Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

River is a blockchain media protocol. In its launch configuration, users can sign in with Privy, register accounts on a smart contract on Optimism, and post references to IPFS-hosted media as calldata to a smart contract on Arbitrum Nova. The team's first-party UI, river.ph, evokes social media collection website are.na.

It was great getting to know more about River at such an early stage. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nicholas
• River

• Hosted by @nicholas
• 4th.energy
• horneps on Farcaster
• Pete's website

My guest today is Alex Masmej, founder of Drakula, Showtime, and $ALEX token.

Alex's new app, Drakula, is a so-called SocialFi mixture of TikTok, friend.tech, Farcaster, and $DEGEN.

On this episode, Alex and I discuss consumer crypto product iteration methodology, team composition, how to sustain setbacks including departing co-founders, the bear market, owing the tax man, and US work visas. We also get into the power of taste, long term vision, and community in building crypto products.

It was fantastic chatting with Alex who is a dynamic and unique voice at the intersection of crypto and consumer. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Alex Masmej
• Drakula

My guest today is Partha Ramanujam, co-founder of Etherspot.

Etherspot is a 4337 Account Abstraction service provider.

On this episode, Partha and I discuss the Pillar personal data locker, and how it led them to account abstraction and founding Etherspot. We get into the details of their AA Bundler, React library, and embedded wallet services. We also discuss the exciting new p2p bundler they've been working on, which is seeing adoption from peers in the space.

It was great getting to know more about Partha and Etherspot. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Etherspot
• David Siegel)
• EIP-7579
• Pillar

My guest today is Cameron Robertson, founder of Arx.

Arx is an NFC chip with a ECDSA private key.

On this episode, Cameron and I dive into the devices and protocols at the intersection of NFC and blockchain. We discuss tamper resistance, signing APIs, and the interaction patterns available in today's mobile device ecosystem.

It was great learning more about Arx from Cameron. This episode was recorded in person at EthDenver. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Arx

My guest today is Haseeb Awan, founder of Efani.

Efani is a telephone service provider for people and companies that are concerned about SIM swapping.

On this episode, Haseeb and I dive into his history founding the original Bitcoin ATM network as a computer science student in Canada, going to YC, and becoming an American citizen. We dive into the details of Efani, his new company, which provides $99 a month US eSIM phone plans with an 11-factor process for SIM swapping that makes it very difficult to SIM jack their customers.

It was great learning more about Haseeb's journey and how Efani is able to provide more secure SIM cards for its customers.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Efani

My guest today is Andrew Huang, founder of Conduit.

Conduit is a rollup as a service provider, which lets anyone deploy their own rollup in only a few clicks. Conduit operates Zora, Aevo, Mode, Frame, Public Goods Network, and several other rollups, and each of these ships with a suite of helpful infrastructure like robust RPCs, block explorers.

On this episode, Andrew and I discuss the ins-and-outs of 1-click L2 and L3 rollups deployments, the costs of running a Superchain rollup, and the different data availability options available today, including L1, Celestia, and AnyTrust. Andrew also shares how he gained the experience required to run a complex service like Conduit.

It was great getting a chance to learn from Andrew. I hope you enjoy the show.

This episode is sponsored by Daimo. Daimo is building a stablecoin personal bank. Their small team is shipping quickly and is looking to make their first engineering hire. Daimo prides itself on self-custody and free and open source software. Their mission is to deliver liberatory cryptography to a global audience. If you're passionate about real-world ethereum, reach out to founders@daimo.com. And if you'd like to know more about the founders DC and Nalin, you can search DAIMO on web3galaxybrain.com and listen back to the fascinating episode we recorded together a few months ago. My thanks to Daimo for sponsoring this episode. Email founders@daimo.com if you're an engineer interested in joining the team.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Daimo - founders@daimo.com
• Conduit

My guest today is Jango, co-founder of Juicebox Protocol, Revnets, Defifa, and Bananpus.

Launched in 2021, Juicebox is a programmable fundraising protocol that has processed more than $180 million of contributions to over 1000 projects, from culture DAOs to open source projects. Most recently, Juicebox Protocol facilitated over 300 ETH in donations to the legal defense fund for Tornado Cash developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm.

Juicebox's core mechanic issues receipt tokens for each contribution to a given project, which can be redeemed at a later date for a portion of the remaining treasury. Issuance schedules can be defined onchain up-front, making possible trustless token launches and clear onchain relationships between project founders and contributors.

On today's episode, Jango joins me to discuss a bunch of new projects that have emerged from the Juicebox ecosystem. Bananapus, Juicebox's much anticipated cross-chain evolution, will enable contributing funds to a project on any L2, while maintaing Juicebox's trustless receipt token mechanics. Revnets, a fully automated form of Juicebox project, will replace DAO governance with predefined and immutable token issuance rules, simplifying project diligence and ongoing maintenance for project creators and contributors. Finally Bannyverse, a new NFT project, will bring Juicebox's beloved Banny the banana mascot onchain with a plethora of customizable accessories, with unique wearables for each L2 chain.

It was fantastic catching up with Jango about all of the exciting projects he's been working on over the past year. I hope you enjoy the show.

This episode of Web3 Galaxy Brain is sponsored by Zapper. Zapper is a smart block explorer that allows you to view the chain in a simple and human-readable way. Track your NFT and DeFi portfolio, search any Ethereum address, discover new opportunities, and trade, all from one place. Try Zapper on the web at zapper.xyz, or download the Zapper mobile app from the Apple App Store and Google Play! See you onchain! My thanks to Zapper for supporting Web3 Galaxy Brain.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Revnets (link 2)
• Bannyverse
• Bananapus
• Juicebox

My guest today is Vidy Thatte, co-founder of Trace.

Trace is a website that lets you build SwiftUI components with LLM text prompts, screenshots, and drawings on a canvas. In short, Trace lets you build iPhone apps with AI.

On this episode, Vidy and I take a walk down memory lane, chronicling his illustrious history of app development projects and startups that led him to where he is today. We discuss the technical details of how the current version of Trace uses GPT-4 and a code database to create smooth feeling UIs, and how powerful Trace may become in the future.

It was excellent getting a chance to meet Vidy, whose journey I've been following online for years. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Trace AI
• Trace's log
• Vidy's blog

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Fuel Docs
• Fuel Passkeys demo

Smol is a set of practical EVM tools born out of Draper and Facu's experience building frontends and marketing material for Yearn Finance.

On this episode, Facu and Draper walk us through the variety of tools and projects they've worked on together, and give us insights into how DeFi protocols do successful go to market. We also get a sneak peek at upcoming projects like Smol v2, and a new interface to Yearn Finance.

It was great learning about dapp development and GTM from Facu and Draper, and to hear more about their unique collaborative relationship. I hope you enjoy the show.

This episode is brought to you by Speedrun Ethereum. Speedrun Ethereum is a hands-on crash course in Web3 development that’ll teach you how to build an NFT contract, a DEX, a multisig wallet, and more, all through hands-on step-by-step project based learning. If you’ve always wanted to get more technical, or to expand beyond your comfort zone in Web3 dev, Speedrun Ethereum is the place to go. Get started at speedrunethereum.com

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Sponsored by Speedrun Ethereum
• Smol
• Yearn
• Ajna

On today's show, I'm joined by some of the first developers building Farcaster Frames. My guests today are Cassie Heart, Farcaster dev and founder of Quilibrium, Christopher Wallace, founder of Unofficial, and Jacopo Ranalli, founder of Deframe and Slice. We discuss the technical mechanisms and product possibilities for Frames, and the guests field questions from members of the community. This episode was recorded on February 2, 2024.

If you're interested in Farcaster Frames, consumer crypto UX, open web standards, and exciting moments in social software design, this episode is for you. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Farcaster Frames Docs
• Farcaster dev resources
• Varun's youtube explainers
• Farcaster stats
• Neynar
• Cassie's Doom Frame
• Christopher's Cookie Frame
• Jacopo's Frame NFT

• Hosted by @nicholas
• Lit website
• Docs

My guest today is Brian Weickmann, co-founder of ZKP2P.

