Pure Innovations on Ethereum 42024 and Beyond

• Infrastructures that silent the D at Dapps

Today there are (d)apps for consumer like Blackbird, Warpcast, Sound, or Friend.Tech. They casually onboarding end-users without crypto jargons. Eventhough those apps already live, they can be better. Semi-custodial WaaS is fine, but non-custodial ERC-4337 (+ RIP-7212) is better. L2 fees are cheap, EIP-4844 and EigenDA will make them cheaper.

Also more improvements at the backend around the aggregation {Intent-centricity, shared sequencer, arbitrary bridges, native L2 bridge, storage proofs, etc} and performance {evm parallelization, ZKVMs, ZK proof accelerators, etc}

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• Novel Financial Primitives

I'm a big air cooler of Panoptic co-founder Guillaume Lambert. He's one of if not the first person who found that UniV3 payoff is close enough to traditional options, unlocking the possibility to have Perpetual Options. This reminds me of BitMex who had launched Perpetual Futures in 2014. Beside panoptic, there are protocols being built around UniV3 such as Haptic and Infinity Pools.

Another huge financial primtive itself is ETH. I always sleep in history lesson, but ETH might be the first asset that able to have deflation from the productivity itself. It's a monetary policy that sustainable, autonomous, and transparent. An ideal asset to become the internet-native bonds.

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• Emergence of Autonomous Worlds

Devs have been trying to marry Gaming with Crypto. So far they only able to modify the items into NFTs. However, the hyperscalability from rollups unlocked a new possibility. All of the game {logic, rule, assets, money, governance} can move onto the chain.

Today there are dozens of Autonomous Worlds built on Starknet powered by Dojo and Optimism powered by Lattice's MUD. Albeit my favorit is Downstream (in development) developed by Playmint. I'll call it a hexagonal minecraft, with a 'mod' that allow devs to build Among Us. I guess this low-level composability has been the dream of game devs utilizing blockchain.

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• Battle Testing the Modern Cryptography

There is a small chance by 2030, 80% of HTTPS internet traffic are going to be breached by quantum computer, somewhere. The only way to protect them is by wrap current signatures by Post Quantum Cryptography. ZK-STARK and FHE are one of hundreds of PQC being developed today. I heard that newer SNARK also resistant(?). Anyway, I hope more people are using validity rollups that utilize STARK and build lindy for them. Another PQC is FHE that allow fully encrypted computation. Zama and Fhenix is building (T)FHE-EVM optimistic rollup.

Those cryptographies can be a savior to our digital sovereignity as human. AI is so scary in a way, imagine how many personal questions already collected by Grok, GPT, and Bard. How many people already tricked by an AI-generated image. FHE-ML should encrypt all of those prompts and even the ML itself. ZKML should give provenance if an output truly generated by model XYZ.

Other interesting applications around these cryptographies include zkEmail, zkKYC, zkCredit, and that zk miccy thing that able to proof a sound made by a hardware microphone.

That's all. Sorry for no source, busy having a feast.

Happy New Year