Ray

Proud of this team, proud of our fans !! Come on @ManUtd !! 💪🏽

Rusty Kaspa v1.1.0 is out. Faster syncing, less storage, and exchanges/wallets building on Kaspa just got a much easier time of it. The big one for integrators is a new API call that returns chain updates and transaction data together in one go, instead of having to juggle multiple parallel requests. If you've ever tried to integrate Kaspa and cursed at the DAG complexity, this is the fix. Node operators get up to 3x faster sync in the early header stage on some machines, plus lower disk usage. The stratum bridge also shipped as beta if you're running mining infrastructure. One heads-up - DB version bumped to 6. Upgrade is automatic, but you can't roll back to an older version without wiping the DB. github.com/kaspanet/rusty…

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

"It takes one big win to cancel all the losses. Just one win."

100%. realtime is speed, and 'realtime decentralization' achieves it in a decentralized manner. but that's just the easiest application to convey. a broader implication is the scope of actionability that you can delegate to the realtime engine. for instance, assume we want to launch a VM capable of expressing real-world events or live indices as tokens, a similar token standard to prediction markets: vance_wins_2028, BNB_chain_stalls, iran_war_ends, cavs_nba_ring (beyond pure betting, the latter has dramatic consequences for the Cleveland economy). now, with single-leader consensus, or when a select committee can choose the contents of a block before mining it, you need to wait many consensus rounds before relying on the reports that committee provides. in contrast, realtime decentralization allows you to sample the fair and honest majority report, in realtime. admittedly, some usecases don't require realtime since they represent slow markets. but the majority of liquidity is time-sensitive esp in large swings, and to protect your funds' value - to actually **store** its value - you need to connect it to the market in realtime. BTW, the advent of LLMs increases the trading intelligence of the long tail, which implies that demand for automated vault handling will only grow.

Kaspa is real-time bitcoin, solving scalability is great but not the core value prop. Real-time bitcoin means achieving in a few seconds the same security guarantees that nakamoto consensus / bitcoin achieves after an hour; decentralizing each consensus round rather than chain quality achieved through a coarse aggregate of rounds. A clean definition anchor for real-time decentralization (RTD): The ability to sample the honest majority in real-time. (Note that even fast leaderless VRF-based proof-of-stake cant sample honestly bc the selected nodes get to choose the content of their blocks after they've been selected; pos=select then write, pow=write then select) -- RTD affects: txn confirmation, censorship resistance, secure oracle finality, MEV resistance. Eg censorship resistance, bitcoin is the most censorship resistant chain, but if 60% of the miners are censoring you (point in reference: OFAC abiding tornado censoring eth miners), your txn will pend for 30-40 minutes. For shady business payments that's not prohibitive, but for a real economy, for an asset aspiring to be at least a king of collateral even if not an MoE, this is unacceptable, esp under economic stress. Beyond censorship, all things finance benefit tremendously from pow density, from sampling the majority in real-time in a secure and honest manner. I wont get into MEV resistance now, but having a "conscious" stream of oracle attestations (not price oracles) finalized in real-time qualitatively upgrades the ability to encode informed risk, collateral, liquidity management, which is the lifeblood of defi. In context of conf times, increasing from 1 to 10bps saturates the latency optimization. But for pow density we need dozens of blocks per second, with the endgame of 100 bps: Under 10bps a 37% attacker can fake the majority signal with probability 12%. With 100bps this drops to 0.3%. Today Kaspa can't accelerate to >10bps w/o harming conf times, but DAGKNIGHT will be implemented hopefully by Q3 at least on testnet, by which we will push for 25-40bps. The cherry on top: RTD also implies netsplit resistance, as per the partial synchrony framework. WWIII cyberwar resistance. Hypothetically speaking ofc. (elaborated- hashdag.medium.com/in-which-it-wa…)

I’m going to @TosinOlugbenga’s upcoming Space. Will you join too? twitter.com/i/spaces/1lPKq…

@groddofcrypto @RefCryptLabs ❤️

@RefCryptLabs @Raymond_Ref 🫶

Happy Valentine’s Day 💕 From all of us at REFCRYPTLABS, thank you for being part of our journey 🌹appreciates your support today and always 💫

The Fall-Off

Exactly

🎁🎄 Merry Christmas!! 🎄🎁

shMON points went live last week, so I decided to experiment a bit beyond just staking my little playbook: I funded a separate wallet and bought about 20k MON purely for this, no degen pool, just to see how far shMON can actually be pushed when it’s used properly first thing I did was simple I staked roughly 80% of the MON on @0xFastLane to get shMON, then instead of letting it sit, I split the shMON into different paths to see how it behaves once it starts doing real work For now I've deployed shMON across three places: Curvance Curve and Euler today I’ll only talk about @Curvance and I’ll continue with the rest tomorrow on Curvance, I deposited about 70% of my shMON and used it as collaterall, I borrowed wMON against it and that unlocked a 2x multiplier on points my original shMON didn't stopped earning its base yield and points, it was as productive at the same time I didn’t stop there I took part of the borrowed wMON, unwrapped it to MON on uniswap, restaked it again on FastLane to mint more shMON, and started another loop on Curvance that eventually flowed into Curve I’ll talk about what I did on Curve tomorrow and how that part works. from just this Curvance loop, I earned additional points on top of shMon staking, plus on-chain activity on Curvance itself in case of future drops shMON is called “super holistic” for a reason, and staking is just the starting point

@Coinvo Fair

BREAKING: Hyperliquid says all employees, contractors and team personnel are banned from trading the $HYPE token.

