, 2025)
So the company that helped trace my "criminal" transactions was itself profiting from Tornado Cash transactions, while I was prosecuted over software I helped create.
And when my lawyers subpoenaed them to testify?
- Chainalysis moved to quash. (Dkt. 211)
- The government backed them: "Your Honor, we agree with the position outlined in the motion." (Dkt. 255)
- The night before, prosecutors called Chainalysis's counsel. The judge asked point-blank: "Did you let them know that they were potentially subject to investigation or prosecution?" The answer: "We have discussed at a high level some of the issues surrounding the relayer with Chainalysis." (Dkt. 259)
- The Chainalysis witness took the Fifth. My lawyers learned about that call only afterward, from Chainalysis's own lawyer. (Dkt. 263)
The jury never heard any of it.
This spring, at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, something happened that I still can't quite believe. The Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel, sat on a panel called "Code is Free Speech."
Think about that. The two top law enforcement officials in the country. Blanche told thousands of developers: if you're a coder and you're not the one committing the crime, "you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged." He said the last administration's crypto cases were "outrageous attacks on the industry." Patel praised "the Chainalysises of the world" as FBI partners.
And when the moderator pointed at the elephant in the room, my case, Tornado Cash, Roman Storm, the Acting Attorney General called it a "lingering case" they are "continuing to deal with."
So here is my hypothetical question. If code is free speech, why am I still being prosecuted for writing it? And if the Chainalysises of the world are the partners, the same Chainalysis that ran its own Tornado Cash relayer and earned fees from Tornado Cash users, while I never did, why is it off the hook?
They made an example out of a developer for writing code. Their own vendor ran the same infrastructure, pocketed the fees, and got a phone call instead of a prosecution.
Sources 👇👇👇
dabdab.eth retweeted
One thing before I start: everything in this post is public information from my own docket. None of it is new, and I'm not revealing anything you can't already find in the court filings yourself.
The retrial just got pushed to April 26, 2027. The order came down today (Dkt. 300). My acquittal motion is still sitting there, undecided. I honestly don't know when this ends.
Prosecutors are supposed to protect American interests and go after people who broke the law. A jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts against me. And still SDNY won't stop, because this case was never just about me. It's about setting an example.
Don't take my word for it. Tara La Morte, the chief of SDNY's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said it herself at a New York City Bar Association event (Law360, Feb. 23, 2024; filed on my docket as Doc. 25-2):
"We want the industry to take notice."
"What we're trying to do is sort of bring the industry into compliance, and I think Tornado Cash is an example of that."
An example. Out of a developer who wrote code.
At that same event, her deputy praised the government's blockchain-tracing partner, Chainalysis.
Here is what they didn't tell the audience. All of it is from the public docket in my case.
According to the trial transcripts, Chainalysis was running its OWN Tornado Cash relayer, and earning fees on the transactions flowing through it.
- Chainalysis's own lawyers admitted to "a relayer node that Chainalysis operated"; my subpoena sought documents on Tornado Cash relayer(s) "used from March to August 2022." (Dkt. 211)
- In open court, the prosecutor said it plainly: "I think the parties agree as to that part of the testimony, that the Chainalysis relayer earned fees." Same hearing: "there's zero evidence that the defendant was in any way aware that Chainalysis was running a relayer." (Dkt. 259, July 25, 2025)
So the company that helped trace my "criminal" transactions was itself profiting from Tornado Cash transactions, while I was prosecuted over software I helped create.
And when my lawyers subpoenaed them to testify?
- Chainalysis moved to quash. (Dkt. 211)
- The government backed them: "Your Honor, we agree with the position outlined in the motion." (Dkt. 255)
- The night before, prosecutors called Chainalysis's counsel. The judge asked point-blank: "Did you let them know that they were potentially subject to investigation or prosecution?" The answer: "We have discussed at a high level some of the issues surrounding the relayer with Chainalysis." (Dkt. 259)
- The Chainalysis witness took the Fifth. My lawyers learned about that call only afterward, from Chainalysis's own lawyer. (Dkt. 263)
The jury never heard any of it.
This spring, at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, something happened that I still can't quite believe. The Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel, sat on a panel called "Code is Free Speech."
Think about that. The two top law enforcement officials in the country. Blanche told thousands of developers: if you're a coder and you're not the one committing the crime, "you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged." He said the last administration's crypto cases were "outrageous attacks on the industry." Patel praised "the Chainalysises of the world" as FBI partners.
And when the moderator pointed at the elephant in the room, my case, Tornado Cash, Roman Storm, the Acting Attorney General called it a "lingering case" they are "continuing to deal with."
So here is my hypothetical question. If code is free speech, why am I still being prosecuted for writing it? And if the Chainalysises of the world are the partners, the same Chainalysis that ran its own Tornado Cash relayer and earned fees from Tornado Cash users, while I never did, why is it off the hook?
They made an example out of a developer for writing code. Their own vendor ran the same infrastructure, pocketed the fees, and got a phone call instead of a prosecution.
Sources 👇👇👇
dabdab.eth retweeted
The loopers don't care about ETH as money.
They only care about what they can extract by borrowing ETH and buying LSTs.
What they care about is extracting the delta from this activity.
AAVE even protected loopers by suppressing rates for ETH when they had issues.
dabdab.eth retweeted
Morgan Stanley just published an @ethereum primer.
Not an ETH price target or a trading thesis.
A primer on Ethereum as infrastructure for stablecoins, tokenized assets, payments, settlement, lending, and financial applications.
