krak/

I often get asked why I work at @LayerZero_Labs. To me, LayerZero is the most scalable, secure, and efficient cross-chain smart contract protocol currently available. First some context. Before LayerZero, to send anything to a new chain, most dApps used some type of monolithic bridge: - Centralized Provider: a centralized entity, manually delivering messages to the destination chain. - Collection of Signers: a collection of different signers which verify the message before delivering. - Middlechain Bridge: a blockchain which routes all messages through the hub chain, inheriting the security of the middlechain. (Note: I'll define each of these "security mechanisms" as verifier networks). While each verifier network came with trade-offs, all suffered from one common problem: a single verifier network determined which messages would be delivered on the destination chain. If that security ever failed, due to centralization, a backdoor in the signer software, the middlechain lacking node client diversity, or upgradeable contracts, every application built on top of that verifier network suddenly had their security fail too. No matter which verifier network you pick, the reality is that you now depend entirely on that sole network to verify your messages correctly. Being locked into a single verifier network means that in the best case, your application needs to fully redeploy to avoid being exposed to a security vulnerability. In the worst case, not just your application, but every application and user interacting with that verifier network faces cataclysmic losses (source: the rekt leaderboard and the socket hack just a few months ago). How does LayerZero solve this? LayerZero is an immutable, censorship-resistant, and permissionless smart contract protocol that enables anyone on a blockchain to send, verify, and execute messages on a supported destination network. Reason 1: Immutable Contracts To send and receive messages on a target blockchain, a non-upgradeable LayerZero Endpoint contract must be deployed to that chain. This Endpoint contract acts as the entry and exit point for the protocol, enabling applications and users to: - Send messages from the source blockchain (Endpoint.send). - Configure application security (Endpoint.setConfig). - Configure execution settings (Endpoint.setConfig). - Quote cross-chain transaction gas costs (Endpoint.quote). - Receive messages on the destination chain (Endpoint.lzReceive). - Debug and retry failed messages (Endpoint.lzReceive). and a handful of other utilities. The LayerZero Endpoint provides users a predictable, immutable interface for sending arbitrary data, external function calls, and tokens. Anytime you need to send or receive messages, all you need to do is interact with the LayerZero Endpoint contract on that chain. Reason 2: Modular Security LayerZero allows applications to configure any number and type of decentralized verifier networks (DVNs) to verify their cross-chain messages. Instead of every application depending on the same verifier network, each application now has a unique verifier configuration called a Security Stack, allowing developers to maintain access controls on arguably the most important part of their application. New verifier networks can be added at anytime using these access controls, future-proofing cross-chain applications to the latest and greatest verification techniques (for example, @PolyhedraZK's zkLightClient). This means that dApps don't need to accept a one-size-fits-all model for cross-chain messaging, and instead actually can control how messages are verified on the destination chain. Teams are starting to realize that this means they can build omnichain dApps with variable security based on their use cases, message volume, domains, etc. In terms of cross-chain messaging, it's a new frontier for devs to explore. Reason 3: Permissionless Execution Because anyone can interact with the LayerZero Endpoint on the destination chain, LayerZero offers permissionless message execution. Once a message has been verified by an application's chosen decentralized verifier networks (DVNs), that message can be executed by calling the Endpoint's lzReceive method. In most cases, this execution is done automatically by an application's configured Executor, a production asset run in the ecosystem which automatically delivers messages after verification. This Executor fully abstracts gas on the destination chain, allowing users to pay for gas only using the source chain's gas token, and add specific execution options for the cross-chain message. Anyone can develop and run their own Executor, and should a configured Executor ever disappear, these messages can still be permissionlessly executed at anytime. The Big Picture When LayerZero talks about the idea of an omnichain application, we refer to this idea where your smart contracts can control how their messages are sent, verified, and executed on any blockchain in the network. It's a fundamentally better system, where developers don't have to hand the keys away to the most critical component of their decentralized application. Instead, use a smart contract protocol that gives you an easy, secure, and future-proof interface to send anything between blockchains. Want to get started? Head to our docs (link in bio), or leave a comment / DM! And remember, LayerZero is permissionless, censorship-resistant, and immutable.

Rate my current setup I just vibe coding and writing tweets

@kramnotmark the quant is quanting

Global permisisonless markets prove to be too attractive to everyone: fast, cheap, programmable, borderless, 24/7, and internet-native. The convergence of crypto and finance has moved a decade ahead of schedule in just the last month.

@vibhu @naruto11eth devastating

@naruto11eth I read this thinking about how you lost 6 games of pickleball in a row to me on Wednesday

i actually dislike the statement when people say: "your only competition is you. try to be better only than yourself" no fck you dude. everyone who is building in the same space as i am is my competition. everyone who is doing remotely what i am doing is my competition. because they are my competition, i need to be better than them, no matter what. it is really live or die. if i cant be stronger against them, outcompete them, and win, then it doenst mean shit if im better than myself from yesterday or not. my win against myself from yesterday means so much less as compared to my win against top 20 people i admire. iykyk

The big difference between previous "institutional adoption" of blockchains and Zero: At 2M TPS, companies can start replatforming all business operations to the chain itself. Previously, companies were only slicing small portions of biz ops (like tokenizing equities or batch settlement). Highly recommend listening to the DTCC and ICE Markets portion of this conversation.

