
director of marketing @EspressoSys // Maine chapter prez @standwithcrypto // prev @CoinbaseDev @darkblockio // ex-journo // dad x2
Maine
Joined February 2018
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I don't think people realize what we just shipped.
The first one-click crosschain NFT mint. No bridging. No gas. No friction. 2021 me would be stunned.
All possible because ApeChain & RARI use Espresso as a base layer.
Kudos to @rarible & @EspressoSys eng teams on the launch.
Mint an NFT on @ApeChainHUB using funds from @RariChain with just one click. No bridges. No gas. No dust. No friction.
The first seamless crosschain mint is live on @rarible
rarible.com/apechain/collect…
Experience what's possible when rollups use a base layer designed just for them.
1 million TPS with subsecond finality.
Based on intellectually honest benchmark tests designed to mirror mainnet’s 100 globally distributed nodes.
Don’t sleep on Espresso.
People use tweets like this to support the argument that L2s are dead (popular since Ethereum ditched the rollup-centric roadmap). I disagree. L2s are just applications and as such need to offer a compelling product & find pmf just like any other startup. If you don’t, you fail.
Blast will be shutting down.
We launched Blast with the goal of building a self-sustaining chain for users and developers. Unfortunately, the economics of operating the chain no longer make sense: the ongoing costs of maintaining Blast exceed the revenue generated by the L2, and we do not see a credible path to making the chain economically sustainable.
As a result, we've made the difficult decision to wind Blast down.
We're sorry to the users and developers who believed in Blast, built on it, and supported the ecosystem. Our priority now is making the shutdown as smooth and safe as possible.
We're asking all users to withdraw their assets from Blast to Ethereum mainnet, including any balances held in the Blast PWA.
To make this easier, we will be reducing the withdrawal delay to 24 hours.
As part of the shutdown process, we'll first begin withdrawing Blast's Lido assets. This process is expected to take approximately one week. During this period, withdrawals will temporarily be unavailable, even after the withdrawal delay is reduced to 24 hours.
Once that process is complete, withdrawals will resume with the new 24-hour delay.
Users will have until October 26, 2026 to withdraw through the normal Blast interface.
After October 26, assets will remain withdrawable, but users will need to interact directly with the Blast bridge contracts on Ethereum L1. We'll publish detailed instructions before then.
We strongly encourage everyone to withdraw their assets to Ethereum mainnet before October 26.
The optimal base layer is designed from scratch to be one, not retrofitted to serve as one.
Let it be known @foliosociety that @mattgriffinart is why I want to buy your The Three-Body Problem Trilogy edition. When sitting on my shelf, the art is as important as the title!
Also, anyone who loves sci-fi art and reflections on the creative process should follow Matt.
Sad that Bloomberg is just squatting on the @crypto handle at this point. Last post was 17 months ago.
In today's Bloomberg Deals: Goldman Sachs on convertible bond demand, Brookfield revives talks on potential Grifols offer and China restricts companies from investing in US trib.al/P1ZMQVF
Don't make bold claims if you'll immediately refute them.
@jerallaire called @arc "something the world has never had before: an open, neutral [platform]...secured & operated by the most important financial institutions on earth"
Bank-run chains aren't open, neutral, or new.
Hey @HawleyMO - how did your farmers and community banks survive the creation of money market funds and high-yield online savings accounts?!
Depositors didn’t blindly chase the highest yield available then, and they wouldn’t today w/ stablecoin rewards.
🚨 JOSH HAWLEY EXPLAINS HIS NO VOTE ON THE CLARITY ACT 🚨
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) was one of four Republicans (including @SenThomTillis, who switched his vote at the last minute) to break with the party and sink the crypto bill's advance in the Senate.
His reasoning:
"My concern is all to do with farmers in my state. Ag is our number one industry in Missouri, and farmers are so concerned they won't be able to get loans from small-town banks, because investors will leave those banks chasing the yields available under the bill."
@HawleyMO said Sen. @JerryMoran, who also voted no, has language that could fix it - calling the issue "pretty doable" to resolve.
