Decentral Block Post

There’s a narrative that’s grown up around Ethereum’s two most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they went in different directions almost a decade ago.

It suggests the pair fell out over the blockchain’s future direction, with the idealistic 20-year-old Buterin determined to turn Ethereum into a nonprofit foundation, while Lubin and others wanted to commercialize the technology via a for-profit company.

“That wasn’t really what happened,” the billionaire founder of Ethereum infrastructure and software firm ConsenSys tells Magazine during an in-depth interview in Tel Aviv.

“What happened was people were looking for a way to explain why these two people were bumped out of the project. And that was a convenient way to label it. But that wasn’t the reason they were moved.”

Lubin’s referring to Ethereum’s infamous “Red Wedding” in 2014 when the eight co-founders and the team gathered to incorporate Ethereum as a company.

Text generator ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer app ever, and it’s still growing rapidly.

But the dirty secret of AI is that humans are still needed to create, label and structure training data — and training data is very expensive. The dark side of this is that an exponential feedback loop is being created where AI is a surveillance technology. And so, managing the humans in the AI loop is crucial.

Some experts believe that when (potentially) robots take over the world, they’d better be controlled by decentralized networks. And humans must be incentivized to prepare the data sets. Blockchain and tokens can help… but can blockchain save humanity from AI?

ChatGPT is just regurgitated data

ChatGPT is a big deal according to famed AI researcher Ben Goertzel, given that “the ChatGPT thing caused the Google founders to show up at the office for the first time in years!” he laughs. Goertzel is the founder of blockchain-based AI marketplace SingularityNET and an outspoken proponent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — computers thinking for themselves. That means he sees where ChatGPT falls short more clearly than most.

“What’s interesting about ChatGPT and other neuro models is that they achieve a certain amount of generality without having much ability to generalize. They achieve a general scope of ability relative to an individual human by having so much training data.”

Whatever happened to EOS? After the biggest ICO in history, the former top 10 token now languishes around number 53. But the community has since taken back control and is determined to restore the smart contract platform to its former glory.

If you’re a newcomer to the crypto industry, you may not even be familiar with The Biggest ICO in History, which launched EOS.

EOS began in June 2018 with great fanfare, an active community and strong tech. Led by Dan Larimer, of Steemit and Bitshares fame, there was a palpable area of excitement with the introduction of new tech, including the delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) system and EOS Worker Proposals to fund projects that grew the ecosystem.

Block.one, the company behind EOS, raised an astonishing massive $4.1 billion over 12 months.

And then… nothing much happened. The community waited and waited for the promises to be fulfilled.

Name: Gabriel Haines 
Anonymous: No 
Twitter followers: 45,300
Known for: satirical ranting, shiting posting, and comedic content

Who is Gabriel Haines anyway? 

Gabriel Haines is a content creator, podcaster and Crypto Twitter shitposter who has a proclivity for ripping off his shirt in videos and ranting about the market in a goofy and comedic fashion. 

His entertainment value has seen him quickly build up a following of 45,300 — not a bad effort considering his online journey only started on YouTube in early 2020, when he was making videos on subjects as diverse as hummus reviews and educational videos on content marketing.

Haines jumped into the crypto space around the end of 2020 after seeking out ways to hedge against inflation in response to the inordinate amount of U.S. dollar printing and stimulus thrown about during the height of the global pandemic. 

Although he started his journey learning about Bitcoin, Haines soon dived into the Ethereum ecosystem and says that his biggest early wins came from hustling on token airdrops.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a once bourgeoning Singaporean hedge fund worth an estimated $10 billion at is peak, was utterly obliterated by the bear market last year. However, the carnival it has created since the initial blowup still lives on, and its main characters appear to be doing quite well, too.

One of 3AC co-founders, Kyle Davies, appears to have finally found some solace from the experience. After much turmoil, the former hedge fund manager has now transitioned into an aspiring restauranteur fixated on one task — perfecting the art of cooking chicken.

