James Parillo

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on the atlas — 29

highlights — 170

We believe that this momentum and pull will only continue: Solana’s development and test tooling is still reasonably primitive, and will only improve over time (and at Lab Eleven we are committed to contributing to this improvement). Solana network performance will continue to improve, with flow on effects to overall user experience and therefore potential use cases. Rust continues to be the most loved programming language in the world (for 6 years running!), providing a steady stream of experienced systems programmers ready to dive into the world of web3. Betting on Solana is betting on the b…
Why Solana?
This means that over time the cost to use other chains will be driven by the use cases with the highest economic reward, locking out significant potential usage. Solana will be able to segregate demand by use case, enabling both high value and low value transactions to co-exist, without impacting each other adversely.
Why Solana?
In other blockchains, the fee is dictated by global demand on the chain. When demand is high for one thing (eg an NFT mint), the cost use the chain is high for everyone temporarily. If global demand becomes high all the time (eg the chain becomes popular in general), then the fees for everyone become high forever. In Solana, the fee market being introduced is based on local demand. That is, when demand is high for one thing (eg an NFT mint), the cost to submit a transaction for that one thing will become temporarily high. The cost to use the chain for everything else will remain low and fixed.
Why Solana?
The low cost of transactions has created an economic incentive to spam. That is, in cases where the potential reward (eg an NFT mint) far exceeds the cost (thousands of spam transactions), spam becomes inevitable. Unfortunately, this spam has had a negative impact on Solana’s ability to process transactions. This is being alleviated in two ways: Through the introduction of networking improvements to allow congestion control at the networking level, and The introduction of a local demand driven fee in ‘hotspots’
Why Solana?
Ethereum shard chains are its path to scalability, expected to ship sometime in the next few years Ethereum L2s are a form of sharding with particularly high costs for crossing between the L2 and L1 boundary Avalanche has sharding with its subnet concept Cosmos / Tendermint uses sharding by promoting independent chains with interchain communication (IBC) NEARs path beyond 800-1000 TPS requires sharding with Nightshade It might seem that sharding is necessary to achieve high speed at low cost. Well, not for Solana.
Why Solana?
Once sharded, the database is no longer a logical whole, and transactions cannot cross the sharding boundary.
Why Solana?
In traditional databases, there are two characteristics to achieving scale in both reads and writes. Vertical scalability (scaling up ⇑) characterises throughput on a single machine, and Horizontal scalability (scaling out ⇔) characterises throughput that can be achieved in a cluster of machines. Vertical scalability hit its upper limits sooner, as there are physical limits to what can be done on a single machine. Horizontal scalability provides more headroom, but must make some tradeoffs to allow machines to operate in a clustered environment.
Why Solana?
With minor variations, Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth has held true throughout a 40-year period.
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth
It is simply that the current web is so horribly slow that it will take 5 years to achieve acceptable response times. Only after 2003 can web design change direction and aim at higher bandwidth.
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth
The vast masses of users are low-end and will lag 2–3 years behind the high-end users. Bandwidth is one of the two most important elements in computing these days (together with screen quality), since computational speeds are almost always more than enough for non-engineering tasks. Unfortunately, I can argue as much as I want: most users still save on bandwidth and prefer a moderate bandwith at a moderate price to the highest-speed, highest-cost option. Web design needs to cater to the masses. Only rarely can a site be successful if it is aimed at the most advanced 10% of users. Thus, even th…
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth
There will always be a few super-users who have advanced equipment that runs really, really fast. Nielsen's law addresses the more normal high-end user who is willing to pay a premium but still wants well-tested equipment that can be bought in a regular shop. This is the kind of user who may have had an ISDN line in 1998.
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth
any blockchain technology that seeks mass adoption must be fast and cheap. All other attributes are subservient if the goal is for meaningful, broad impact and adoption - and for us, it is.
Why Solana?
Launching new asset ledgers is one way to achieve flexibility, but it rarely adds value, and it almost always creates technical and social complexity with minimal ultimate gains for application developers.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
let’s consider the apps that exist today across general-purpose, integrated L1s. Some examples: Games; Audius; DeSoc systems such as Farcaster and Lens; DePIN protocols such as Helium, Hivemapper, Render Network, DIMO, and Daylight; Sound, NFT exchanges, and many more. None of these particularly benefit from the flexibility that comes with modifying consensus. They all have a fairly simple, obvious, and common set of requirements from their respective asset ledgers: low fees, low latency, access to spot DEXs, access to stablecoins, and access to fiat-on ramps such as CEXs.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
The three specific use cases I’ve identified in which flexibility is important are: Apps that leverage “hot” state. Hot state is state that is necessary for real-time coordination of some set of actions, but is ultimately not committed permanently on-chain. A few examples of hot state: Limit orders in a DEX, such as dYdX and Sei (many limit orders are ultimately canceled). Real time coordination and recognition of delivery of order flow in dFlow (dFlow is a protocol to facilitate a decentralized order flow marketplace between market makers and wallets). Oracles such as Pyth, which is a low-lat…
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
By launching many asset ledgers, developers are naturally increasing technical and social complexity without unlocking real performance gains, even during times when other applications are driving heightened volume.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
Most modular proponents severely underweight the importance and difficulty of solving the hard engineering problems that make hyper-local fee markets possible.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
When you recognize that the solution is to localize fee markets, the logical endpoint is fee markets per piece of state (as opposed to fee markets per L2).
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
The only solution to fee spikes is to both: 1) maximize L1 DA, and 2) make fee markets as granular as possible:
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
with a little bit of thinking, app developers can easily capture MEV back to their own tokens on general-purpose chains. Launching an entirely new chain is simply unnecessary, creates additional technical and social complexity for developers to manage, and creates more wallet and liquidity challenges for users.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