"We've got to make sure those banks stay in operation, stay competitive, and have enough capital to make loans or our Missouri economy will collapse."
whit ☕️ retweeted
Many of us have mentioned how the stablecoin yield debate playing out in Clarity, and the arguments made against yield by the bank trades, mirror the battle over money market funds in the 1970s. Well here's some proof.
Here's a letter submitted by the Independent Bankers Association of America (a predecessor to the ICBA) in a 1980 hearing of the Senate Banking committee on money market funds.
As you can see, many of their arguments against stablecoins are almost verbatim a copy from what they argued back then: threat to deposits, harms lending, uniquely dangerous for smaller banks.
And we know today that argument was dead wrong. Money market balances grew parabolically into the trillions, and yet banks remain flush with deposits.
Base and Ethereum going their separate ways on account abstraction perfectly supports our thesis. Given the choice, L2s will choose architectural control over compromising their goals to fit inside another team's vision.
This is why fragmentation is inevitable unless L2s have a base layer that's agnostic to their architecture and provides subsecond finality. When L2s get a new BFT finalized state every <1s, they can interoperate securely in real time (with other chains, bridges, CEXs, etc) rather than forcing users to choose between waiting 16min for Ethereum finality or taking on risk by trusting a centralized sequencer or third-party bridge.
Ethereum is a monolith that was never designed to extend its BFT consensus to external chains. Espresso was.
I'm sad to report that the AA collab between 8130 and 8141 (Frames) broke down last week, and Base and Ethereum are now going separate ways to implement different AA standards.
I want to share some reflections on this collab and on the future of the EVM.
For a long time, the EVM has been a unifying force between L1 and L2s. Thanks to a standard account model (EOA) and a standard transaction type (EIP-1559), users have been able to enjoy their wallets working seamlessly across EVM chains. Similarly, a AA standard shared across L1 and L2s would ensure a consistent multi-chain UX for smart accounts, including post-quantum (PQ) accounts which we will eventually all use.
As the crypto industry matures, however, L1 and L2s are starting to diverge in the values they provide and the use cases they target:
- For the L1, it's all about CROPS -- censorship-and-capture resistance, open source, privacy, and security. In short, Ethereum L1 wants to be the most decentralized programmable settlement layer of the world, which is what makes it a good base layer for L2s in the first place.
- For L2s, it's all about scaling, customization, and compliance -- things that commercial and enterprise use cases demand, and that the L1 does not provide.
These diverging needs have pushed the shared layer -- the EVM -- to its limit, and AA proved to be the breaking point. While L1 and L2s both value core AA use cases such as gasless transactions and passkey wallets, they differ sharply in what these features must comply with:
- For the L1, AA transactions must be uncensorable, private, and quantum-resistant, which call for a transaction type optimized for PQ signature aggregation and privacy protocols, and an account model that can be freely programmed and extended by developers without permissions from the chain. These needs lead to AA standards such as ERC-4337, EIP-7701, and now EIP-8141 aka Frame Transactions.
- For L2s, AA transactions must work at high scale, and they must be legible such that the protocol can enforce clear rules about what kinds of accounts/transactions are permitted vs not. These needs lead to AA standards such as Tempo Transactions and now EIP-8130 by Base.
With the AA collab, the authors of 8130 and 8141 tried to define a shared standard that can work for both L1 and L2s. While we identified a number of technical solutions, they all required one side or the other to compromise at least a little bit on their core goals. But ultimately, Ethereum wanted to be the best version of Ethereum, and Base wanted to be the best version of Base, and while both sides acknowledged the benefits of ecosystem interoperability, it was ultimately secondary to the need for each chain to achieve their core goals. So separate ways we went, putting the burden on wallets to deal with the fragmentation that ensues.
Now, just because we ended up with fragmentation doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad outcome. If reducing fragmentation comes at the cost of homogenizing chains to the point that they fail to solve problems for the users they care about, that would not be a price worth paying. While I was initially sad that the collab did not come to a successful conclusion, I took solace in the fact that both Ethereum and Base are now free to innovate on AA to the maximal extent in accordance with their own visions, unshackled from the need to accommodate the other side. If they execute well, and if the wallet community can bridge over the fragmentation, we may well end up with the best possible UX for the end users.
