
novelist in training | newsletter @bankless
Joined November 2014
- Tweets17.7K
- Following7.4K
- Followers15K
- Likes102K
gwilym retweeted
Been learning about ZK-SNARKs lately! The core ideas behind modern hash-based schemes are surprisingly accessible & elegant 🧙♂️
Partly to teach myself, I wrote a post explaining them from scratch for people like me without a deep math background:
xn--2-kmb.com/zk-snarks
suddenly putting all the critical digital infrastructure code onto public blockchains so we can verify what is even going on, doesn't seem so strange. And going server-less. We should just put all the apps into blockchain code, too. So they run same every time. Switch not hard...
gwilym retweeted
Pump is bringing some of its execution infrastructure in-house. While we want to serve everyone, Relay is not a story about one app.
Relay is a platform that serves thousands of developers across wallets, payments, RWAs, prediction markets, perps, and trading, all built on the same belief: people shouldn’t have to think about which chain they’re on.
Users want one balance, instant execution, and zero friction. We’re making that the baseline for every onchain app, not just one.
On performance, Relay offers best-in-class latency, reliability and fill rates, across 100x the scale (txs), larger orders, more routes and use cases. The data is public (dune.com/relay/fomo-pump-fun…).
Two apps on Relay can see wildly different performance depending on how they’ve integrated. We’ve shipped a lot lately, so reach out and make sure you have access to all the latest and greatest.
Back to building. 🫡
NEWS: Ethereum consensus researchers have proposed Decoupled Consensus, a draft EIP that would replace Ethereum's Gasper consensus design and split validator voting into two separate jobs.
A committee of ~512 validators sampled each slot would vote on the chain head, while the full validator set votes on finality in its own rounds.
The goals are at least 4x faster finality, tougher reorg defenses, and a cleaner path to post-quantum signatures.
EF researcher Barnabé Monnot expects it in the I* upgrade, early 2028.
gwilym retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Anyone in the TokenWorks playground can start launching their ideas via the IMD swarm
Our first idea: Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Will prompt a site once it builds (no trading yet). If everything works, anyone will be able to launch their own Playground tomorrow
Thank you to @Bankless and @wmpeaster for covering yesterday's launch of Privacy Pools v2.
This is just the beginning.
NEWS: 0xbow has launched Privacy Pools v2, adding private payments, yield, and swaps across seven networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base.
Shielded funds can now pay any EVM address privately, earn Aave yield inside the pool, and swap across tokens and chains via LI.FI.
Deposits still need approval from 0xbow's screening service, albeit with no KYC or viewing key.
The Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku wallet-privacy initiative is also notably integrating it.
gwilym retweeted
🆕 Claude Connector
Connect Etherscan to @claudeai and ask about wallet balances, transactions, token transfers, and verified contracts across supported chains
gwilym retweeted
v4 hooks
soulbound nfts
6551 bonding
defi pools
token incentives
pm
ca
gacha
zk
and a ton of other primitives you can mix + match to build apps ppl actually want
there's no excuse!
just build
gwilym retweeted
We’ve reinstated the 10% of protocol fees that were going to daily purchasers as ethereum:0xa0df17b5ac76ababa36e1450e2cbcd18a620c845
Protocol fees are now split as follows: 70% buy-and-burn ethereum:0xa0df17b5ac76ababa36e1450e2cbcd18a620c845, 20% to stakers, and 10% to daily purchasers
NEWS: 0xbow has launched Privacy Pools v2, adding private payments, yield, and swaps across seven networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base.
Shielded funds can now pay any EVM address privately, earn Aave yield inside the pool, and swap across tokens and chains via LI.FI.
Deposits still need approval from 0xbow's screening service, albeit with no KYC or viewing key.
The Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku wallet-privacy initiative is also notably integrating it.
gwilym retweeted
Probably the best summary of @papertrade_xyz news so far
@wmpeaster crushes it per usual
gwilym retweeted
Over the last 90 days, 76% of proposals submitted to @nounsdao failed to reach quorum - and therefore didn't pass. Only 4 proposals reached quorum in the past 3 months, and all of them passed.
Of those 4 approved proposals, 3 needed the vote of 5gram.eth, the largest individual holder in Nouns DAO, with 177 votes. Without his vote, and those of other holders with more than 40 NFTs (votes), reaching quorum becomes mathematically much harder, creating a dependence on them.
Since April 24, 2026, when the Noun/NFT reserve price was set at 2.8 ETH, the number of new buyers has plummeted. As a result, power is becoming concentrated among those who already hold the tokens, like 5gram.eth.
Data from @anticapture MCP
gwilym retweeted
ETH supply is up about 1% since the Merge.
In the same time period:
> solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112 supply grew 66%, from 354M to about 589M.
> ripple:native supply grew 27%, from 49.83B to about 63.1B.
> cardano:native supply grew about 10%, from 34.18B to about 37.5B to 38B.
> bitcoin:native supply grew 4.96%, from 19.15M to about 20.10M.
> ethereum:native supply grew 1.0%, from 120.52M to about 121.7M.
gwilym retweeted
Ultimately, precompiles and EVM are both the wrong place to put most cryptography support into Ethereum. The reason is that precompiles and EVM both operate on data that has to be included into the ethereum chain somehow, which realistically means included in a block as calldata. That space is limited - even with PeerDAS and blocks-in-blobs, there's a practical cap of ~8 MB/s before it starts getting uncomfortable.
Remember: it's not a blockchain. It's a cryptographic world computer. Any data/computation that does not need to be in the "main thread" of data/execution should not be put into the main thread.
Instead, the correct solution is... EIP-8288 maximalism.
If you have any heavy computation that's self-contained, compute it and STARK it client-side (this is quickly getting faster and faster, even on phones), and push the STARK through the EIP-8288 recursive aggregation mechanism. The chain sees the fact that the computation was done and what the result is; it never needs to see the actual data and computation.
This way everyone can use whatever cryptography they want, the Ethereum chain can be lean, and we never need to add more precompiles again.
Replying to @lex_node
> we could still ultimately do Lattice stuff for accounts, wallets, etc. through a precompile if it is proved to be AI-secure
The ideal route to support everyone's cryptography is imo through 8288. You make whatever signature you want locally, then STARK it, and then it gets included through the stark aggregator machine. Don't need any calldata onchain. Ethereum can then never add a new precompile again.
gwilym retweeted
The playground idea by @token_works is so good
makes AI multiplayer²
> on the frontend humans collaborate on ideas
> they send a tx onchain and the IMD agent swarm collaborate on creating, auditing and deploying the idea onchain
the humans get paid if their ideas take off and distribute the rewards between themselves and the swarm


