Any seasoned chef would know that cooking a tender, well-seasoned, juicy, and crispy-skinned chicken is a rather exquisite skill. To perfect it, one needs to maintain a razor-sharp focus on the meat while techniques are applied, which requires cutting out distractions — such as focusing on negative feelings related to creditors trying to claim $3.5 billion from 3AC’s bankruptcy — during the performance.

Generally speaking, chefs don’t like customers who are rude. Which is why when a user suggested on Apr. 14 to review-bomb Davies’ new Dubai restaurant, the now professional cook immediately threatened legal action against individuals who post “intentionally false reviews and defamation against my restaurant.”

The past few weeks have seen a wave of zero-knowledge proof project launches, including Polygon’s zkEVM and Matter Lab’s zkSync Era on mainnet, and the Linea zkEVM from ConsenSys on testnet.

They join StarkWare’s long-running StarkEx solution and its decentralized cousin StarkNet along with a variety of other projects in development from Polygon (Miden, Zero, etc.) and Scroll.

They all promise faster and cheaper transactions to scale Ethereum using zero-knowledge proofs.

But is the brutal competition between ZK-rollups a zero-sum game where there can be only one winner? Or are we looking at a future in which lots of different rollups are able to work in harmony and interoperably?

Anthony Rose, head of engineering for zkSync, thinks the latter future is much more likely and predicts that one day, no one will think about which ZK-rollup they are on because it’ll all just be infrastructure. 

From working on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show as an animator to now having more than 1,000 collectors of his NFTs, Bryan Brinkman is an example of how a digital artist can thrive in ways never before possible. 

Best described as a digital pop artist with an emphasis on animation, Brinkman’s fans include high-profile NFT collectors such as Pranksy, J1mmy.eth and WhaleShark. He has also been featured at Christie’s and had fractionalized art of his put up for auction at Sotheby’s.

“Prior to NFTs, I spent 15 years working in various industries such as fashion, MTV shows and animated television series. I’ve also worked a large chunk of my career on late-night TV shows like Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show, which revolve a lot around humor,” Brinkman says. 

“When NFTs came along, animation finally became a medium that could be quantified and collected. It immediately clicked with me. There are lots of branches you can do as an animator, but this is the only one that allows you to truly be independent and in control.”

“In its simplest form, I describe myself as a digital pop artist, but I also think mixed media is a term I use as well. I like to mix 2D and 3D as well as play around with different mechanics and forms.”

In a February interview with New York Magazine, Gary Gensler, chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, said that just about every crypto transaction, with the exception of Bitcoin spot transactions and buying or selling things with cryptocurrency, falls within the jurisdiction of the SEC. 

In the interview, when discussing what types of crypto transactions should be regulated as securities, Gensler didn’t mince words. “Everything other than Bitcoin. You can find a website, you can find a group of entrepreneurs, they might set up their legal entities in a tax haven offshore, they might have a foundation, they might lawyer it up to try to arbitrage and make it hard jurisdictionally or so forth,” Gensler said. 

Gensler continued, “They might drop their tokens overseas at first and contend or pretend that it’s going to take six months before they come back to the U.S., but at the core, these tokens are securities because there’s a group in the middle and the public is anticipating profits based on that group.” 

Gensler contends that the SEC’s jurisdiction over most cryptocurrencies is based on a 1946 Supreme Court ruling in the case SEC v. W.J. Howey Co. According to Investopedia, the W.J. Howey Co. sold citrus groves to Florida buyers. Those buyers would lease the groves back to the company. The company cultivated the trees and sold the oranges on behalf of the Florida buyers. Both would share in the profits. W.J. Howey Co. subsequently failed to register with the SEC, arguing that its transactions were not investment contracts. 

W.J. Howey Co. lost the case when the court ruled that the leaseback arrangements were investment contracts, thus establishing the Howey test wherein four criteria are used to determine whether something constitutes an investment contract: An investment of money, in a common enterprise, with the expectation of profit, to be derived from the efforts of others.