@0xLamps @LayerZero_Core 👑

Last week I wrapped up my time with the wonderful @LayerZero_Core team. I have spent the last 3 years working tirelessly with the smartest people I’ve ever met, building something I am truly passionate about. I am incredibly proud of everything we did for Stargate, and LayerZero more recently. Ultimately being an intimate part of ~80 chain launches over the last couple years has taken a toll on me & it’s time to touch grass for a bit. The bridge is home & Stargate is left in the safest of hands, LayerZero will continue dominating interop, and Zero will blow your minds. To be very explicit - LZ, and Zero, will win and my belief in the technology and the team is at an all time high. Through it all, I could not be more grateful for the opportunity and learnings. A true honour. Ad Astra.

Why Zero? A conversation with @citsecurities, @The_DTCC, and @ICE_Markets. Speakers: - Dan Doney, CTO of DTCC Digital Assets - Marcin Sablik, Partner at Citadel Securities - Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives at Intercontinental Exchange

Worth chatting with Kunal if you’re not up to date on LayerZero and what’s coming in the next few months. Impossible not to finish the conversation bullish $ZRO once you see the full picture

Unrequested (long) late night USDT0 story: One of the first chains to hear the @USDT0_to pitch was a certain L1. Let’s call it X. My co-founders and I are DeFi-native, and at the time we were close to people operating the X Foundation. Our mentors were skeptical. We genuinely believed in the team. X had strong backing from early DeFi builders and had just gone through a rebrand + upgrade that felt significant in that cycle. In our minds, X was the ideal launch partner. We pulled every favor we could and even had people at Tether who saw the potential in what we were building advocate for us in the telegram chats with X management. Eventually, we got on a call with X’s leadership, a team that had been trying to get USDT on their chain for almost two years. We prepare for 2 days as if it was the most important thing ever. The call starts. I begin what is still, to this day, my go-to USDT0 pitch. Less than 90 seconds in, a person in their management team lies down on his sofa WITH HIS CAMERA ON and starts doing something else on his MacBook, clearly not listening to our value proposition. Two minutes later, he interrupts me, laughs, and dismisses us. He tells us they are one of the best L1s in the world, that they already work with other stablecoins, and that they have no interest in what we are building. He says our product will never get traction and that the status quo is perfectly fine. That’s what they are interested in. At the time, it was frustrating. In hindsight, it was clarifying. A few months later, we met the @inkonchain / @krakenfx team, and what we expected to be a difficult conversation turned into an obvious one. We launched USDT0 there, and traction started to build. Then came the @arbitrum upgrade. Tether entrusted us with ownership of the contract, 1.8B USDT. We went from about 100M TVL to over 2B, and suddenly the market understood what we were trying to do. From there, we kept shipping. Berachain, Sei, Hyperliquid, Flare, Polygon, Corn, and more. Daily volume moved into the 10 to 15M range, then kept growing. What mattered most was that partners started using USDT0 because it solved a real operational problem, not because of narratives, but because of utility. A few months later, I heard that X tried to work with a USDT0 copycat. That effort failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, USDT0 kept growing thanks to some new and exciting chains. Plasma, Mantle, Stable, Conflux, Morph, MegaETH, and more. Today, X isn’t where it once was. The DeFi Builders attention has moved elsewhere, and CT’s tone toward its leadership and communications has become more critical. The governance token is in a though spot, like most others in his market. Today, USDT0 moves about 300M USDT per day across 25 chains. It is the de facto expansion strategy for Tether assets and sits at 4.4B plus TVL. It is the fastest growing cross chain infrastructure in the world. Sometimes, getting laughed out of a room is the best thing that can happen to your project. If you are building something with real utility, something that improves the status quo and solves an actual problem, you cannot give up just because short-sighted people do not see it. Prove them wrong.

@peaq @LayerZero_Core @UnitreeRobotics @openclaw love the demo!

Introducing peaq Escrow: Turn your robots & machines into ERC-8004 compatible omnichain actors, powered by @LayerZero_Core. Showcased with @UnitreeRobotics + @OpenClaw: Watch a Unitree robot make a cross-chain escrow deal with a drone.

In the week since we announced Zero, there has been a lot of speculation about ZRO’s role in Zero and on ZRO’s tokenomics. Let’s clear that up. There will be no new token for Zero. ZRO is the only asset. • ZRO will be the staking asset within Zero • ZRO will be the gas asset within Zero • All excess fees generated through priority fee (state contention) will flow through to ZRO • All excess fees generated through tips/MEV will flow through to ZRO • All trading fees from the markets zone will flow through to ZRO • All payment fees from the payment zone will flow through to ZRO • Once the fee switch is turned on within LayerZero every LZ Message will have a fee that goes to ZRO. ZRO is the only asset and all economic value generated by Zero, LayerZero, and Stargate goes directly to ZRO. Additionally, total institutional purchases, buyouts of early investors, and LayerZero buybacks now total to 19.77% of the total token supply with the majority of this being the buyout of upcoming unlocks and early investors. Most public dashboards don’t account for this, and overstate the pressure from upcoming unlocks by almost 2x. We're building Zero with an ambitious goal: to provide permissionless infrastructure for a better world. We'll see you at mainnet this fall.

