Alex K

Layer Zero team is like that friend who orders the most expensive thing on the menu and when it's time to pay says, Ayo let's split

it's odd that anthropic has shared a smart contract exploitation eval (they are aware of the risks), but they didn't share mythos with any of the auditors or companies in the space (they want your money stolen).

What about @aave @LayerZero_Core and @KelpDAO ? How much are they putting since they fuck it up?

@ammalgam @aave @KelpDAO excellent work in difficult conditions

On April 18, an attacker minted $195M in unbacked rsETH and borrowed it straight out of @aave. The exploit lived upstream in @KelpDAO's bridge infrastructure - not in Aave's code. But locked markets don't care where the fault lives. We had $1.53M in exposure inside that locked market. Here's how we got it down to $35k in 32 hours 👇

Bankers watching you sign a 50-year house mortgage backed by a job that will be replaced by AI next year.

Those who say "crypto is dead" or "DeFi is dead" don't know what they are talking about. Banks never operated in such harsh conditions, and they always get saved by the Big Printer. As a result, their infra is horrifically bad. In DeFi, we have to make sure that our stuff is solid, and only the fittest survives

Circle has chosen the worst of both the centralized and decentralized worlds with this policy. Circle can freeze your USDC at any time, but won't use this power to defend its users from obvious hacks. USDC gives users the downsides of centralization without any of the benefits.

Leaving the hearing on @rstormsf's motion for acquittal, the only thing that was clear to me is that the government still does not understand the tech at issue. The lack of nuance, the misrepresentations about how a UI functions, and the equivocation between different technologies is really disheartening at this point in the case. The arguments SDNY advanced at this hearing on the application of Section 1960 are limitless and dangerous for all software developers. It was good to see the judge digging in and asking detailed questions, but there is no way to predict how she will rule on Storm's motion. Given that she was focused on dates for retrial at end of 2026, I think we can expect to see the case continue.

Cannot believe these clowns had the audacity to say “with strong protections for user rights and privacy” You freeze legit people You fight their unfreezes You do nothing about DPRK abusing people and YOUR systems Pull your fucking head out your fucking ass. You suck.

The cypherpunk dream has nowhere to go, except maybe Ethereum Our CEO @EvgenyGaevoy on why @ethereumfndn is ahead of the curve for the first time, and why @ethereum might be the only blockchain still publicly committing to its cypherpunk origins His opinions with @_choppingblock ↓

@hosseeb @banteg North Koreans will spend efforts on decompilation and stuff to steal billions, whitehats won't bother with the closed source code

oh god uhhhh like sushi, thorchain, yam, pickle, harvest, reclaim, swing, paid, naos, shezmu, qrolli, saffron, sifu, napier, harmony, blueberry, stabble, onering, elemental, divvy, la token, impermax, kira, cook, fantom, ankr, gamerse, metaplay, spice, beanstalk, deltaprime, magiccraft, hector, despace, depo, creamfi, shib, kumainu, starlink, yearn, floki and that’s just off the top of my head

It was a great @EthCC edition. Here’s my bittersweet take: - definite bear market vibes, fewer people, fewer tourists too - the bear market, combined with agentic AI, has been an extinction event for the crypto job market. Plenty of people are looking for new roles, but opportunities are scarce - hardly anyone cares about the talks anymore. People just point the replay to their agent and get a summary. I think the next edition should embrace that and build an agent track for speakers who did not make the official schedule, so they can record a video and publish a transcript. Done well, that might get more attention than an actual slot - a significant number of people and projects are out of money. Many pretend otherwise, but it shows. Better to be honest and transparent - Many are sitting in stables. They are still around, but they have lost faith in most tokens. The naive era of tokens without substance is dying, and that is for the best - the @ethereumfndn cares, it matters, and it is worth supporting. - There are still quite a few OGs around with drive and focus, and that is motivating - Many projects have dropped the act of pretending to care about decentralization and cypherpunk ethos. They think bending the knee to institutions will make up for their failure to reach PMF and profitability. It will not. - incumbent onchain lenders seem to believe their only path to survival is selling cheap liquidity to yield-bearing assets. It shows a lack of drive and conviction, and it will not work - it is better not to have a zero-sum mindset. Morpho learned that the hard way, and their wall-of-shame humiliation was deserved. It was hilarious. Looking forward to taking a sponsor slot for EthCC 10.

