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MEMO W44 NOV 2024

"America's Class Politics Have Turned Upside Down", "The Worst of Crypto Is Yet to Come", "A Bogus New Rationale for Trump's Economic Agenda", "The Most Opinionated Man in America", these are the headlines everyday people are confronted with when reading The Atlantic today, one of America's most renowned newspapers. Long gone are the days in which we found balanced fact based news in those traditional media outlets. What you and me are bombarded with today is rarely rooted in facts. Traditional

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MEMO W43 OCT 2024

We can still hear people complain that crypto has no apps. Meanwhile the city of Buenos Aires has rolled out digital identities using zero-knowledge proof technology to all of its roughly 3.6 million citizens. This is a huge deal for two reasons. For one those digital identities are secured by Ethereum, since the underlying infrastructure is provided by an app on top of ZKsync, an Ethereum L2 rollup. And two, these credentials are the cryptographic property of individuals, who can now reveal onl

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MEMO W42 OCT 2024

What are we doing here? I mean here in this, our industry, the world of blockchains. What is this crypto thing all about? When you ask that question, then there will very likely be silence for a moment, followed by, a lot of words. This question, what crypto is about, is so hard to answer, and I thought about why that is the case. Imagine you were talking to some farmer in the 15th century, and imagine you would tell them about DNA. You would go like "here mate, look at that, that is DNA". And l

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MEMO W41 OCT 2024

Onchain onboarding is solved, technically. And with that claim I want to make the case that we already have all the tools that we need for users to just get started on any decentralized application. What that implies is that users to not have to worry about blockchains, gas tokens, transactions or even wallets anymore. As far users are concerned, the future is already here, it is just not evenly implemented. Back in the day, people needed a wallet in order to use any dApp. And even if you had...

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MEMO W40 OCT 2024

Markets are some of the most powerful concepts in human history. Our ability to leverage markets has enabled trade and wellbeing on a global scale across the centuries like we have never seen before. We can get lost amidst the marvellous progress that we accomplished in aggregate as all of mankind, thinking we have figured it all out. The thing is, we haven't. There are so many questions left to answer and there is so much progress yet to be made, to everyone's benefit. I have spent the past ...

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MEMO W39 SEP 2024

"But what about the inverted yield curve", can we hear them asking. And to me it is just all noise. People in crypto land are concerned with so many inversions on the 4D chessboard, and often I can't help but think, you are all just playing against yourself. If you want to make it, long term, then all you need to do is to bet on human progress. Technology equals human progress. And however you wish to express that bet on the human race, somewhere there between the lines of technology you will...

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MEMO W38 SEP 2024

Dear diary, it was very surprising to me when I heard several times this week, that some people started to entertain the idea of exchanging their ETH for BTC. This is so surprising to me, because it does not make any sense in my head. Imagine somebody holding ETH ever since it traded around 11 USD, since the very early days, now allocating more to BTC. And for what reason? What are those people doing? What made them allocate money to ETH in the first place. And what makes them now want to rea...

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MEMO W37 SEP 2024

We have come a long way on this planet, our earth. And ever since we look up to the stars, we wonder, what it is that truly matters in this life. The human mind created the second realm, which we call imagination. An alternative reality that we can choose to believe in. The human mind is what fabricates everyone's very subjective social reality. And along those lines of thought, it wasn't necessarily truth that humans optimized for ever since, but something more meaningful to people. This mea...

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MEMO W36 SEP 2024

The new meta in Ethereum land has apparently been to suggest that we better reduce the amount of available blobs for data availability, because the fees generated as revenue on Ethereum are now "too low". When you have a look at the timeline, then high fees were bearish for Ethereum in 2021, beca...

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MEMO W35 SEP 2024

The purpose of a system is what it does. That is a complicated way of saying that we are not mere prisoners of the games we play. We are not supposed to be held hostage by the rules that try to confine us. The games we play, the tools we use, were all made by us. They were made by us in order to ...