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BREAKING: Aztec just shipped the Ignition Chain, the first fully decentralized L2 on Ethereum. This launches the decentralized consensus layer that powers the Aztec Network. ignition.aztec.network 🧵

DAOhaus is @base approved! Speedball is a winner in the Onchain Summer Buildathon Trading track and Cookie Jar made the list in the Unplugged track base.mirror.xyz/p_A3ZxaBUEcpWw…

Weekend #longreads: How governments around the world are using facial recognition technology to crack down on dissent restofworld.org/2024/facial-re…

🔐🌐 Introducing Safe Crosschain! You can now control your Safes on any chain using just your main Safe! Powered by storage proofs and Hashi's block header propagation. Check out github.com/crosschain-all… for details!

Here are my predictions for 2024 👇 Ethereum Loses Narrative Dominance Remember when we used to say that bitcoin was boomer tech? yeah, well now it’s Ethereum’s turn. Expensive, slow and will complete its roadmap when Vitalik is 176 years old. The kids will talk about how Solana is super fast and has a phone and bonk. The Bankless lads will keep talking about other blockchains. It doesn’t pump like the others. You get the idea. Consumer App Renaissance Imagine this. Things that people want to pay for. It’s crazy I know. Now we have more blockspace than atoms in the universe it’s time to actually make something for “them”. You know.. those people “out there”. The “normies”. Consumer apps will become a hype narrative like it’s some genius idea. The Dark Forest Gets Darker Maybe it’s written in the universe that everything trends towards Citadel front running the plebs, like an economic law of thermodynamics or something. We’re going beyond private mempools, to private oracles, to centralised latency battles and if you forget to change those slippage settings you’re full rugged. Welcome to crypto. The regulators will get to MEV this year. More blocks will be censored. Lido starts using hard power. Shadow chains. People will steal stolen money to make pennies. The dark forest gets darker. Protocol Gating We’re going to start seeing a lot more permissioned dApps this year and not just at the front ends. Pick up an SBT pass that jurisdictionally nuances your access on the blockchain. This is the fork in the road, and that direction is Web3. The other is crypto. Contenders Rise This year will be about the rise of the contender L1. Solana has got everyone throthy again, but at the moment it’s low fee rugs that’s on offer and not much else. The chains that builds a vibrant ecosystem of both devs and retail investors holding the native asset to use to buy things and use apps will win, a surprisingly difficult challenge. The Public Goods Debate Heats Up As networks realise that the way to generate network adoption is to actually nucleate that growth by deftly turning their infinite money printers towards those who are mad enough to thinking about setting up shop on their networks. In network theory terms we need to generate lots of small-worlds, tightly bounded groups that increase network clustering coefficients, which bootstrap network effects. Basically, it’s gonna come down to funding DAOs. Some networks will get this, some will pump their treasury back into VCs pockets or just give it to degens for a short lived pump. Guess which one’s win in the end. The Sybil War Continues As gamified governance stuff starts to be used more extensively for smashing money into the hands of people all over the world, the sybil armies will grow. Of course, this means worldcoin will be in the wings promising to chase Sybil away with ultra dystopia, but it literally only works if everyone in the world has been to an orb and no one leaves the sybil door open. It’s also not necessary, and we’ll see some non-orb based actually scalable approaches to sybil resistance through the emergence of pseudonymous decentralised identity this year. Collective Intelligence I will fight for this narrative single handedly if necessary, but the tools we have here for social consensus (think curatorial DAO voting, TCRs) and advancements in prediction markets will demonstrate genuine emergent self ordering and collective decision making without a stitch of authoritarian governance. First signs this year. M*tam*sk starts losing market share The amount of money that has gone into wallets is insane. One of them is going to start doing it so much better than MM. A good wallet should basically disappear, but something rather radical needs to happen to make it actually palatable for real humans. Might be something with AI, might be some account abstraction wizardry, might be a wallet natively built for the cross-chain world. I don’t know what it is, but the MM UX is waiting to get 10X bettered. Chain Abstraction On a similar tip, NEAR is one of those contenders I think will do very well this cycle. Their “chain abstraction” thesis is right on the money as an emphasis to focus on improving crypto UX and pushing the chain aesthetic to transparent. We’ll see some onboarding flows this year that funnel normies into apps with great efficiency and we’ll see some web2 competitive DAU stats and it will be where the blockchains have disappeared. Reputation systems I’ve been saying this for YEARS, but I do think it’s finally gonna happen this year. We’ll start seeing experiments in non-financial governance, power shaping activities in DAOs and subDAOs, dynamic memberships and responsibility architectures (see @hatsprotocol). Call them points if you want, to