yezhang1998

(not so) hot take:

Traditional payment companies don’t actually want irreversible instant finality. What they need is fast, controllable pre-confirmation.

Legacy systems rely on layers like SWIFT, correspondent banks, and clearing houses to handle compliance, fraud checks, and settlement. The delays are intentional.

Crypto’s real value is removing many of those middlemen, but not all. To onboard institutions at scale, we need compliant, auditable, and faster infrastructure without forcing everything fully onchain from day one.

One super interesting take from a conversation with @drakefjustin:

Bitcoin’s security model will be broken in 10 years. ETH will be the only money left — ultrasound, credibly neutral, decentralized, and economically sound.

Here’s a deeper dive into why Bitcoin’s model might not hold up:

> Bitcoin relies on miners for security. Today, miners are paid through a block subsidy (newly minted BTC) and transaction fees. The subsidy is the dominant component, accounting for more than 90% of miner revenue.

> But every four years, the subsidy is cut in half. This means Bitcoin’s native inflation, which effectively funds its security, declines exponentially. Eventually, the network will rely entirely on transaction fees to incentivize miners. There is no guarantee that fees alone will be enough to maintain adequate security.

> Some argue that BTC's price will increase and make up for the lost subsidy. But if you run the numbers, the flaw becomes obvious. As the price of BTC rises, the value that miners are securing also rises, often by a much larger factor. So you're effectively paying less and less to secure more and more value.

This isn’t FUD. It’s a real, long-term economic question baked into the protocol’s design.

Hard to imagine what crypto will look like in 10 years. But one thing feels increasingly likely:

The ticker is ETH. 🦇🔊

One super interesting take from a conversation with @drakefjustin:

Bitcoin’s security model will be broken in 10 years. ETH will be the only money left — ultrasound, credibly neutral, decentralized, and economically sound.

Here’s a deeper dive into why Bitcoin’s model might not hold up:

> Bitcoin relies on miners for security. Today, miners are paid through a block subsidy (newly minted BTC) and transaction fees. The subsidy is the dominant component, accounting for more than 90% of miner revenue.

> But every four years, the subsidy is cut in half. This means Bitcoin’s native inflation, which effectively funds its security, declines exponentially. Eventually, the network will rely entirely on transaction fees to incentivize miners. There is no guarantee that fees alone will be enough to maintain adequate security.

> Some argue that BTC's price will increase and make up for the lost subsidy. But if you run the numbers, the flaw becomes obvious. As the price of BTC rises, the value that miners are securing also rises, often by a much larger factor. So you're effectively paying less and less to secure more and more value.

This isn’t FUD. It’s a real, long-term economic question baked into the protocol’s design.

Hard to imagine what crypto will look like in 10 years. But one thing feels increasingly likely:
The ticker is ETH. 🦇🔊

Speaking of which, I was also 22 years old when I first started working on scroll. It was my first proper job after graduation.

Time really flies.
Unconsciously, four years have passed.
I've stepped into quite a few pitfalls along the way, learned a lot, and the road ahead is still long. I need to keep learning and keep building.

Oh, before that, I interned at conflux during my undergraduate studies, and I bought CFX at 0.8🥹 Can I seek justice from the director? @forgivenever

Both Matter labs and zksync account get hacked at the same time?

I used to think that the altcoins everyone talked about were particularly fake, particularly absurd, particularly low-quality, completely makeshift, and the kind of coins that could rug at any time.

Now I suddenly realize that what everyone means is that any coin other than BTC and ETH is an altcoin 🤦‍♂️

Honestly, I still can’t tell if @Optimism and @0xPolygon are truly collaborating or just throwing the nicest shade ever...

Huge respect to both teams:
1. Props to the OP team for building and open-sourcing a modular rollup stack framework
2. Props to the Polygon team for advancing open-source zk proving infrastructure

That said, if the endgame is an interop layer, I do believe the zk-based approach has a better shot at winning on scalability. The Superchain model comes with too many trade-offs beyond the 15% tax (i.e., limited chain customization, requirement to run a follower node for each other). And frankly, both teams need to ship faster.

Some of my personal thoughts on interop:

1. Interop is overrated. Most issues can be addressed via intent-based bridges. Interop matters more to long-tail or app-specific rollups to access liquidity and users from larger, general-purpose rollups that have their own economic zones (e.g., Base).

2. Chains will increasingly need deep customization, it will make seamless interop hard. Even if you only look at sequencing, @unichain uses TEE-based sequencing, @Celo has its own consensus, some chains want to be based, others want real-time pre-confirmation. These divergences will always exist. You can try to mask it all behind “chain abstraction,” but that comes with heavy trade-offs.

3. I see the Superchain more as a social and relational network than a technical moat. Without a new kind of moat, it’ll be hard to coordinate and govern such a diverse chain ecosystem effectively in the very long term.

The whole conversation is like

Fede: Ethereum leadership failed to work with Starkware and almost abandoned them. Need to involve Eli in decision-making.

Me: I don’t see Starkware being treated unfairly. Their tech stack is different, but they’re treated like everyone else. This is a broader issue, and we need to involve more legit, tech-driven Layer 2s in the process.

Fede: You just don’t understand how important Starkware is. Let me teach you with (wrong facts). Others can’t compare to Starkware.

Me: Dismissing others' contributions with incorrect facts isn’t the way forward. I’m not saying Starkware isn’t important, just that they’re not treated any differently, and leadership needs to be more inclusive and supportive of tech teams.

Fede: You’re flexing credentials, I was gay, I know more about butt hurt.

Me: ....👍

The quality of this tweet keeps going up. I remember many people DM me saying I can’t say this, but I insisted not to delete 😅

Shout out to @fede_intern for calling it out the first……my bar for calling a project scam is usually high and I don’t like to fight on CT, but….😅