ZKP2P is a trustless fiat-to-crypto P2P onramp powered by ZK proofs.

On this episode, Brian explains how ZKP2P leverages ZK proofs to translate DKIM signatures in Venmo and HDFC transaction confirmation emails to unlock onchain assets like ETH and USDC. ZKP2P lets depositors charge a fee, creating a financial incentive to draw liquidity into the protocol.

It was great learning more about ZKP2P from Brian, as this is one of the most exciting and tangible applications of ZK that is live today. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nicholas
• zkp2p.xyz
• Docs
• Circom

My guest today is Kristof Gazso, founder of Pimlico.

Pimlico is an ERC-4337 smart account infrastructure provider. Pimlico offers a handful of services, including Alto, the most popular bundler by total executed user operations, a paymaster transaction sponsorship solution, and permissionless.js a new platform agnostic typescript library built on top of viem, that helps devs wire dapps up to smart accounts.

On this episode, Kristof and I chat about the design of 4337, the most recent updates to the spec, and their recent seed round fundraise.

It was great getting a chance to talk to Kristof about his journey building Pimlico. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nicholas
• ERC-4337: Account Abstraction Using Alt Mempool
• ERC-7521: General Intents for Smart Contract Wallets
• Pimlico Docs
• BundleBear
• Kristof's site
• Patch Wallet
• permissionless.js
• zkp2p
• Etherspot
• ERC-6900: Modular Smart Contract Accounts and Plugins
• ERC-7579: Minimal Modular Smart Accounts & https://erc7579.com
• ERC-6492: Signature Validation for Predeploy Contracts
• https://delegatable.org/
• ERC-7555: Single Sign-on for Account Discovery
• ERC-7556: Embedded Accounts as Smart Modules

My guests today are Ulas and Dogan, founder and founding engineer at Clave.

Clave is a stablecoin wallet powered by passkeys and zkSync smart accounts. On this episode, Ulas and Dogan dive into the origins of Clave on Optimism, the UX advantages of account abstraction, and Rollup Improvement Proposal 7212, which aims to bring secp256r1 passkey elliptic curve verification to L2s. We also discuss their partnership with ZkSync, and some of the very slick onboarding flows they have to bring new to crypto users onchain.

It was fantastic getting to know Ulas and Dogan better. I hope you enjoy the show.

This episode is brought to you by ContractReader.io - the best way to read and understand smart contracts on the EVM. With ContractReader you can read smart contracts on Mainnet, testnets, and L2s with text-highlighting and live onchain values, viewed right inline with the code.

With their new Audit Toolbox, create public solidity gists or make them private by adding collaborators. Share the link to add comments and conduct audits in a native solidity flow. Give it a try today at contractreader.io

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Clave Twitter
• @doganeth
• @Ulerdogan
• Screenshots of Clave
• Opclave ETHGlobal
• Etherspot

My guests today are Chris Chang and George Datskos, founders of GhostLogs.

GhostLogs is a new platform that allows developers to fork contracts on various EVMs, inject their own custom events and view functions, and then interact with them via RPC, Dune Analytics, or Flipside.

In this episode, Chris and George explain how their journey doing MEV on Binance Smart Chain and building NFT loan aggregator Snow Genesis led them to build GhostLogs. We also discuss EIP-7571, another potentially compatible approach to moving event logs out of transaction execution.

It was great getting to talk to Chris and George about the emerging trend separating events from transaction execution. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nicholas
• GhostLogs
• EIP-7571

My guest today is Itai Turbahn, co-founder and CEO of Dynamic.

Dynamic is a Web3 login provider that offers embedded wallets, account management, and webhooks. In this episode, Itai and I talk about the present and future of wallets, authentication, multichain, passkeys, AA smart accounts, and more.

It was nice getting to learn more about Itai's journey building Dynamic. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Dynamic
• Dynamic Demo
• a16z fundraise
• auth0, Stytch, Flow

My guest today is Hilmar Maximilian Orth, founder of Gelato Network and Arrakis Finance.

Gelato is a service provider that helps protocol developers automate smart contract and rollup maintenance. Gelato's network of nodes automate and relay EVM transactions to many EVMs. Gelato also supplies rollup as a service tools to help new rollups launch with the necessary infrastructure to attract third party devs.

It was great getting to chat with Hilmar about his journey building Gelato, how the company's products fit together, and what's next for the EVM ecosystem. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by Nicholas
• @hilmarxo
• Gelato Docs
• Gelato Whitepaper
• Vitalik on L2s
• Arrakis Finance
• Request Finance for invoicing in crypto

My guest today is Eito Miyamura, co-creator of ZK Microphone.

ZK Microphone is an EthGlobal Paris hackathon project that prototypes generating hardware signed audio recordings, which uniquely link a file of captured audio to the device that recorded it. This application is enabled by hardware security modules, also known as trusted execution environments and secure enclaves.

In this conversation, Eito explains how hardware attested recording devices work, and how his team used zero knowledge provable computation techniques to go beyond and enable editors to mutate hardware attested audio files while maintaining a cryptographically provable link to the original recording.

It was great getting to know more about Eito, hardware attestation, and the HomeDAO hacker community in Oxford that brought together the ZK Microphone team. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by Nicholas
• @eito_miyamura
• EthGlobal - ZK Microphone
• ZK Microphone presentation at ZK Summit
• Fault Injection

My guest today is Ryan Smith, founder of Index Supply.

Index Supply is a company dedicated to open source indexing the EVM. Index Supply builds on Ryan's years of experience building backends and indexing services at Heroku, Chain, and Mint.fun, and through consulting with Zora, Reservoir, and more.

On this episode we discuss Shovel, Index Supply's open source indexer that transcribes every event emitted in an EVM node to an OLTP postgres database. We discuss the ins-and-outs of indexing, Index Supply's companion Block API, and the company's unconventional approach to funding open source software development for long term sustainability.

It was a pleasure catching up with Ryan who is generous with his knowledge and opinionated in his indexing. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Index Supply
• Ryan Smith
• Henry de Valence
• Oleg Andreev
• Cockroach DB Pebble
• QuickNode
• Simple made easy
• Shovel
• Clickhouse
• Thoughts on funding

My guest today is Nazar Ilamanov, Solidity and Web3 dev and creator of Monobase.

Monobase is a collection of tools for reading smart contracts. It includes a universal frontend for contract interactions, a scheme for creating onchain HTML interfaces, and a forthcoming VSCode extension for writing contract interactions in Solidity.

It was fun getting to chat with Nazar about his experimentation around the EVM. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Monobase
• @nazar_ilamanov
• whatsabi - ABI inference package
• 4byte.directory
• Monobase onchain HTML intefaces

My guests today are Nick Hollins and Ivano Salonia, co-founders of UFO. UFO is an onchain radio network and a spiritual offspring of indie radio.

In this episode, Nick, Ivano, and I discuss the work of creating podcasts that grow onchain brands and build community. We consider how Web3 communities make use of Web2, how NFT drops create momentum, and how media consumption habits have changed in the last few years.

It was great getting to know Nick and Ivano who are exploring what's possible at the intersection of indie subcultures and the Ethereum ecosystem. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Ivano Salonia
• Nick Hollins
• UFO FM
• UFO Mirror
• Based Management
• FM Tour 2023
• UFO on Interface
• Casino on Mars
• Pew Research on teen internet behavior
• Variant - New signs of life for NFTs on Ethereum & L2s

My guests today are Bryce Ferguson and Jack Kearney, CEO and CTO of Turnkey.

Turnkey is a private key as a service provider designed to let app devs and enterprise customers create, manage, and use private keys with a simple API. Turnkey leverages Amazon Nitro, a Trusted Execution Environment as a service, to give customers of all sizes a Secure Enclave in the cloud. This is particularly useful for companies that need to programmatically manage a large volume of private keys.