Base is moving off a shared OP Stack model toward a unified, Base-operated stack. More upgrade control More independence Unclear impact on the 118M OP token agreement Is this maturity or stack fragmentation? x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

As the industry moves towards the tokenization of everything, Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology (FCAT®) is well-suited to help secure assets moving across chains. The FCAT DVN is now live and already verifying value movement going between chains for @OndoFinance.

One of the biggest unlocks using OpenClaw is asking it to give you insights about yourself and your workflows. This validates multiple aspects. Firstly it shows if the agent fully grasped what you expected, secondly it can give you insights about things you previously have not been aware of Just tell it to: 'Give me a brutally honest summary of what you learned about me today: (1) what I expect from you, (2) how I actually work, (3) my blind spots/bottlenecks, and (4) what you’ll change next to serve me better.'

excited to share that I've joined the @LayerZero_Core devrel team ! I'll be working alongside @unkrakable @0xfabs @0xjooohn @dotslashnaz @10xKelly @caleb_banister and many other great people I'm still getting to know.

@PrimordialAA Excited to share the world computer!

The last week has been completely incredible. Will be writing a lot more in the coming week(s) and going deeper on a lot of the topics people still have open questions on. Countdown to mainnet is in full swing, so much to do 💪

First of all, thank you! However, you and I both know hash-based SNARKs using Reed-Solomon codes just don’t scale linearly across GPUs. There’s a hard stop because the NTT requires constant cross-GPU communication the moment you spread the workload. Ours can. Plus, last I saw, Airbender performance was only with ~80 bits of security, which obviously isn’t something that could ever be rolled into production. So while existing proof generation numbers may be getting closer, they are not viable for real-world workloads without massively sacrificing security.

The Ethereum 5-year roadmap is fairly vague, so we base our high-level understanding on this post: @oK3in1lRQ7-pt7b3j8nQxg/Hk9KBHsGgg" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">hackmd.io/@oK3in1lRQ7-pt… In short, Zero combines: 1. The real security of Ethereum's L1 zkEVM roadmap. 2. The horizontal performance scaling of the L2 roadmap. 3. Bespoke Atomicity Zones (STF diversity) 4. Trustless Native Interop between Atomicity Zones. 5. Asymmetric latency (Ultra low latency in one Zone and multi second latency in another) ZK Currently Ethereum has not picked a zkVM to enshrine or stated whether or not it will be one or many zkVMs. They are not building any inhouse at the EF that I’m aware of and are dependent on external teams. We evaluated all zkVM tech and chose the Jolt research project as our foundation because it (1) actually scales linearly with additional GPUs, and (2) with future protocol and system optimizations (e.g., lattices, GPU kernel optimizations) the unit economics will vastly outpace all other zkVMs. We built a inhouse ZK team made up of world class cryptographers, ASIC designers, and GPU developers to make Jolt Pro. Jolt Pro will scale to a THz cluster and will be able to support real time proving for our high performance needs. Statelessness Zero implements something similar to weak statelessness. You can find more context here, along with a brief explanation of why Block Producers aren't a concern for centralization: We do not have strong statelessness (where the beacon chain state is just 32 bytes). That would require many beacon chain messages to include large plaintexts with opening proofs. However, our settlement layer architecture is designed from the ground up for weak statelessness. Architectural Differences In the Ethereum roadmap, they loosely claim to bifurcate the network into builders and attestor/includers to create enshrined shards. This is likely the parallel between Zero and "zk-Ethereum." Our Block Producer has a similar role to a builder, and settlement layer validators do the job of attestor/includer. However, there are still key architectural differences: - Block Production: Our Block Producer is allowed to produce blocks, whereas the builder is not. Our settlement layer design allows the Block Producer to give ultra low-latency preconfirmations during periods of settlement layer asynchrony without introducing additional trust assumptions. This design enables determinism; preconfirmed transactions won't be "reorged out" unless network conditions remain bad for an unrealistically long time. - Validator Load: Our beacon chain essentially only runs consensus. Each validator stores only the minimum set of information to efficiently perform consensus. Proof of Stake and our enshrined governance are moved into the System Zone. This allows our beacon chain validators to achieve what Ethereum refers to as weak statelessness. - Zones and Interop: Our architecture is designed to scale to multiple unique Zones with universal interop. To our knowledge, Ethereum does not have a clear roadmap for sharding the L1 into multiple asynchronous shards like our Zones. ZeroOS enables a diverse set of bespoke zones (trading, payments) that are significantly more efficient than traditional blockchain VMs.

We built Zero because we had to. Because we felt an obligation to protect the ideas that matter. This is not another incremental L1. It is a decentralized alternative to AWS and GCP.