Assets converge where the liquidity is.
Liquidity converges where the assets are.
Institutions converge where both already exist.
Ethereum has spent a decade compounding all three.
Those network effects can't be replicated.
Institutions building the future of finance are choosing Ethereum.
dabdab.eth retweeted
I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( strawmap.org/ ).
In general, a lot of overlap, but:
* Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized)
* Some things deprioritized (eg. VDFs; many EVM improvements)
* Some things replaced with superior constructions (eg. Verkle -> unified BT -> PBT; state expiry -> new state types)
What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all. These reflect changing priorities.
Notably:
* First-class attention to strong privacy. This covers: keyed nonces and recent roots, aspects of FOCIL, lean privacy pool & wormholes
* Aggressive scaling in the context of post-quantum. This covers: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, zkzk frames (see ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip… )
* Lean-ification of the spec, to assist in formal verification (full FV of everything is only possible because of modern AI)
* Blob and gas futures (this idea just didn't exist back in 2023)
* Native rollups (SNARKs were nowhere near mature enough to even consider this back in 2023)
* A more open design space for the "future of the EVM". zkzk frames already implies that the protocol will expose to users some ISA that's not the EVM - current leading candidates are leanISA and RISC-V. These ISAs are more simple, modern and efficient than the EVM. Once they're there, why not expose them to developers everywhere? (And then, why not turn the EVM into being an IR on top of that ISA, instead of an enshrined feature massively complicating the base protocol?) Though much of the deeper exploration here is too early even for the strawmap.
* New state types are not just a replacement for expiry, they're a fundamentally different paradigm to how Ethereum does scaling
A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale ALL ethereum activity, we try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols).
The other common theme is treating STARKs and AI-accelerated FV as first-class objects, that we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on. There are recursive STARKs in many layers of the protocol, one particular primitive (the "aggregate to union verified dependencies" primitive) is expected to be used in *three* places in the protocol: EL, CL and DL. This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools.
In general, many steps forward in maturity. And a huge amount of hard work by many dozens of Ethereum researchers and developers on all of these features.
Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.
dabdab.eth retweeted
2022: Ethereum asks Lido to self-limit. Lido vote: 99.81% no.
2024: Lower issuance comes to ACD for Electra. Lido raises concerns. Proposal dies.
2026: Again. After some revealing tweets this weekend, no need to wonder how much is about incentives. They’re saying it explicitly.
issuance politics 101:
you never have to kill an EIP. you just postpone it until the people pushing it burn out.
one side: a handful of volunteer researchers. the other: DATs and protocols with millions at stake and staff paid to raise “concerns.”
nobody objects. everybody says “but.” the EIP dies of natural causes :)
dabdab.eth retweeted
A lot of people against changing issuance on Ethereum are using emotionally charged or fallacious arguments. If you want to be taken seriously, stick with the facts and appeal to everyone's reason. I'll be way more interested in what you want to convey.
Avoid these:
dabdab.eth retweeted
On the current curve solo stakers are priced out long before industry, that's the problem.
On the new curve, everyone is priced out together.
The pain is coming either way. The purpose is ensuring long term health for Ethereum by not favouring one group over another.
dabdab.eth retweeted
Now that I'm no longer at the EF, I can finally say this even though it'll upset some people.
The best founders I worked with all knew one thing, the foundation can't find PMF for you.
They had it mostly figured out, what to build, where they were weak, what they needed, and when they came to us it was always for specific, bounded asks.
Then there were the founders who thought their distribution problem would be solved by an @ethereum retweet on launch day, who genuinely expected the EF to somehow hand them PMF. (And yes, I offered that retweet myself all the time, plenty of great founders took it, the difference is they treated it as a bonus, not the plan.)
No foundation can make you successful. Building a good product, figuring out distribution, finding PMF, that's all on you.
I always gave the example of @StaniKulechov or @gdog97_. Stani built Aave through multiple cycles, pivoted from ETHLend, and kept shipping through thick and thin.
Guy built Ethena into one of the fastest growing protocols in DeFi without waiting for anyone's blessing. These people were going to build regardless of whether the EF supported them or even knew they existed, the support helped at the margins but it was never the reason they won, and the same can be said for the best founders in the Solana ecosystem.
Now, to be fair, the people who criticized the EF for not having founder support teams in the first place were right, that function needed to exist and for a long time it simply didn't. That criticism was valid and it's part of why things changed. But there's a difference between saying the EF should support builders and expecting the EF to make you successful, those are two very different asks and only one of them is reasonable.
I'll also admit that not everyone starts from the same place. Some founders are first timers, some come from outside crypto, some don't have the network or the capital that others do, and they genuinely need more help, which is fair. But there's a difference between needing help and outsourcing your success.
What should foundations do? The fundamentals, an intro for liquidity, an intro to an investor, programs like startup schools, guidance when teams hit walls etc etc.
What they can't do is build your startup or decide your fate. These are open and permissionless networks(at least ethereum is), and anyone can build whatever they want.
There's something Elon(not a big fan btw) says that I've found to be true here too, the loudest complainers are usually the worst people. The teams screaming about lack of support were almost never the ones a retweet would've saved. I am personally guilty of trying to help those teams in the first few months of my job rather than working with the real builders.
And to be clear, if you worked with me at the EF and we had good conversations, this isn't about you.
Lastly, I have to say, If your go to market strategy was a retweet from @ethereum, I have news for you....