Research Log #1 by gokhan.eth

The original text was conceived on my main blog on Paragraph, and reproduced on my main website, Substack blog, and Mirror blog too. You can collect the post on Paragraph.

Podcasts & Talks

• Christin Kim of Galaxy Research hosts Robert Miller of Flashbots on the specifics of MEV across rollups. Listen to the episode Infinite Jungle episode “Why MEV Looks Different on L2s” here. As Miller states we “need to address MEV if we are [gonna] scale these rollups.” Their conversation also touches on the searcher-originating spam problem on the networks.
• Not An Essay: Jon Charbonneau on Composability, Stake Centralization and Bitcoin L2s where Gwart hosts Jon and they talk about staking, re-staking and venture capital along the way. It is one of the most insightful conversations that I listened to lately.
• Not necessarily a podcast gathering by the usual framework when it comes to the The Chopping Block camaraderie but I really enjoyed this Consensus chit-chat by the gentlemen on the Coindesk TV where they discussed the celebrity merde-coins alongside the Trump verdict in a rather uplifting vibe. Starts at [07:20:07]
• Nicholas hosts Jong-Kai Yang, the founder of HackMD, for the former’S Web3 Galaxy Brain podcast.
• Andrew Miller on e2e apps in Gramine where controlled channel attacks are introduced.

Articles & Essays

• 17 misconceptions about SNARKs (and why they hold us back) by Justin Thaler on a16z Crypto weblog. I am impressed at myself that I have postponed reading this post almost for about a year, having bookmarked it. No, it’s not because of the recent ZK drama. I was just making an Airtable for verifiable computing projects on the cryptoeconomics vistæ.
• Building Blocks — Closed Software, Competitions by Terence Tsao. I encountered the post on the /ethereum channel on the Farcaster protocol whilst doing my weekly scan especially after the above-mentioned Galaxy Research podcast with Robert Miller.
• Reflections on Ethereum Governance Following the 3074 Saga by Derek Chiang
• How to find product-market fit: 5 strategies for web3 by Jason Rosenthal
• Onchain Advertising is Here by Antonio García Martínez of Spindl
• I myself wrote a piece on how to make use of available tools such as Buoy and Automod to curate and moderate your own personal and channel feeds across the Farcaster Protocol

Academic Works

• The Future of MEV is a pre-print by Jonah Burian in which the author analyses the Execution Tickets proposal on Ethereum Research.

Technical Docs

• Custom Gas Token Chain on the OP Stack. Syndicate are to guide those who want to launch their own layer2 or layer3 solutions on top of OP Stack re: custom gas tokens.

Public Statements

• The public statement from leading zero knowledge projects against Matter Labs’ attempt at trademarking “ZK”.

Dev Tools

• Awesome Last is a chain-agnostic comprehensive crypto/ web3 developer guidance repository by the Last developers. -
• mev.fyi is the maximal extractable value (MEV) research chatbot — underrated as hell.
• Farcaster channels now have a transfer function.

Posts, Threads

• Riley on crypto usecases.
• Re: ZK trademark registry attempt drama across the cryptographically secured societies. Please make sure you read Thaler’s above-linked post first before diving in. My resolution on the issue is that we do not need a defensive trademark thereof. If we were to talk about hijacking attemps, we first need to reflect on other cultural and PGF related ones that directly affects how resources come to be ratioed across our industry.
• Starkware’s post
• Eli Ben-Sasson’s post
• The original Alex G of Matter Labs post against or around which the above-linked public statement was issued
• Micah Zoltu’s response to Alex G’s post
• Brendan Farmer’s post
• Rebecca Rettig’s elaboration regarding defensive trademarking issue thereof, which is not.
• Polygon’s post
• Linea’s post
• Hudson Jameson’s response

The Art Market

• Gallery spotlights Maya Man whose art I find valuable for the ecosystem. Man has a meta-approach with which she blends the infrastructure-inspired aesthetics with the quotidian nichés of the personal.
• Many have missed it but Joan Heemskerk from the legendary net dot art duo JODI issued a self-reflective wallet-based art project through Folia Berlin, a house of experimental inter-disciplinary art, the last year. Yes, it is on the mainnet. It’s a self-reflective piece by the pioneer of internet-based infrastructure art wherein “the user generates endless wallets, interpreted across the screen in sound, color and words. Upon minting, they capture a point of randomness, storing it as the on-chain ID of the minted NFT. While the NFT is tethered to a single seed, the sub-infinite number of derived private keys score the endless animation.”

Disclaimer: The above hyper-linked digital content are for mere personal research usecases, and are not whatsoever any investment advice in any form.