On this episode, Bryce and Jack explain Turnkey's QuorumOS, a deterministic OS for secure execution of apps like their Policy Engine, Signer, and EVM Parser. We also discuss the provisioning process for initializing apps securely, and discuss the risk profile of Hardware Security Modules and HSM cloud providers like Amazon.

It was a pleasure chatting with Bryce and Jack and learning more about the wonderful world of cryptography in the cloud. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Turnkey
• Goldfinch demo
• AWS Nitro Enclaves

My guest today is Bunny, aka @ConejoCapital, CEO of Dora. Dora is a user friendly block explorer and blockchain search engine.

On this episode, Bunny and I discuss multichain block explorers, unified blockchain interaction interfaces, and the challenges of blockchain indexing. We discuss Dora's search product and it's data product, and it's adventures beyond the EVM.

It was fun getting to know Bunny and learn about Dora's journey making blockchain transaction auditing easier for consumers. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by nnnnicholas
• @ConejoCapital
• Dora
• SimpleHash
• Goldsky
• Numia
• Celestia Modular Cloud
• BlockScout
• Codeslaw
• ContractReader

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Derek Chiang
• ZeroDev Docs and Blog
• ZeroDev's Passkey Demo
• Kernel Github
• ZeroDev's EF Grant
• 62% of deployed smart accounts (Sept 23)
• BundleBear AA adoption stats
• Web3Auth
• Eternal, Derek's last startup

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:11) Distributed systems (00:06:20) Twitch clip NFTs and Eternal (00:09:40) ZeroDev's origins (00:15:30) UX Advantages of AA (00:21:30) ZeroDev's Kernel 4337 account implementation (00:23:30) ZeroDev adoption (00:26:00) ZeroDev and Privy and other signers (00:30:15) CTO Taek Lee (00:32:30) How should app devs choose a smart account provider? (00:35:50) EIP-3074 vs EIP-4337 (00:38:55) Adoption and applications (00:42:55) Social signers (00:46:50) Passkeys cross-app (00:49:10) Account Central (00:53:55) EIP-7212 (00:57:20) Gas sponsorship (01:01:09) Multichain Smart Accounts (01:04:30) Address consistency across chains (01:09:36) Pricing (01:13:35) Session Keys (01:17:15) Plugins (01:21:00) Outro

Subscribe at web3galaxybrain.com

Today's episode is a roundtable discussion about EIP-3074: AUTH and AUTHCALL and EIP-4337: Account Abstraction Using Alt Mempool, two very different approaches to enabling smart contract accounts.

To discuss the past, present, and future of 3074 and 4337, I'm joined by Matt Garnett, aka lightclients, developer contributor working on Go Ethereum, Gregory Markou, aka @gregthegreek, CTO at ChainSafe, and Joseph Delong, CTO at Astaria and former CTO at Sushi.

It was fantastic getting these three talented and opinionated developers to the table to discuss the social and technical processes it takes to improve the EVM. My thanks to Pedro Gomes for helping bring this episode together. I hope you enjoy the show.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• gregthegreek, ChainSafe
• @lightclients, Go Ethereum
• @josephdelong, Astaria
• EIP-2938
• EIP-3074
• EIP-4337 and Eth Magicians
• On Abstractions - Vitalik Buterin
• Getting rid of WETH using 3074 by axic
• EIP-1153
• EIP-2535 Diamonds
• EIP-5492
• EIP-7212
• Shadow owners of Gnosis Safes
• lightclient's history of AA Link Tree
• Is the secp256r1 curve compromised? Podcast

Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:42) Interview start: Matt Garnett, Joseph Delong, and Greg Markou introduce themselves (00:06:57) How EIP-2938 led to EIP-3074 (00:10:05) What EIP-3074 proposes: AUTH and AUTHCALL (00:13:50) How 3074 improves ERC-20 approvals (00:18:20) Why has 3074 not been adopted? (00:20:04) What ERC-4337 proposes (00:22:30) 3074 and 4337 are not comparable (00:23:50) Design philosophies: 3074 vs 4337 (00:28:30) 3074 makes every account a smart contract account (00:31:45) 3074 + 4337 (00:35:50) Enshrinement (00:41:40) NEAR’s native Account Abstraction (00:43:50) 4337: Enables centralized operators
(00:45:45) Is secp256r1 compromised? (00:51:23) Are Optimistic rollups legit? (01:01:00) 3074 can get rid of WETH (01:02:30) Recovery with 3074 (01:04:00) 3074 does not solve key rotation (01:05:00) 3074 vs 4337: State bloat (01:10:30) 3074 vs 4337: Nonces (01:13:05) Nested execution (01:14:45) Can 3074 and 4337 be compatible (01:16:00) Diamond Pattern vs Safe style (01:18:40) 3074 rallying cry (01:20:45) Outro

My guest today is Biconomy co-founder and CEO Ahmed Al-Balaghi. Since 2019, Biconomy has executed over 40 million metatransactions to help devs make crypto UX easier for their users. Today, Biconomy is one of the top Account Abstraction service providers, boasting significant markeshare across popular EVM chains.

In this episode, Ahmed and I sit down to discuss Biconomy's ERC-4337 smart accounts, Paymasters, and Bundlers as a service. We cover session keys, Passkey signers, EIP-7212, multichain permissions. We also touch on ERC-6900 AA Module, which Biconomy and Rhinestone are collaborating on for their forthcoming Module Store, which is planned to launch in Q1 2024.

It was a pleasure chatting with Ahmed about his journey building Biconomy into one of the most important players in the AA ecosystem. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Support on Gitcoin
• Biconomy
• 4337 provider stats on BundleBear by 0xKofi
• Biconomy Blog
• Multichain Validation Module
• EIP-4337
• Biconomy on Session Keys
• Biconomy x Rhinestone Module Store & blog

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:02:30) Interview start (00:20:00) Why AA matters (00:21:40) Ideal Biconomy Customers (00:22:00) Appchains (00:26:10) Rollups as a Service (00:29:00) How to choose between ERC-4337 Account implementations (00:42:08) Safe vs Diamond (00:44:20) AA Session keys (00:46:30) ERC-6900 AA Modules (00:50:45) Multichain Smart Accounts (00:55:45) Embedded Wallets (01:00:30) Paymasters: Which transactions should app devs subsidize? (01:06:29) Bundlers (01:07:50) Bundler aggregators (01:08:18) Builders, Bundlers, and MEV (01:09:30) Sequencer-sponsored gas (01:13:25) Signers: Passkeys, EOAs, and more (01:16:40) EIP-7212 (01:16:45) Biconomy’s team & Dubai Ethereum scene (01:19:30) Outro

Web3 Galaxy Brain on Gitcoin

My guests today are Jacob Frantz and Zak Salmon, founders of FirstMate.

FirstMate lets Creators build and host their own secondary NFT marketplaces. Creator-owned marketplaces can display all of an artist or team's collections across minting platforms, enforce royalties, and source liquidity from the most popular marketplaces thanks to Reservoir. In its initial version, FirstMate is served as an app within the Manifold app store, and it will become its own website soon.

On this episode, Jacob, Zak and I discuss the evolving NFT landscape, what it's like running the most popular Reddit Collectible Avatars secondary marketplace, and how FirstMate works under the hood. If you're interested in the art and business of NFTs, this episode is for you.

It was a pleasure chatting with Jacob and Zak who are insightful, kind, and persistent. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas (Telegram)
• Firstmate
• FirstMate's Twitter
• Jacob Frantz and Zak Salmon
• Sound Market
• "Every artist deserves to own their marketplace."
• XCopy's site
• Reddit Collectible Avatars (Dune) (r/CollectibleAvatars) (FirstMate's Marketplace)
• Noble Gallery

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:42) Interview start

(00:03:00) Every Artist Deserves To Own Their Marketplace

(00:11:00) The New FirstMate Manifold app

(00:16:00) Creators and NFTs

(00:22:30) Creator Insights

(00:24:15) Reservoir vs FirstMate

(00:25:33) Having everyone in one place

(00:33:00) Reddit Collectible Avatars

(00:40:00) Indexing Shared Contracts

(00:44:00) Creator Owned Primary Storefronts

(00:44:30) Creator Storefronts Are For Communication

(00:45:00) Background at Instagram and Walmart

(00:47:40) Metrics

(00:57:00) The Royalty Wars

(01:11:00) Sound’s secondary market

(01:13:15) 90cc’s secondary market

(01:18:00) Bankless’s secondary market

(01:24:00) How FirstMate is built

(01:36:00) NFTs Enable Niche Creator Monetization

(01:41:00) What comes after NFTs?