me they’re reputation factors and yes they (can) mean future tokens. Be careful with them promises. The year of crypto and AI When the VCs realise that a token allows them to monetise the GPT wrappers they’ve invested in at silly valuations, they’ll be riding their portco’s hard to YOLO a shitcoin into the market. And it will work. The degen mind needs a “meta” to grab on to and basically any mention of AI at the moment is enough to get them horny for number go up. This will be capitalised on. A lot. Most of the crypto AI fodder will be terrible cash grabs, but some of it, particularly at the AI governance end will be very interesting indeed. We’ll see AI agents executing crypto transactions frequently by the end of the year. SOL sell pressure At some point this year the FTX estate are going to start liquidating that $6bn of SOL into the market, and then the realisation that there’s 8 years of SBF’s bags to relentlessly dump into the market will sink in. The degens will move onto the next fast chain to dodge rugs on, unless something very special happens on there, which it could. An entire L2 will rug It’s either fancy Zk tech gone wrong, some egregiously weak security model at a bridge, or it’s just a multi-sig powered database run by scoundrels. A big one is going down and it’s probably going to pay for a Kim Jong rocket, not great. Blast gets a slap The most trusted centralised set up imaginable with literal promises of exponential gains and $800m of degen funds under irreversible custodial control, the absolute mad bastards. They look like geniuses at the moment, but they can’t get away with it… can they? Hyperdegeneracy If they do, we get more of this. Lots more. Regulators have dropped every ban hammer they’ve got and the impact on everything but a few isolated projects has been basically nil. There is literally no known force that can stop a group of anonymous degens from launching a shitcoin rug and the lack of “regulatory clarity” means the only people brave enough to build here are the ideologically committed and the outlaws. Ironically, the state protecc machinery just makes more rugs and this cycle is going to outdo the last on unadulterated hyperdegeneracy, thanks Gary. Freaky bonding curves The friend tech bonding curve burned out predictably quickly and basically just added pure ponzi to chat groups, but the magic was there and the magic was a bonding curve. This year we’ll see all sorts of mathematical curves hit the blockchain, most of them will just dial up the ponzi of course, but some will put the token curated registry back in the game and we might even see one that does something special. Decentralised curation is a way bigger deal than people are ready to accept yet. DAOs Organise with your friends has been a central driver of internet adoption since day dot and sadly this now all takes place on centralised web2.0 hellscapes set to MAX EXTRACT. People (yes real people) are going to start doing that in decentralised sovereign spaces, with resources and with an autonomy that’s realised progressively as we collectively hone in the practices for decentralised governance and the tech pushes further organisational activities on chain. DAOs are the means by which anyone can set up a crypto project and it is precisely that, which kicks the growth for the whole industry to the next level. You might not believe it yet, but DAOs are the killer app for taking crypto to normies. Mark my words. VCs will be apeing into DAO tooling again by the end of the year. Blockchain Geopolitics I don’t think there’s a rational person left on the planet that thinks crypto “is just going to go away” now. So what does that mean? It means the game theory gets to planetary scale. The hegemons will rattle their sabres, the bureaucrats will make their PDFs, the Central Banks will launch their tyranny tokens, but crypto is gonna crypto and there’s not much you can do about it. It comes down to this. It’s NOT IF, BUT WHEN you’re gonna play and those who get in early win. It’s quite simple really. Of course doing it at the moment means angering the global world order and that’s where the geopolitics comes in. This is a vast opportunity for some countries and this year some high quality jurisdictions will go explicitly pro crypto and make some big moves. And by “pro crypto” I don’t mean just say it, DO IT - I’m looking at you @RishiSunak Election Insanity This year is going to be gross. The UK and the US have imminent elections and that means electioneering dialled up to post-truth AI powered dystopia complete with gibbering geriatrics and lots of chat about war. Crypto is going to feature heavily as politicians are forced to state their stance on “bitcoin and cryptocurrencies”. They will pick a side (of course) and it will become a hot button topic. Trump is on his third NFT rug now. Let that sink in. It’s a Bull Market We’re out of goblin town. It’s going to get silly. It’s going to get degen. You’ll think it’s all over (again), but it won’t be, because it’s a bull market BABY. We are so back! That means number go up regardless of quality. It means we’ve learned nothing. It means hyperdegeneracy and JPEG cash grabs. It means NPCs will rage and cry. It means every bitcoin transaction burns a thousand Olympic swimming pools. It means YouTubers will rug you. It means.. oh god I can’t even imagine how crazy it’s going to get. Have fun. Happy New Year 🎉 And a bonus one Bitcoin will break All Time High We will absolutely SMASH through $69k and begin our journey to $420k. ETF or no, it is written. 😘