running an app roll-up is not the only way to capture MEV back to an application-layer token, and, in most cases, not the optimal way. Application layer tokens can capture MEV back to their own tokens simply by encoding logic in smart contracts on a general-purpose chain.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
DeFi works best when assets are issued on a single asset ledger and trading occurs within a single state machine. The more asset ledgers, the more complexity application developers must manage, and the more costs users must bear.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
It is important to recognize that creating more asset ledgers explicitly compounds costs along all of these dimensions, especially as it pertains to DeFi.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
regardless of modular vs. integrated architecture, some piece of hardware somewhere has to do the work, and pushing DA and execution to separate pieces of hardware doesn’t intrinsically accelerate either or increase total system capacity.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
separating DA and execution doesn’t inherently improve the performance of either; at the end of the day, some piece of hardware somewhere in the world has to perform DA, and some piece of hardware somewhere has to perform execution. Separating those functions does not increase the performance of either. Separation can, however, reduce the cost of compute, but only by centralizing execution.
The Hidden Costs of Modular Systems - Multicoin Capital
Part 1 was Intel’s internal manufacturing of its own designs; this was basically IDM 1.0. Part 2 was Intel’s plan to use 3rd-party manufacturers like TSMC for its cutting edge products. Part 3 was Intel Foundry Services.
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Intel can’t expect to be a full-service foundry if it can’t use industry-standard design tools and IP libraries.
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
The problem is that Intel, used to inventing its own tools and processes, gradually fell behind the curve on standardization
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
CMOS (which enabled the use of a cell library) A Hardware Description Language (providing a convenient input mechanism to capture design intent) Synthesis (which provided the automatic conversion from RTL to gates and layout)
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Overshooting does not mean that customers will no longer pay for improvements. It just means that the type of improvement for which they will pay a premium price will change. Once their requirements for functionality and reliability have been met, customers begin to redefine define what is not good enough. What becomes not good enough is that customers can’t get exactly what they want exactly when they need it, as conveniently as possible. Customers become willing to pay premium prices for improved performance along this new trajectory of innovation in speed, convenience, and customization. Wh…
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
as a result of us being able to remedy that then those designers would successfully form their own companies, and they will become our customers, and they will constitute a stable and growing market for us.
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
the leading chip manufacturer in the world is TSMC, a company built on the idea that it does not do design
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
To make a new chip, Intel needed to make new tools, as part of an overall integrated effort that ran from design to manufacturing.
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
When there is a performance gap — when product functionality and reliability are not yet good enough to address the needs of customers in a given tier of the market — companies must compete by making the best possible products. In the race to do this, firms that build their products around proprietary, interdependent architectures enjoy an important competitive advantage against competitors whose product architectures are modular, because the standardization inherent in modularity takes too many degrees of design freedom away from engineers, and they cannot not optimize performance.
The Intel Split – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
em. In this post we will say circuit to mean a Halo2 circuit, or, more specifically, a Plonkish arithmetization, i.e. the language that expresses circuits for the Halo2 proving system in which circuits are defined in terms of a rectangular matrix of values.
Anatomy of an application, Part 1: Introduction - Education - Anoma | Research & Development Forum
a validity predicate is a circuit that holds certain additional properties, namely properties related with the notes they are contained in.
Anatomy of an application, Part 1: Introduction - Education - Anoma | Research & Development Forum
The part of an application that may vary from user to user when they use the application, such as a signature scheme, is called dynamic.
Anatomy of an application, Part 1: Introduction - Education - Anoma | Research & Development Forum
The part of the application validity predicate that is shared among users (i.e. the rules of an application that is independent of who owns the application) is called static.
Anatomy of an application, Part 1: Introduction - Education - Anoma | Research & Development Forum
different predicates validate different necessary parts for a transaction to be validated
Anatomy of an application, Part 1: Introduction - Education - Anoma | Research & Development Forum
predicates validate transactions
Anatomy of an application, Part 1: Introduction - Education - Anoma | Research & Development Forum
Once formed, the relay-inclusion committee will establish it’s own internal process, but commits to fulfilling its role at least once per calendar month.
Relay Guild Proposal - HackMD
Any relay entity may veto a nomination so that in effect, the committee is unanimously agreed.
Relay Guild Proposal - HackMD
There’s certainly a possibility that previously effective people may get stuck in a position if the incentive is significant enough.
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
If voluntaryism and donation-based funding does not scale sufficiently to the levels this mechanism needs in order to be effective.
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
We feel that this mechanism is differentiated enough (ie. forward looking, core protocol focused, vested, biases towards native tokens as opposed to USD) that the overlap may appear larger than it actually is.
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
the large membership distribution dilutes any targeted intent. It would be much more effective to bribe individuals, which can already happen today
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
Only when there are relatively few donating entities could the mechanism become more susceptible to bribes. Or, if the relative amount donated by one entity dwarfs that given by others.
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
If this mechanism doesn’t accrue significant funds, then it’s not really working properly.
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
No, this should be perceived as a bonus on top of current pay: employers/DAOs should pretend as though it doesn’t exist
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation
If enough contributors decline, this may not be an appropriate tool for incentivizing work on public goods. In the latter case, the vesting would still continue but it may be difficult to solicit additional donations.
7. Anticipated Concerns — protocol-guild documentation