(01:47:30) New-To-Crypto Creators

(01:55:00) Scarcity

(01:56:15) Outro

My guest today is Nitya Subramanian, founder of Capsule.

Capsule is an embedded wallet SDK that leverages Passkeys, MPC, and AA Smart Accounts to simplify the user experience around wallet creation and transaction signing. Apps that integrate Capsule's embedded wallet SDK authenticate users by their email address. Capsule creates a Passkey for each user, which is configured as a signer on a 2/2 Multi-Party Computation. This MPC, in turn, is the signer on a 4337 smart account. Users that have created a Capsule account in another app will be able to access it in any future app they log into with the same email address. In other words, Capsule is a cross-domain embedded wallet provider.

In this conversation, Nitya explains the MPC setup underlying Capsule, and provides hints at the team's forthcoming release, which aims to allow secure cross-app smart account access, programmable MPC permissions, and automations for common actions like Dollar Cost Averaging.

It was great talking to Nitya about Capsule, which is making strides in the challenging domain of cross-app embedded wallets for a mainstream audience. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Web3 Galaxy Brain on Gitcoin
• Nitya on Twitter
• Capsule Docs
• Capsule Demo
• Capsule Github
• Capsule Blog

My guest today is Furqan Rydhan, co-founder of Thirdweb.

Thirdweb is a popular web3 toolkit for app developers. Thirdweb is used by big brands and indie developers to drop NFTs, enable log-in, and power decentralized games. By the numbers, in September 2023, Thirdweb had 50,000 active developers and 5 million active end-users interacting with products built atop its tools.

In this conversation, Furqan and I discuss Thirdweb's focus on app developers, and how that differentiates it from its peers. We dive into how he thinks about organizing its vast set of product offerings, and what he's learned after many years building and exiting unicorns like Bebo and AppLovin. We also talk about working with Thirdweb co-founder Steven Bartlett, and the content marketing approach he brought to the project. Finally, we touch on Furqan's venture studio, Founders Inc.

It was a pleasure chatting with Furqan whose years of experience lend him a mature perspective on startup cycles and the development of web infrastructure. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas (Telegram)
• Thirdweb
• Furqan's Website
• Thirdweb Market Dominance - Dune Analytics
• Electric Capital Releases 2022 Crypto Developer Report - PR Newswire
• Web3 Warriors
• Account Abstraction
• Steven Bartlett - Twitter
• F.inc Website

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Sign up for the Daimo beta
• Daimo
• Daimo Github
• DC Posch
• Nalin Bhardwaj
• EthUniversity
• Hack Lodge
• Solidity Summit
• p256Verifier and Github and Daimo's blog
• Progressive precompiles (aka Precompile shadowing)
• FreshCryptoLib
• WebAuthn Halo2
• WebAuthn Circom
• ZK Sync Era's p256 precompile
• Awesome WebAuthn
• Dogan_Eth's State of Verifying p256
• Veridise audit

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:37) How DC and Nalin met: EthUniversity and Hack Lodge (00:03:40) Decentralization and permissionlessness

(00:05:57) What is Daimo

(00:08:30) Advantages of Smart Contract Accounts

(00:12:55) Passkeys and Enclave Keys

(00:16:25) Trusted execution environments and firmware updates (00:19:55) Apple binaries and reproducible APKs

(00:24:30) Self-custody UX

(00:25:58) Why p256 (secp256r1)?

(00:28:20) ECDSA vs ZK

(00:31:10) Renaud Dubois & FreshCryptoLib’s p256 implementation vs Daimo’s p256Verifier

(00:36:50) Wycheproof test vectors

(00:38:00) CPU style optimization for EVM cryptography (00:39:40) Precomputation, or not

(00:44:10) EIP-7212

(00:49:05) Progressive Precompiles (aka Precompile shadowing) (00:54:00) EVM equivalence and p256

(01:00:05) Veridise audit

(01:02:00) Daimo's forthcoming Base64 encoder

(01:03:40) Daimo cross-chain stablecoin wallets

(01:06:00) Getting Daimo

My guest today is Pedro Gomes, better known as @pedrouid on twitter. Pedro is the founder of WalletConnect, the most important software for connecting wallets to dapps. On this episode, Pedro joins the show to discuss WalletConnect's origins and the architectural changes introduced in WalletConnect v2. We also go in-depth on the recently finalized EIP-6963: Multi Injected Provider Discovery, which brings together the most popular browser wallets to solve the instability caused when more than one wallet provider is injected into the same browser session. Finally, we touch on how WalletConnect will intersect with embedded wallets and smart accounts. It was a pleasure getting to know Pedro and WalletConnect better in this conversation. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. If you enjoy Web3 Galaxy Brain and would like to support the show, please send me a tweet or DM saying why you listen and what makes Web3 Galaxy Brain special for you. I'll post the best testimonies to the show's website. Thank you! Links https://docs.walletconnect.com/advanced/migration-from-v1.x/what-changed-from-v1.0 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-6963 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:19) Interview starts (00:01:48) EIP-7212 (00:02:20) Early dapp history (00:06:20) EIP-1193 (00:08:40) Web3Modal and wallet connect SDKs (00:14:05) WalletConnect v1 (00:18:00) WalletConnect v2 (00:20:15) Signaling servers (00:26:10) Relayer incentives (00:27:15) Why do I need a projectId to use WalletConnect v2? (00:30:25) How many wallets are active? (00:31:40) Using Safe with WalletConnect (00:33:20) Wallet Terminology (00:34:00) Smart Accounts (00:36:00) The remote connection protocol is only 20% of what WalletConnect does (00:38:40) Coming soon: Cross-dapp single signer embedded in Web3Modal (00:42:20) Safe Core vs 4337 (00:43:00) Why doesn’t WalletConnect work over VPN sometimes? (00:43:50) Are discrete software wallets going away? (00:45:40) How does WalletConnect work? (00:47:40) WalletConnect notifications (00:49:05) EIP-6963 and the window.ethereum problem it solves (00:54:15) The window.ethereum wars (00:55:00) Mobile & browser wallets (00:58:00) Wallet standards EIP-1328, 1193, and 6963 (00:59:42) How EIP-6963 works (01:01:20) Fingerprinting protection (01:03:10) EIP process tips (01:04:50) Outro and links

My guest today is Konrad Kopp, co-founder of Rhinestone. Rhinestone is an exciting project that's researching and developing smart account modules atop the ERC-4337 Account Abstraction standard.

AA modules promise to allow smart contract account owners to safely add new functionality and permissions to their accounts, without having to upgrade to new smart contracts. The module pattern described in the draft ERC-6900: Modular Smart Contract Accounts and Plugins aims to create an ecosystem of interoperable modules to augment the various 4337 implementations that choose to support it.