You only feel alive in battle. Tonight’s war will be an important memory. Watch it live: cobratate.com/fightnight

The replies here are depressing. Not the initiative by Wolfie, which is very nice of him, but the comments mocking @cryptok777 for asking for some compensation after running the website for the Kaspa community out of his own pocket for three years. This is far from being the first instance of a contributing community member ostracized for trying to earn compensation for their work. I'm sure @asaefstroem will do a fantastic job, as I've heard he has done for Sparkle/vProgs. The point here is not to undermine him or his undertaking. The point is that a project whose community disparages community funding cannot call itself a "community project". Even if developers can grow from the community, once they need resources that go beyond uplifting tweets, their only recourse is either secure funding from a very small group of individuals, work indefinitely out of their own pocket (even if their undertaking has no immediate profit horizon, e.g. a block explorer, or a book), or wither. History shows that turning to the community for funding hasn't been an option for more than a year now. Not only is the community reluctant to support, but it is actively hostile against such attempts. (Simple yet annoying example: some people "called me out" for receiving 1Mkas from the Rust fund so I "shouldn't be complaining". But the truth is that I contributed 1.5Mkas to that same fund during the crowdfunding phase. I got less back than I put in. I don't care, I didn't put in that Kas to make a direct profit, I did it to contribute to the development. But this is still somehow used against me when I mention that my decision to dedicate so much time and effort to Kaspa resulted in an overall *huge* net loss for me personally.) Kaspa has a community and Kaspa has a project. But that is not enough to call it a "community project". As long as the community doesn't help carry the project, they cannot take credit for the project. Every time you call it a "community project" you just hoard credit from people who worked hard with no meaningful support from that same community. This isn't even a criticism, just am observation. And it should be trivial for anyone following the plot. The Kaspa community offers zero support for devs who want to take risks, which means "the community" has failed it's end in the social contract called a "community project". This doesn't mean Kaspa is doomed, or that it has failed as a project. It just means it's time to grow up of this narrative and face the reality of the situation: the Kaspa community delegated the task of taking care of contributors to a narrow selection of wealthy individuals, and developed a social norm where asking the community for funding (or even appreciation) is considered distasteful and should be avoided. In that, the community relinquished any rights to claim that they are supporting the project. It is as simple as that. The good news is that this fate is not set in stone. You want Kaspa to be a community project? Put your money where your mouth is. Like I did, like cryptok did, like many others did (and got fuckall in return). There are a million things you can do. For example, set up a community funded grants program. If it is really a "community project", such a fund should be formidable enough to support a lot of currently starving ecosystem endeavors. You want to be a "social movement"? Then fucking move. You don't feel it's your responsibility? That's fine. It's your prerogative to do whatever you want with your resources, even if you made them by being an early Kaspa contributor. But then you don't get to call Kaspa a "community project".

Much respect to @cryptok777 for creating and maintaining kas.fyi. It has been an important service to the community, and that effort does not go unnoticed. He is fully entitled to run it however he chooses. The product and the code are his. We place no blame at all and understand his decision completely. Thank you for the time, energy, and value you’ve contributed. We wish you nothing but success in whatever comes next, and we wish kasfyi.io the very best going forward.

We no longer have any active servers in France and are continuing the process of leaving OVH. We'll be rotating our TLS keys and Let's Encrypt account keys pinned via accounturi. DNSSEC keys may also be rotated. Our backups are encrypted and can remain on OVH for now. Our App Store verifies the app store metadata with a cryptographic signature and downgrade protection along with verification of the packages. Android's package manager also has another layer of signature verification and downgrade protection. Our System Updater verifies updates with a cryptographic signature and downgrade protection along with another layer of both in update_engine and a third layer of both via verified boot. Signing channel release channel names is planned too. Our update mirrors are currently hosted on sponsored servers from ReliableSite (Los Angeles, Miami) and Tempest (London). London is a temporary location due to an emergency move from a provider which left the dedicated server business and will move. More sponsored update mirrors are coming. Our ns1 anycast network is on Vultr and our ns2 anycast network is on BuyVM since both support BGP for announcing our own IP space. We're moving our main website/network servers used for default OS connections to a mix of Vultr+BuyVM locations. We have 5 servers in Canada with OVH with more than static content and basic network services: email, Matrix, discussion forum, Mastodon and attestation. Our plan is to move these to Netcup root servers or a similar provider short term and then colocated servers in Toronto long term. France isn't a safe country for open source privacy projects. They expect backdoors in encryption and for device access too. Secure devices and services are not going to be allowed. We don't feel safe using OVH for even a static website with servers in Canada/US via their Canada/US subsidiaries. We were likely going to be able to release experimental Pixel 10 support very soon and it's getting disrupted. The attacks on our team with ongoing libel and harassment have escalated, raids on our chat rooms have escalated and more. It's rough right now and support is appreciated.

In your 20s, you’ll meet a crypto guy who tells you to quit your job and “just trade perps” It’s very important that you run him over with your car.