Random thoughts. Mostly memoryless.
What makes a business successful? The most important rule – or if I even dare call it a law – for business success is that there are no formulas. Most business books need to be classified under the Entertainment category. Most business schools need to be classified as just history degrees. When you grasp the free market forces acting on a business, the preceding statements become almost…
Special thanks to the Enclave team for helping me compile a large corpus of the information on this writeup, and a special thanks to Victor Costan and Srinivas Devadas for writing their excellent detailed paper on the inner workings of Intel’s SGX.
This article is evolving. A whole lot of subnets are planned to be launched this year. This begs the question: what can be done, if anything, to leverage their existence to further boost their individual security, effectively cross-pollinating state and validators? I’ll try to go through a few options below. Note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive review. Background and Definitions
So, let’s talk about why standardization is so important. Let’s talk about the internet. I’ll call it “Web2”. Despite its many design faults at various layers of the stack, from the communication protocols to the execution environments, the Internet works exceptionally well. Billions of people interact with web connected devices pretty seamlessly. The way that web2 has been built is in an obvious…
This post concerns itself with the consequences of block re-org MEV, how much stress blockchains can sustain before breaking, and what are the protocol-level things we can do to permanently rectify this issue. Effectively, it tries to answer this question (thanks, Jeremy!):
There was a recent tweet in the crypto-Twitter sphere (can’t seem to find now) which discussed constant-mix – a well known, albeit simplistic, dynamic portfolio management technique – in the context of Uniswap and impermanent loss. What surprised me about that thread is that people seemed unaware of constant-mix. The matter of the fact is that constant-mix has been known and used since 1985,…
What is the biggest value proposition of “crypto”? Simply put, crypto is an upgrade to the internet that allows transfering and programming of “value”, or “assets” (used almost interchangably), besides just information. It does this through two key components:
Market evolution (or innovation) is often catalyzed from a multitude of mechanisms. Software digitizes and streamlines archaic business models, technological breakthroughs give birth to whole new markets, etc. In this post, and the main topic of discussion, I wanted to take the time to formalize an important driving force of market innovation, called functionalization (not to be confused with the…
This is a brief intro to the Azuma-Hoeffding concentration inequality. It can be viewed as a generalization of the Chernoff bound. For those that are unfamiliar, concentration inequalities specify how concentrated around some mean a particular random variable is. This is useful to quickly demonstrate that a particular random process doesn’t deviate from some expected outcome by more than some…