@0xngmi please make room/support for independent researchers! Not all of them have gone to work for companies! Many continue to work for themselves! And i love to use LlamaAI tbh!

tbh looking back at it we heavily underpriced LlamaAI We priced it at 50$/mo so that it would be available for retail But turns out that retail doesnt usually ask the complex questions where you'd need LlamaAI, so they dont have much use for it Instead almost all users are funds, analysts, researchers... who have much higher budgets for data but are much fewer We even had ppl who replaced 4 fig of data products with LlamaAI because its more useful, but we're only charging them 50/mo lol

There are two major bets I have made in my life. The 1st was quitting a job in 2017 with nothing to fall back on except a handful of zero-interest credit cards to learn to code. The 2nd was quitting my kush engineering job to work in DeFi the same week Terra blew. I walked away from a hefty retention bonus a few months before Microsoft bought my previous employer. I remember trying to recruit engineers to work with me. They all said startups were too risky. Funny, most of them have been laid off from their safe jobs. I kept building through an atrocious market, through commitments evaporated into the Luna black hole. I kept building when I didn't know if we would have enough money to finish. And I will keep building until someone forces me to stop. I bootstrapped. I lent out my own money. I deferred compensation. My team saw my sacrifices, and I was humbled that they followed my example. I put the first money into our vault launch, and I will take that same money and use it to bridge us to pmf. I tried and failed to find a balance with my personal life and relationships to prioritize success. I did this all as a solo founder with no one to meet me halfway. I believe in what I am building because this industry repeatedly shows the cost of its inadequacy. Working on a protocol that is designed to survive contact with reality has given me greater purpose and meaning because I know what I am building will have an incredible impact on users. I am not driven by vanity metrics, the industry has enough of that. What matters is creating an improved primitive that holds under stress, whether users remain protected when volatility spikes, and whether the design still works when narratives disappear. That is the standard we are building against.

9-5 jobs are comfort money. They give you just enough money to make it hard to leave. Then you buy a house, get a car, have kids. Then it's too much risk to leave the job. Next thing you know, you blink, and you're 60.

Crypto Winter reflections I've been in crypto since 2013, so quite a few years by now. I co-founded @Zcash, then moved on and co-founded @StarkWareLtd. In short, I've been here for a while. By now I've passed quite a few winters, so many, that I've stopped counting. I do notice that different winters have different flavor to them and I remember the last crypto winter. The one word I associate the most with the last crypto winter is SCAMs. Between the crash of Luna, 3Arrows Capital, and the cherry on the top – FTX, that winter was brought about by over-wild speculation and unethical conduct. In contrast, the current crypto winter feels very different to me. The phrase I use is TradFi Bear Hug. By this I mean that with the election of Trump and the warm embrace of regulators and large TradFi players of crypto, it seemed for a while that crypto found its destination: to become the new money, new financial rails, new infrastructure for doing all the stuff that Wall Street has been doing so far. But what actually happened is that this Bear Hug crowded out the true spirit of crypto, which is about Freedom of Economic Enterprise. This type of freedom means doing all sorts of wild, fun, crazy, new things that in TradFi world are reserved to the Fat Cats, and some of which are not even dared to be done by them. So, we find ourselves in a weird winter, marked by the smothering of the spirit of freedom by the big bear hug of TradFi. At the same time, there's a vacuum and lack of leadership. But change is on the way, I can smell it. It's Freedom.

codex helped me get some of my money i have long written off from an unverified contract. we have worked it out from my old notes, archive org snapshots of now deleted docs, and abi probing. pretty amazing, it has earned itself a few years of pro subscription with this move.