On this episode, Konrad and I discuss the different approaches to account abstraction contract architecture, including Safe and the ERC-2535 Diamond standard. We dive into the details of ERC-6900, and discuss the compelling Rhinestone video demo, which shows how a user might activate and disable smart account modules like Passkey validation, dollar cost averaging, and recurring payments. We also cover the grant that Rhinestone recently received from the Ethereum Foundation's 4337 team to develop a Module Registry, a public goods venue where security audit firms and others can attest to the safety of specific modules.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Konrad Kopp's twitter
• Rhinestone Docs
• EIP-2535
• EIP-6900
• Rhinestone Blog
  • Modular Account Abstraction
  • EF Grant announcement
  • App-layer Innovation with Modular Smart Accounts
  • Introducing ModuleKit

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:02:00) Rhinestone starter at EthDenver (00:03:54) What is Rhinestone? (00:06:30) Authentication as a module (00:08:14) Types of AA Modules: Validators, Executors, and Hooks (00:15:25) Modular Accoints vs Hot/Cold Wallets (00:16:10) Approaches to Modular AA (00:16:45) 4337 implementation approaches: Diamond ERC-2535 vs Safe (00:23:30) State of Bundlers (00:25:15) State of AA Modular Accounts ecosystem (00:27:25) Diamond ERC-2535 vs Safe, continued (00:30:45) ERC-6900 Modules: Run anywhere & no vendor lock-in (00:33:11) State of ERC-6900 (00:34:05) Will we converge on one 4337 implementation? Gas vs security (00:35:30) What does ERC-6900 specify? (00:36:10) Rhinestone & the Module Registry (00:39:00) EF Grant (00:40:00) Migrating AA to a new interface (00:42:40) Modules terminology (00:43:20) Modules Summary (00:44:30) Reference modular wallet implementation (00:48:10) ModuleKit for Module devs (00:49:25) Singleton registry (00:53:15) Cool Module ideas (00:56:45) Recovery module (00:58:06) Session Keys Permissions Modules (01:01:00) WalletConnect? (01:02:15) Farcaster Passkeys and largeBlob (01:03:45) Is Rhinestone for devs or end-users? (01:04:50) Wallet vs Account (01:06:12) ERC-6492: Signature Validation for Predeploy Contracts and ERC-1271: Standard Signature Validation Method for Contracts (01:09:27) Mutating AA predeploy (01:11:27) Cross-chain Smart Accounts (01:13:45) Standardizing module frontend (01:17:19) Outro

My guests today are Will Hennessy and Noam Hurwitz, who work on Alchemy's Account Abstraction team.

In this episode, Will and Noam walk me through the ins-and-outs of Account Abstraction. We discuss the actors in the lifecycle of an AA transaction, how different signing schemes like Magic link and onchain r1 verification fit in, and how AA wallets will connect to dapps. We also dive into Alchemy's latet offering, AccountKit, which provides a suite of options for building smart contract accounts.

It was fantastic getting to talk to Will and Noam who are knowledgable builders making quality implementations at a crucial software frontier.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Will Hennessy
• Noam Hurwitz
• ERC-4337
• EIP-1193
• Noam's AA ELI5
• Understanding AA from Alchemy
• AccountKit Announcement
• Alchemy

My guest today is artist, Rhea Myers. Rhea is a programmer, essayist, researcher, thinker, and art practitioner who has been working in the medium of blockchains for over a decade.

In this conversation, Rhea takes us through some of the works and writing in her 2011-2021 retrospective, Proof of Work, which is a gorgeous book in the print edition.

I've been wanting to interview Rhea for some time. It was exciting to sit down with her for this sprawling and deep conversation about art, technology, culture, politics, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Rhea Myers' site
• Rhea's github
• Brainfuck
• Rhea's ongoing shows (at the time of recording)
• GEN/GEN Gazelli Art House London
• Exploring the Decentralized Web – Art on the Blockchain:
• Notes From the Ether
• Mark Fisher Exiting the Vampire Castle
• Charles Harrison)
• Erin Hoffman, "EA Spouse"
• Donald Norman on Jacques Carelman's "Coffeepot for Masochists"
• @cybourgeoisie
• Marguerite deCourcelle
• Thread of excerpts from Rhea's book
• Is Art

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:17:50) Is Satoshi the best artist (00:18:35) DuChamp’s art coefficient / art leverage (00:19:29) Baron von Munchausen (00:25:00) Fungibility & politics (00:29:00) The World’s First Bitcoin Artist (00:31:27) MYSOUL (2014) (00:35:05) Project based art practice (00:37:10) Do you feel ethical obligation to improve the world? (00:42:30) Facecoin (2014) (00:43:45) Secret Artwork (2018) (00:49:15) Art Coins (Coloured) (2015) (00:50:50) Dogecode (2014) (00:53:00) TORCHED H34R7S (2015), Marguerite deCourcelle, and Cybourgeoisie (00:58:45) Dogecode continued (01:01:30) Bitcoin VMs via Indexing: Counterparty, Dogecode, Ordinals, Ethscriptions (01:17:50) Working as simple as possible with the primitive at hand (01:25:06) Critical Coins (2015) (01:40:00) Andreas Anronopoulos

My guests today are James McComish and Peter Ferguson, co-founders of Forum. Forum is an iPhone app where every groupDM has its own shared wallet.

James and Peter are among the most knowledgeable builders working with WebAuthn and Passkeys that I've encountered. On this episode, we discuss the ins-and-outs of WebAuthn in production, including largeBlob, cross origin domains, session keys, and the three versions of the spec to date. We also delve into the team's journey building Forum.

It was a treat talking to James and Peter about their experience building with Passkeys. I hope you enjoy the show.

While Forum is fundraising, as always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Forum
• WebAuthn Explainer W3C
• ERC-4337
• ERC-137
• Stackup account abstraction SDKs
• ERC-6900: Modular Smart Contract Accounts and Plugins
• Secure Payment Confirmation
• WebAuthn W3C
• WebAuthn MDN
• CanIUse WebAuthn
• Chrome's WebAuthn support

Chapters

• X.com Video
• YouTube
• Zora NFT
• PDF Slides

Today's special episode is the audio version of a research tech talk that I published on October 5, 2023, entitled The Consumer Crypto Stack: The 100x unlock in consumer crypto applications.

If you enjoy this talk and want to go deeper, I encourage you to check out recent and upcoming episodes of Web3 Galaxy Brain where I get to talk to many of the people working with Passkeys, Account Abstraction smart wallets, and L2s.

If you get value from Web3 Galaxy Brain and would like to support the show, please send me a tweet length testimony explaining what makes it special to you. I'll post the best testimonies to the website to help others discover the show, too. Thank you.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:13) The Consumer Crypto Stack

(00:01:35) The Problem

(00:04:05) The Consumer Crypto Stack's Values

(00:06:10) The 4 parts of the Consumer Crypto Stack

(00:06:45) PWAs & Apps

(00:07:50) Passkeys

(00:09:49) EU's Digital Markets Act

(00:10:44) Smart Contract Wallets & Account Abstraction

(00:16:15) L2s

(00:19:22) Gasless User Experience Design

(00:21:00) Case Study: Passkeys and largeBlob in Warpcast

(00:22:00) Summary

(00:22:20) Outro

My guest today is Sam Hart. Sam is a developer, artist, and biochemist. He is Head of Product & Strategy at Skip Protocol and co-founder at Timewave Labs. He has contributed to the Cosmos ecosystem for years, and is also co-founder of Folia, a blockchain art collective.

On September 1, 2023, Sam wrote a long and detailed post to the MakerDAO forums pitching Cosmos as an interesting option for the appchain aspect of Maker's endgame.

Inspired by that post, this episode is an introduction to Cosmos for EVM devs. In this conversation, Sam and I discuss the major components of Cosmos: CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), VMs like CosmWasm, and client tooling like CosmJS. We also compare the design philosophy of Cosmos and Ethereum. Good starting points for interested builders are included at the end of the interview.

It was fun chatting with Sam about Cosmos, which is an ambitious project whose many flexible affordances can make it challenging to get a handle on. My thanks to Sam for sharing his knowledge. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by nnnnicholas
• Sam's MakerDAO post about Cosmos
• Kronos
• Evmos
• Berachain
• CometBFT
• CosmWasm
• Neutron
• Osmosis
• IBC
• Cosmos Tutorials
• Become a Cosmos Validator
• Keplr
• Leap Wallet
• Tendermint Specs
• Paper Trail: FLP vs CAP

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:48) Sam Hart’s journey into Cosmos (00:06:40) Sam’s biochemistry DNA sequencing background (00:08:45) Cosmos’ origins: Jae Kwon & Ethan Buchman (00:12:10) Cosmos culture (00:14:00) Cosmos vs EVM architecture (00:17:40) Cosmos overview: Cosmos is a design pattern (00:22:15) CometBFT (00:28:00) Validators, operators, delegators, and liquid staking (00:34:00) Dydx on Cosmos (00:43:30) CometBFT Mempool (00:47:30) Cosmos validator selection (00:52:40) Modifying CometBFT (00:57:40) CosmosSDK (01:03:10) Getting started with Cosmos as an EVM dev (01:06:10) IBC: Inter-blockchain communication (01:13:20) Programming languages and wallets in Cosmos (01:15:00) Outro

My guest today is Scott Sunarto. Scott is the founder of Argus Labs, a decentralized gaming company. He was contributor to Dark Forest.

