swifzui

The AI industry started raising an insane amount of money around 2016–2017, but it has really been trending since ChatGPT became public 5–6 years later. Startups were raising at crazy high valuations because demand was way higher than supply. The robotics industry is basically what the AI industry was 10 years ago. Infinite demand, with very, very low supply. Companies are raising at billion-dollar valuations for products that aren’t even working, because VCs are betting on the next "Nvidia of robotics." The current 500M–1B startup could be worth 1T tomorrow. But robotics and crypto are two industries that can’t really connect: - robotics is very, very expensive, 50–100M of funding is usually necessary to start building, - robotics salaries are insanely high. I would say a very good dev gets paid at least $200–300K yearly, while the crypto industry is willing to pay a maximum of $70–80K, so their interests are very low, - retention time is very low. Shipping takes years, most startups fail, and unfortunately failure isn’t something Web3 wants to hear (disillusioned industry). CT is always late, and it’s only when robots start replacing humans that people will really begin digging into the industry, while most robotics startups will already be 20–30x the valuation they are today. Only a few teams are taking the risk of associating themselves with this "baby" narrative. $CODEC, for example, is building real-time execution infrastructure for AI agents and robotics (met the founder IRL, very solid, plus Theo (@0xdetweiler) is advising them). But have you ever seen a crypto project building physical robots? No, it’s too expensive and complicated. But for the past two months I’ve been monitoring Small Thing (@the_small_thing) as THE potential big winner (it was basically my only holding on Fomo before I added 50k$). What are they building? Autonomous, physical robots that are cleaning the oceans. IDGAF about ecology, but I care about the project’s upside. - governments/politics: leftist cities or countries are willing to clean the sea. These kinds of contracts are usually long-term (10–20+ years) because they’re hard to cancel. Good thing, Small Thing is officially backed by a city : x.com/the_small_thin… - They should release/show their final product in a few days or weeks. If they do and don’t disappoint, they’ll officially be the first crypto project building physical robots. (Yes, the 1st one) - Token utilities haven’t been revealed yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if the token allows discounts to buy the robots or something similar, which means cities or governments might buy the token. (you get it ? ^^) - Robotics is not trending yet, so the potential for it to become the next meta is at its peak. $CODEC went over 40M while people didn’t even understand what it was doing, they were just bidding the narrative. - The project is legit. They onboarded very strong advisors and are teasing more (Xris (@xrisborg) from SwissBorg, Mo Ezeldin (@Mo_Ezz14) from Animoca Brands, and Rodolphe Steffan (@RodolpheSteffan) a well-known French trader). - Virtuals (@virtuals_io) needs a runner, and what’s better than pushing a whole new narrative? They’re already trying to integrate robotics (for example with Xmaquina (@xmaquina )). Mark my words, I won’t sell a single token I bought on FOMO before 50M FDV. 20x from here. After digging into the whole thing and fully understanding the vision, I reached out to Jerome Mercier (@djedjex) the founder, and asked if I could advise them and help. I’m now officially an advisor. I’d rather be transparent about this than have people accuse me of shilling my own project or whatever. Get your own conviction, study the meta, don’t follow me blindly on this, and believe in something. dexscreener.com/base/0x01e15e0…

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.