Mars Cheng

the most successful traditional VCs are those who formerly built traditional companies themselves they're long-term thinkers who have done the work themselves on the other hand, most crypto VCs have never actually built or operated a crypto-native business themselves and have the time horizon of a goldfish they outsource their thinking and frequently apply weird web2 analogies to things that don't make sense they have *not* done the work required to advise crypto-native founders this is made worse by the liquidity of crypto tokens blurring all sorts of incentives — it's basically a popularity contest in high school all that is to say, if you're a founder, be very careful about this and how you structure your cap table there's a reason why glorified swing traders or commodity traders aren't on the boards of successful web1/web2 companies

2023, oh, what a ride in the world of DeFi! 🫠 USDC de-pegging worked a scene, causing SVB to feel a painful lean, into bankruptcy of $209 billion it did sink. 😈 Masking as a validator did the "low-carb-crusader," unbundling, stealing $20 million from sandwich bots, no later.

MEV searchers typically send bundles to the builder's private RPC, keeping them hidden from others. But when searcher-builder integration comes into play, it unleashes some 🤖 game-changing advantages, illustrated in the above examples. Discover more in our thread 👇

Today, ~15% of Ethereum Txs are landed thru Private Mempools. Cross-checking txs seen by public mempools, we are able to observe the trend of Ethereum txs moving towards private channels over time - thru metrics across the Tx Settlement Stack on Ethereum. 👀 🧵👇

Great post. The MEV centralization part is a very overlooked area as David mentioned. It is also MUCH harder problem to solve, even beyond the disagreement if it is even a problem at all. There is a smaller set of very profit motivated actors and entities in an area of crypto (MEV) that much fewer people understand. At least in general Ethereum protocol disagreements there are generally straightforward ways to explain to a non-dev crypto user what is going on. It's not impossible and there are a very limited amount of people in the MEV space who can accomplish this. The question is will their time be pulled in different directions due to the lack of coordination resources available for many of the other hard problems in MEV. I'm still hopeful 🙂