On this episode, Scott joins me to discuss his Cookie Clicker Rollup, a toy L2 he built to better understand and demonstrate the architecture of optimistic rollups. We discuss optimistic and zk rollups, censorship resistance, offchain execution, sovereignty, the spectrum of EVM equivalence, and much more. If you're interested in learning more about L2 architecture from first principles, this episode is for you.

My thanks to FirstMate who provided the recording studio for today's episode. If you're creating NFTs and want to run your own branded secondary market that aggregates listings across all NFT marketplaces and enforces NFT secondary royalties, check out FirstMate at firstmate.xyz.

Links

• Guest: @smsunarto
• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• NeverEnding Game - a16z
• OPStack Bedrock
• Starknet: What are Storage Proofs
• Verifying Ethereum Smart Contract State with Proof - Leo Zhang
• The Open Problems of Onchain Games - Charlie Noyes & Doug Feagin
• Brandon Gomes
• l2beat
• Vitalik's An Incomplete Guide to Rollups
• Vitalik's The different types of ZK-EVMs
• Pete Horne's 4th energy
• barrywhitehat
• Scott’s research day talk "How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Execution Sharding" Introducing World Engine by Argus
• Argus’s Agar.io game (private beta, ask Scott)

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:30) Interview start: Scott in Jakarta for Argus (00:03:15) A Toy L2: Cookie Clicker Rollup (00:08:00) What is an L2? (00:12:25) Sovereign rollups & fraud proofs (00:14:30) What happens when there’s a fraud proof? (00:16:40) Cascading rollbacks & bridges (00:21:10) Verifying with ZK (00:25:25) Finality and Instant finality (00:27:45) Can you verify L1 rollup state roots before the fraud proof period (00:29:45) Cookie clicker rollup: architecture (00:33:00) Nicholas attempts to make Cookie clicker clicks tradable (00:35:00) Proof systems (00:36:20) Data AvaIlability (00:38:00) Validiums and data availability committees (00:41:00) L2 Calldata posted to L1 (00:47:50) Proving systems are too opaque (00:48:00) EIP-4844 and data availability (00:50:00) Cost of proving should be public (00:52:40) Cookie clicker block step by step (00:57:40) What happens in a Fraud Proof? (01:01:00) L1 trapdoor forcing rollback of soft confirmed L2 txs (01:03:00) Red Team: Hypothetical attacks on L2s (and dapps) today (01:06:40) Cookie clicker’s fraud proof (01:09:30) Gas attacks on fraud proofs and Interactive verification game (01:11:20) Single shot fraud proof (01:17:55) Specialized settlement layer L1 could support gasless fraud proofing to enable Single shot fraud proofing (01:19:45) L2 Specificity: EVM Equivalence vs Prover performance spectrum (01:25:00) Argus’s World Engine Game Shards (01:30:00) World Engine is like a shared sequencer — multiple execution layers share one sequencer (01:36:30) Argus is building game engine and games (01:40:40) World Engine game UX: embedded chain native AA wallets (01:43:40) Realtime interaction AA Bundler signature batching (01:46:45) L2 gaming scene: Argus, 0xParc Autonomous Worlds, and Lattice (01:49:30) Try today: Primodium, SkyStrife (01:50:35) Outro

My guest today is Jose Aguinaga. Jose is Head of Digital Custody Services at SEBA Bank in Switzerland. He was previously Head of Engineering at HOPR.

Jose is also the creator of passkeys.is and mpc.is, two valuable educational resources that describe and demonstrate passkeys and multi-party computation, respectively.

On this episode, Jose and I go deep on elliptic curve cryptography, ECDSA, passkeys, homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, account abstraction smart wallets and much more.

If you're interested in the frontier of self custody smart wallet user experience, this episode is for you.

It was a pleasure talking to Jose who is knowledgable, humble, and generous. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• passkeys.is
• mpc.is
• Elliptic-curve cryptography
• ECDSA
• EdDSA
• WebAuthn guide
• Web3 Authentication W3C
• Passkeys Dev
• Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets
• Sui
• Fireblocks
• passkeys.dev video demo
• Homomorphic encryption
• DeCompute conference
• Lukas Schor
• Safe
• Know Nothing Labs
• WebAuthn Halo2 Github
• Sui
• Sismo
• Fireblocks
• Defining Crypto Custody in 2023 by Jose Aguinaga

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:18) Interview start (00:02:27) Jose’s cryptography origin story (00:09:15) What is Elliptic curve cryptography? (00:13:45) What is ECDSA? (00:20:20) What are Passkeys? (00:25:10) What is WebAuthn? (00:28:35) Passkeys (secp256r1) vs EOAs (secp256k1) (00:31:30) Is the secp256r1 compromised? (00:39:50) What happens when creating a passkey? (00:43:55) Passkey UX gotchas & cloud keychain sync (00:53:45) Advantages of passkeys (00:57:15) Passkeys as Smart Wallet signers (01:01:00) Hierarchical deterministic passkeys? (01:03:25) Cross-origin passkeys (01:11:20) Public key registries (01:13:14) largeBlob in Safari 17 (01:15:40) Understanding passkey signatures in DER and CBOR formats (01:20:10) p-384 support (01:21:30) MPC: Multi-party computation, homomorphism, Paillier cryptosystems (01:25:40) DKG: Distributed key generation (01:29:30) Signing an intent with an MPC DKG (01:32:20) Threshold signature scheme (01:35:00) Silence Labs' Decompute MPC for blockchain applications conference (01:37:15) MPC signing vs smart contract passkey signature verification for Account Abstraction applications (01:39:40) Lit Protocol (01:44:40) MPC based AA permissions (01:48:40) Risks of MPC based smart wallet signing: censorship (01:51:20) AA Permissions UX (02:00:28) Know Nothing Labs' Halo2 (zk) based signing (02:04:30) ZKSync's native 4337 (02:05:52) Outro

My guests today are Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen, two of three co-founders of Obvious.

Obvious is a smart wallet company with three products. The Obvious Wallet is a multi-chain 4337 account abstraction smart wallet that was among the earliest full featured AA consumer products on the market. Obvious Embed is an AA wallet that third-party devs can integrate into their own dapps. Obvious Money is a stablecoin focused smart wallet app aimed at emerging markets in Africa and South America.

On this episode we discuss the team's path from building a traditional EOA software wallet to account abstraction smart wallets. We get into the tradeoffs of Shamir, MPC, and Passkeys, and the challenges building smart wallets in a massively multichain world. We also talk about fiat money platform incumbents, like M-Pesa, India's Unified Payments Interface, IBAN, and how crypto fits into the mix.