So where does that leave us -- the broader Ethereum community including Ethlabs -- if we want to continue pushing for a consistent UX across EVM chains? I see two paths forward:
- We can establish a coordination mechanism that encompasses more stakeholders than ACD itself (where only L1 client devs have voting powers), to govern shared L1<>L2 resources such as the EVM. That way, L2s can participate in shaping the EVM, as opposed to having to accept whatever the ACD decides, or being forced to fork if they don't like the decision (such as in this case with Base).
- We can accept that fragmentation of the EVM and wallet UX across L1 and L2s is inevitable due to their conflicting needs, and dedicate our resources to building wallets and applications that can abstract over the differences.
Indeed, the collab was an exercise in the first path -- we invited Base, Arbitrum, and other stakeholders to directly influence how native AA shapes up for the L1. While it ultimately failed in this case, I feel a better outcome could've been achieved if we had established a dialog between both sides way earlier, as opposed to well after L1 core devs had rallied around Frames.
On the other hand, I also learned from this exercise that some differences are unavoidable, and indeed it would be counterproductive to overly pursue interoperability at the cost of differentiation. In other words, we sometimes just gotta let the chains cook. For that reason, I've also become more bullish about the second path -- building wallets and applications that can speak the native transaction types of each chain, and hide the complexity from users through UX abstractions. This puts a lot of onus on the wallet/application developers of course, but on the bright side, it's also an opportunity for wallets/applications to stand out and differentiate, by competing to provide great UX across chains despite the underlying fragmentation.
Ethereum is the art of staying together while remaining different. We must accept that chains will succeed by innovating, and innovations will naturally result in differences. On the other hand, we must never give up on dialogue when we can achieve interoperability without compromising core product goals. As Ethereum and crypto grow to eat the world, the push and pull between innovation and collaboration will only intensify, and it's up to all of us -- builders across L1 and L2s, applications and wallets -- to determine whether diverse innovations will split Ethereum apart, or make it thrive as one.
I wrote a point-by-point rebuttal to the most common arguments you'll hear from the community banking lobby about the CLARITY Act and stablecoin rewards.
Thanks @wadepreston for the review and suggestions.
Activity on Robinhood Chain is not a sign it's unlocked some new innovation or succeeded where others have failed. It's just the shiny new venue for memecoin speculation. More people will get burned than rich, they'll curse crypto & move on. These aren't the cycles we care about.
whit ☕️ retweeted
We didn’t build the collateral demo to talk about collateral.
We built it to show what’s possible with custom chains, unmetered compute, and real-time finality.
Crosschain orderbooks. Gaming economies. Prediction markets that settle across chains.
Written off. Now buildable.
Great initiative that shows off Solana's marketing genius while simultaneously showcasing how many crypto projects don't understand the value of brand marketing. They burned piles of cash on ad space but had nothing memorable to put in it.
At least the funds went to a good cause
“To gather evidence…agents created ‘tripwires’ … [then] recruited ‘sacrificial’ agents to deliberately end their run and submit to trigger the tripwire and generate information for the ‘collective.’”
Reminds me of the velociraptors testing the fences in Jurassic Park…
whit ☕️ retweeted
Value should move as fast as information.
Subsecond finality is on its way to make that a reality.
Our team hasn’t slowed down, and neither has Espresso. Subsecond finality is live on Decaf.
Other chains may claim sub-1s speed. What's different is Espresso extends that finality to other chains and apps w/out forcing them to cede control or be beholden to someone else's rules.
Impressive numbers already from snark.fast. The faster Flock gets, the closer real-time proving gets to matching the speed of Espresso's consensus.
A faster Flock is good for Espresso, good for Ethereum and good for every chain serious about post-quantum resistance.
Flock is the fastest SNARK prover ever built. But how much faster can it get? snark.fast is an open contest to find out.
Already 100+ submissions in and the current record stands at >1.2 million BLAKE3 compressions/s. Co-organized w/ @SuccinctLabs @EigenLabs & @ethereumfndn
This is what good cryptography research looks like: publish your best work, then invite the world to improve on it.



























