Product at Nethermind! | Professor at Duke! | Exploring the intersection of distributed compute, cryptography, and finance. | BanklessDAO OG

Joined December 2014
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Web 2.0 me vs Web 3.0 me
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“Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.”

ALT Nodding Yes GIF

USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen. I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify. In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather. "Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully. "Honey, that's what it looks like." The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it." I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it. I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South. It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent. "Well?" the waitress asked. "I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed." "Everybody does, hon." Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it. Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating. I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden. It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.
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Excellent write up on the design of Eth consensus.
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John Church retweeted
The Ethereum not ETH stuff is the mental fallacy that triggered me into writing and podcasting in the first place. There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions. Without ETH as a global store of value, Ethereum is a failed project. Full stop. ETH is economic bandwidth for DeFi. It is the only asset maximized for CROPs, fail at high value ETH, fail at CROPs, fail at Ethereum. Saying you’re bullish Ethereum not ETH is like saying you’re bullish America not the American economy. They are one and the same - economic engines. Better to admit Ethereum is a failed project than “Ethereum not ETH”. So spew that weak blockchain not crypto stuff out of your mouth, it doesn’t make sense for BTC, ZEC, ETH, or any truly crypto native project.
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Super excited about what we are building!
Aztec Alpha went live last quarter. The first privacy ZK rollup with full private smart contract execution on Ethereum mainnet. We shipped a multi-asset fee payment contract (FPC) to testnet. FPCs are native to @aztecnetwork. What was missing was a version that supports non-native assets. With ours, users bridge USDC and pay fees in it directly, with no separate fee token to acquire first. One less wall between a new user and their first transaction. Our Aztec Governance Dashboard went live. Our AztecNodes explorer added mainnet support. Plus developer tools: a faucet, a linter, an installable set of agent skills. And underneath, the protocol kept getting harder to break. 34 audit findings closed. Incident response through three post-launch events. Privacy on Ethereum was a research direction for a decade. Last quarter, it became a working stack.
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I'm starting to see AI being appropriately measured as a counter party risk. AI is valuable and useful, although to the degree that you place your engineering skill in the hands of one party, is to the degree that you accept counter party risk.
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I'm finding that I generally use AI to increase output for generalized tasks, or as a secondary opinion for contrast against my own. Although, very very clearly, systems thinking and understanding is more valuable than ever. Exhibit a: x.com/mitchellh/status/20600…

I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem. As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)! I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work. It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results? 88ms => 1.5ms 150K allocs => ~500 allocs Incredible right? Nope. My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path. This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput. The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity. Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.
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John Church retweeted
Prove what's required. Reveal nothing else. ZKPassport is joining @AztecLabs_, but the mission remains the same. 130 countries, zero data uploaded, zero data stored. Privacy that works in the real world: tinyurl.com/w4awd2b5
Today, ZKPassport is joining @AztecLabs_ . The mission stays the same: prove what's required, reveal nothing else. Nothing uploaded, nothing stored, nothing to leak. More resources, more reach, same product you can use today.
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Congrats to the @blocknative team and @mcutler !
News to share: the Blocknative team has joined Deloitte. It's been eight-plus years. Thousands (more?) of conversations. Too many talks, panels, blog posts, and podcast appearances to track. A team that refused to ship anything we weren't proud of. Grateful for each and every one of you. Onward. 🫡
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John Church retweeted
Ethereum is fixing its 5 biggest issues this year. Glamsterdam (H1 2026): > EIP-7732: Block building moves on-chain, external relays no longer control what enters a block. > EIP-7928: Parallel execution, transactions run simultaneously, L1 targets 10,000 TPS. > EIP-7623: Smart contract calls get 78% cheaper. Hegota (H2 2026): > Verkle Trees cut node storage by 90%. > A laptop is enough to run a node. > Lower hardware requirements = more validators = deeper decentralization. Speed is easy to copy. Decentralization at scale is not.
0/1 $ETH is the most underrated engineering story in crypto. Not the price. The protocol. 8 upgrades. 99.95% energy reduction. Fees down 99.99%. 37M ETH staked. L2s doing sub-cent transactions. Most people still can't explain how it happened🧵
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With the advent of AI, it is very seductive to outsource your thinking or the work of understanding. You have to do the mental effort, to have quality output. If you don't know the difference between quality or slop, you are making slop.
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John Church retweeted
here it is folks, it's finally time to understand Groth16
Groth16 is still the GOAT of zero-knowledge proof. Why can't anyone understand how it works then? Don't worry, we got you :) blog.zksecurity.xyz/posts/gr…
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Claude is really degrading in performance. Tasks I'd one shot 4-6 weeks ago, now are getting slop output with max performance/thinking.
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John Church retweeted
We’re thrilled to unveil our new Interactive Interop page - a visual map of how value moves across the ecosystem. The ecosystem is no longer a list of silos. Our interactive hub lets you visualize the connections between 15 chains and 33 supported protocols. 👇
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John Church retweeted
Listen to @Nethermind’s @DuckDegen, an EEZ Alliance launch member, explain why synchronously composable rollups matter and how advancements in ZK real-time proving mean they’re here today. youtube.com/watch?v=ycHBbNGu…

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John Church retweeted
⚡️ UPDATE: Starknet, Aztec, and Arbitrum rank among the top Layer 2 projects by development activity, according to Santiment.
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ALT Omni Man Invincible GIF

Privacy via intermediaries is not real privacy.
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