It was a pleasure chatting with Himanshu and Jebu who are moving quickly at the intersection of cutting edge smart wallet tech and global consumer applications. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Himanshu on X
• Jebu on X
• Obvious
• UPI
• Bangalore on Google Maps
• Monerium
• Biconomy
• Know Nothing Labs
• No Seed Phrases
• Silence Laboratories
• ERC-3668: CCIP Read
• jebu.obv.id

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:42) Interview start: What is Obvious? (00:03:10) Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen's backgrounds (00:06:40) The Obvious Smart Wallet UX (00:07:58) Why embed an EOA in a smart wallet? (00:09:30) Obvious product offering overview (00:12:13) Obvious Money: hedge inflation with easy access to stablecoins (00:15:35) Regulation compliance (00:16:50) Digital banking status quo worldwide: M-PESA, UPI, Interac, Venmo (00:20:17) Bangalore: vibrant for crypto startups (00:23:52) Obvious Card: An AA signer Credit Card (00:28:00) Paymasters with Biconomy: Paying gas in any token (00:30:10) Login services (00:30:45) Obvious Shamir and seedless recovery (00:36:30) Does AA require an EOA admin? (00:38:20) Passkey challenges in multichain world (00:39:40) Seedless recovery cannot key rotate (00:40:40) Why MPC?: Lit Protocol MPC Distributed Key Generation (00:45:16) Passkey synchronization between platforms, EIP-7212 secp256r1 verification onchain (00:48:00) L2s with 7212, Halo2 Know Nothing Labs (00:50:30) Silence Laboratories: Jay Prakash (00:54:00) Is secp256r1 curve safe or compromised? (00:55:00) Future of Account Recovery (00:59:00) Permissions architecture for AA wallets (01:01:14) How the smart wallet wars will play out (01:02:15) Social login != smart wallet passkey signer (01:04:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:04:20) Address book and AA wallets importing phone contacts (01:06:20) CCIP-Read: How Obvious is using EIP-3668 to build obv.id vanity ENS-style addresses (01:04:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:13:15) Obvious combining cross-chain assets into a single token balance (01:15:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:16:30) Westerners' blind spots (01:20:05) UPI in India (01:21:13) Goodbye

• Igloo demo
• @snowballtools
• @vivianphung
• Lit Protocol
• Alchemy AA SDK
• EIP-7212 roundtable on Web3 Galaxy Brain

Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:37) What is Snowball? (00:04:17) Passkeys, a replacement for passwords (00:07:00) Challenges with passkeys today (00:08:40) Passkey Smart Wallet UX, explained (00:12:40) MPC (Multi-Party Computation) and DKG (Distributed Key Generation) (00:15:20) Turnkey (00:16:40) Snowball's AA providers: Alchemy, Fun (00:17:30) Facilitating mobile dapp development (00:18:55) The EU will jailbreak iOS 2024 (00:20:40) Viv's background building apps: College programs, Eventbrite, Apple, Facebook (00:24:00) Apple: Passionate cult-like culture, intense work, codename database (00:26:20) Facebook: Open, strong intern program (00:28:00) Instagram: Building multifeed (00:30:00) Working in Web2 vs Web3: Dora (00:32:05) Mobile dapp dev is too hard right now, everyone rebuilding the same tooling (00:36:50) Session keys (00:41:40) Embedded app-specific wallets vs shared wallets (00:45:20) WebAuthn Passkey UX challenges: Create vs Authenticate (00:51:30) EIP-7212 (00:52:30) Viv on gaming (00:54:00) Appchains and gas subsidies (00:58:00) Where to find Snowball and Viv

Gami is one of a small number of practitioners in an emerging discipline that I call "crypto production." Gami led the creation of several onchain happenings, including GnarsDAO, a DAO dedicated to onboarding skaters to Web3, Forgeries, a nounish open edition and onchain Noun raffle, as well as an arts patronage dao, an onchain tontine, and much more.

In this episode, Gami and I discuss his creative practice, and how he manages to be so prolific. We discuss his positive sum philosophy, his belief that crypto is a counter cultural movement, and his collaborative working relationships with Iain Nash, Volkey, and 0xlght.

It was great getting a chance to chat with Gami, who is doing fascinating work summoning onchain happenings with social media and the blockchain. His perspectives on leadership were particularly surprising and exciting. I learned a lot from Gami in this call. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Gami.wtf
• GnarsDAO
• Omega Build
• Hypercommons
• Tings
• Tontine
• Art Haus
• That's Gnarly
• Nouns HD
• Forgeries team on Def.Crypto (Youtube)
• Hyperstructures
• Embryonic
• Lght on Mirror

Chapters

(00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:32) Welcome Gami (00:04:30) Gami's origins (00:10:02) Online events that bring people together (00:13:00) "Everything is about context" (00:15:05) Crypto facilitates social interactions because onchain activity is verifiable kinship (00:18:00) Embracing transient events in an immutable medium (00:19:49) Hyperrealism: High fidelity representations are nevertheless representations; blockchains are one medium for recording history (00:24:15) Forgeries: Working with Iain Nash, Emre, Jordan and others (00:29:16) Raffle protocol omega.build (00:31:20) Open edition sketching, minimum viable ideas, Jack Butcher (00:34:30) How GnarsDAO got its start (00:36:30) Volkey (00:37:30) How to find collaborators (00:39:35) Hypercommons: Positive sum world (00:47:15) Branding, "SubDAOs," and the relationship between genesis DAOs and their offspring (00:51:28) Gnars, skating, and its brand (00:53:20) Shademark (00:56:35) How do you design projects so you can be prolific without becoming burdened with too much accumulated responsibility over time? (01:00:00) TimShel collaboration (01:02:40) Distributed data systems (01:04:46) Derek Sivers' video: Lessons in Leadership. The first follower is the CEO. (01:06:45) Domain names, ENS, and new ideas (01:10:15) Change in Gami's style after discovering Nouns. Lower fidelity artwork is easier to remix (01:12:00) Always leaning into creating (01:14:00) Private twitter, Twemex, Nicholas's twitter extension ideas (01:18:00) Reserved issuance in Nounish DAOs (01:21:00) Nouns HD on Zora and Base (01:24:40) Crypto producers inspire and relinquish ownership (01:27:00) 0xLght; Crypto as a countercultural movement (01:31:32) Limitations of the Twitter Algorithm hinder tweet engagement and reach (01:32:37) Algorithms vs curation, and freedom (01:39:08) Curating and letting go (01:45:15) Deviating from the original idea: That's Gnarly, a platform for extreme athletes (01:51:04) Gnars' values

Today's episode is all about EIP-7212.

To understand EIP-7212, first we need to talk about Passkeys.

Passkeys are a new authentication standard designed to replace passwords.

With passkeys, when you sign into an app or website, a passkey is generated on your device, and saved either locally, to a passkey manager, or to a hardware device like a Yubikey. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are adopting passkeys because they are more secure than the traditional username and password scheme.

Passkeys use the secp256r1 elliptic curve, or R1 for short. Bitcoin and Ethereum use the incompatible K1 variation. In other words, there is no built-in way to verify an R1 signature inside of a smart contract.

EIP-7212 proposes to add support for the R1 curve directly to the EVM as a precompiled contract, so that every modern device in the world will be able to sign smart wallet transactions natively, no software wallet required.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Ulaş Erdoğan, Jerome de Tychey, and Lionello Lunesu.

Ulaş Erdoğan is the co-author of EIP-7212. He is also the founder of Clave, an account abstraction smart wallet.

Jerome de Tychey is CEO of software dev firm Cometh, which are building AA smart wallets under their Alembic product line. He is also president of Ethereum France, which organizes EthCC.

Lionello Lunesu is an electrical engineer and software developer with experience building software and hardware wallets. Lionello was prototyping and writing about using the R1 curve on the EVM in 2016.

This episode is all about the pros and cons of adding an R1 precompile to the EVM.

This was an exciting conversation about a deep technical topic that could have major implications for mainstream adoption. I'm excited to share this panel, which gives insight into next gen wallet and authentication technology, and the Ethereum Improvement Proposal process. My thanks to Ulaş, Jerome, and Lionello!

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• EIP-7212⁠
• Igloo tools wallet demo
• Alembic wallet demo
• EIP-7212 Ethereum Magicians Thread
• A Tale of Two Curves by Lionello Lunesu (2016)
• EIP-101
• Satoshi’s Genius: Unexpected Ways in Which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets by Vitalik Buterin (2013)
• evm.codes page on Precompiled Contracts
• Safari 17 largeBlob
• KZG Ceremony
• Passkey Signer Package post by rishotics on Eth Research
• Progressive precompiles via CREATE2 shadowing on Ethereum Magicians
• Apple: About the security of passkeys

Chapters

(00:00:00) Introduction (00:03:38) Lionello Lunesu & The Tale of Two Curves (2016) (00:09:15) Ulaş Erdoğan⁠'s background and founding Clave (00:12:25) Jerome de Tychey's background (00:15:15) Passkeys and EIP-7212 (00:16:40) Why did Satoshi choose K1? (00:19:30) ecrecover (00:22:10) Secure enclaves (00:24:30) What does it mean for an elliptic curve to be compromised? (00:28:20) Which devices support Passkeys? Most! (00:29:00) WebAuthn (00:32:15) Passkey UX on iOS. Why trust Secure enclaves? (00:37:57) Smart wallets help users manage accounts securely. (00:40:00) What does it mean for 7212 to propose a new precompile for r1? (00:42:10) Ledger's smart contract based r1 verification (70k gas). (00:45:00) 7212's precompile executes in native Go or Rust (3405 gas) (00:49:00) Is ECRECOVER dead? Is K1 going away if 7212 is finalized? (00:53:06) Paymasters and gas sponsorship (00:55:10) Verification only requires R and S, while recovery also requires V (01:02:49) Safari 17 introduced largeBlob storage (via dwr.eth) (01:06:30) Current workflow for passkey signer on AA (01:07:20) MPC in the middle, and its advantages (01:09:00) Sessions and AA permissions (01:13:00) Precompiles vs opcodes (01:14:46) Social recovery and the Apple approach (01:18:38) Progressive precompiles

My guest today is Henri Stern, CEO of Privy. Privy is an authentication and embedded wallet SDK. With Privy, dapp developers can allow their users to sign in with their existing wallet, or generate an embedded wallet associated with an email, SMS, or SSO provider such as AppleID or Gmail.

Privy's embedded wallet powers friend.tech, the breakout social dapp launched in August 2023. With Privy, friend.tech generates a new embedded wallet for each user that signs in, allowing the PWA dapp to sign transactions at the click of an HTML button element — no WalletConnect back-and-forth required.

Privy's 2/3 Shamir wallet option allows dapp developers to create self-custody wallets for their users, while Privy provides a password-protected recovery services in case users should lose access to their account or device.

On this episode we discuss Henri's experience studying under Dan Boneh, working on Filecoin at Protocol Labs with Juan Benet, and building Privy. We explore the ins-and-outs of Privy's embedded wallet architecture and discuss what's next in wallets.

It was a pleasure diving into the emerging embedded wallet and account abstraction smart wallet stack with Henri, who is a clear thinker and humble decentralization minded builder. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• @nnnnicholas on Twitter
• @henri_stern on Twitter
• Privy Architecture docs
• Henri's EthCC 2023 talk
• Courtyard.io
• Dan Boneh
• Shibuya
• POAP
• CabinDAO
• EIP-1193

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:05:01) Protocol labs, and how Privy started

(00:09:38) Heterogeneous wallets cater to diverse user expectations.

(00:12:13) Product decision made, focus on embedded wallets - Building stable wall connectors and library is difficult.

(00:21:11) Wallet authentication process: SMS verification and key sharing.

(00:25:14) Web tokens authenticate user and holder. Off share only accessible by user. Single device operations with iframe and key. Typical 90% usage scenario.

(00:29:48) Privy uses hardware security module. It encrypts recovery shares and tracks devices for added security.

(00:43:43) Fear of EOA, comparing Shamir and multi sig.

(00:47:21) Account abstraction allows for smart wallets.

(00:54:43) Main NetEase locked in app, no control.

(01:00:48) Exciting fintech innovations cater to diverse users.

(01:04:19) Balancing user control while empowering developers and users.

(01:08:25) Enabling interoperable wallets in the Web3 space.

(01:13:35) Few relevant DeFi apps; WalletConnect is problematic.

(01:23:46) Apple offers secure self-custody wallets with social recovery.

(01:26:01) Privy is a secure cross-platform custodian.

My guests today are John C. Palmer, Steve Klebanoff, and Danny Aranda, founding members of PartyDAO, creators of the Party Protocol.

Party is a dapp for onchain group coordination. With Party, a small group of friends or a large group of strangers can come together to raise funds and buy an NFT, trade tokens, or complete any other onchain activity together. Party is a group wallet with onchain governance, designed to allow parties of people to move quickly and get things done onchain.

On this episode, John, Danny and Steve explain how they have expanded Party's purview from the original Partybid group NFT purchasing experience, to the Party Protocol, which is more flexible. The new Party allows people to crowdfund ETH without a predefined acquisition target, or sell party memberships as timed and limited editions.

Operators, a new feature launched just one day before this recording, solves a sticky problem familiar to multisig signers and onchain DAO members alike. When coordinating to execute time sensitive onchain transactions like a DEX token swap, Safe multisigs and Governor DAOs often have difficulty, as the swap orders they collectively approve expire and would revert, by the time constituents have signed the transaction or voted on the proposal.

Party Operators allow party members to vote on an intent, which describes parameters like the tokens to be swapped and an acceptable exchange rate, as well delegate execution of the swap to qualified party members. Operators separate voting on transaction intents from their execution, solving the delays that plague existing onchain coordination schemes.

Towards the end of the call we talk about the brand vision, values, and aesthetic choices the team has made, which represent a unique perspective amongst their peers.

It's always a great time getting together with the PartyDAO crew to discuss their perspective and approach to building tasteful crypto products. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• Hosted by @nnnnicholas
• Party.app
• PartyDAO Github
• Party Protocol Docs
• Party Notion
• John's Multiplayer alignment matrix

Chapters

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:09:37) Two axes of coordination in crypto: on-chain/off-chain, economic/social.

(00:11:50) Categories of on-chain coordination

(00:20:36) Group bids to fractionalize NFTs

(00:25:24) Introducing new protocol with diverse use cases.

(00:33:07) 3 components of the product: group formation, decision-making, execution.

(00:39:16) Party can be used for group activities like trading NFTs.

(00:41:47) Ethereum group solutions for regular consumers.

(00:50:02) New proposal type separates consensus and execution.

(00:52:18) Three parts: UX, gas cost, security risk

(00:57:50) Intense conversation about general intent and behavior.

(01:02:32) Choosing qualified executors and protecting best interests.

(01:09:47) Consumer-focused crypto product.

(01:23:46) Open-source protocol seeks developers for collaboration.

(01:29:56) Using ETH to fund proposals.

(01:33:03) Party fund projects, release NFTs

(01:36:43) Crypto parties generate revenue through competition.

My guest today is Paul Razvan Berg. Paul is a longtime Solidity developer whose open source tools, including prb-math and prb-proxy, are integrated into many Ethereum contracts and protocols. Paul is also the co-founder and lead developer of Sablier, the token streaming protocol which launchced its v2 in July 2023.

On this episode, Paul and I go in-depth on three topics. First, we discuss a handful of his influential open source repos. Second, we talk about testing in Foundry and recap the Branch Tree Technique test writing framework that Paul presented at EthCC this year. Finally, we cover Sablier, its origins, and what's new in the recently launched v2. In the course of discussing Sablier, we also touch on PRBProxy, which is a new proxy implementation that Paul believes is a great update to Maker's DSProxy.

This was an excellent conversation and it was a pleasure learning from Paul, who is not only a brilliant and expert Solidity dev, but also a generous soul. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

• PRBMath
• EIP-1620
• Paul's Testing Best Practices in Foundry Projects talk at EthCC
• Paul walks through Sablier v2 on The Bytecode
• Shafu's Sablier walkthrough with Paul
• Shell script to turn natspec into docusaurus
• Alex Fertel's CLI tool for making Tree files into test scaffolds
• Invariant Examples by Lucas Manuel and Paul
• K Framework
• SMTChecker formal verification in Solidity
• FREI-PI
• solc bugs
• Mocha testing framework
• Cucumber Gherkin
• The Withdraw .tree example in Sablier

Ethscriptions.com

The infamous

TechCrunch Disrupt appearance (2013)

• Decent
• Uniswap Foundation Bridge Assessment Report
• Decent's The Box Docs