Top Stories This Week

Ethereum’s Shapella hard fork executed on mainnet

The Ethereum blockchain’s mainnet, also referred to as the Beacon Chain, implemented the Shapella hard fork on April 12. The upgrade made fund withdrawals possible for those who have staked the network’s Ether (ETH) asset. Within the first hour of the hard fork, a total of 12,859 Ether were unlocked in 4,333 withdrawals, according to Ethereum block explorer beaconchai.in. Nearly a day after the upgrade, ETH surpassed the $2,000 price point.

FTX has recovered $7.3B in assets, will consider rebooting exchange

A comeback for FTX is on the table, according to the legal team of the bankrupted crypto exchange. In an April 12 hearing, FTX’s lawyers said the company had already recovered about $7.3 billion in liquid assets and was considering restarting its crypto exchange operations in the second quarter of 2024, suggesting a reboot as early as April. After the news broke, FTX token (FTT) surged over 112%. Meanwhile in Europe, a Swiss court approved the sale of the firm’s European operations.

OpenAI finds fresh support from Japan amid global country-wide bans

Japan is interested in potentially using technology from artificial intelligence (AI) outfit OpenAI — the creator of chatbot ChatGPT — depending on the resolution of issues relating to cybersecurity and privacy. The interest was expressed by Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Hirokazu Matsuno. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, aims to work with Japan to build technology for the country. OpenAI has faced opposition from multiple countries, however. The artificial intelligence race has also accelerated this week with Amazon, Alibaba and Twitter working on their own AI initiatives.

Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments.

Bitcoin’s day of glory on Chinese TikTok

On Apr. 10, Douyin, the version of Tiktok exclusive to Chinese users, began publishing price quotes related to Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Ripple (XRP). The move sparked rampant speculation among the Chinese media and users alike related to a potential change of policy by the country’s central government on cryptocurrency regulation.

Unlike its Western counterpart, content on Douyin is heavily monitored and sometimes censored by Chinese authorities. Since Sept. 2022, Douyin has been cracking down on content relating to cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Metaverse.

Hence, many individuals were genuinely surprised to see cryptocurrencies discoverable on the government-curated platform. For around 24-hours, any of Douyin’s estimated 730 million mainland Chinese users could freely view crypto price quotes on the app. However, dreams of a relaxation in the country’s strict crypto laws were crushed shortly thereafter. On Apr. 11, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies price quotes were removed from Douyin, with a message stating:

“Based on relevant national regulations, unofficial digital currencies do not possess the same legal standing as fiat currencies. Please invest cautiously.”

Blockchain gaming guilds are the continuation of an ancient tradition. Guilds have existed since the beginning of capitalism in the fourteenth century. The most popular European artisan guilds were seven major guilds of Florence known as Arti Maggiori, which helped refine and improve crafts and trades from medicine to banking and weaving.

Can blockchain gaming guilds perform a similar role to help refine and improve games and gameplay? We’re in the middle of rapid experimentation to find out. 

Colin Goltra, chief operating officer of Yield Guild Games — a decentralized autonomous organization — says that similar to the ancient guilds, a gaming guild is a group of players who pool their resources and collaborate to achieve greater rewards. They work with valuable in-game digital assets in games developed by decentralized communities.

As the blockchain gaming sector grows rapidly, guilds have positioned themselves as key entry points for new players, offering unique feedback loops with informative insights into game design, future gameplay and education around blockchain features of games.

Gaming guilds onboard new players

Up to date and accurate research on blockchain gaming guilds appears thin on the ground. According to BreederDAO figures, a Philippine-based blockchain gaming startup, the top 25 guilds had a potential base of 900,000 players by the end of 2021, but only 89,935 scholarships were operating. However today, YGG alone has 30,000 scholarships so those numbers are out of date, but it seems safe to say there is likely still a large untapped base out there. 

From childhood dreams of becoming a rapper to serving in the United States Marines, to now being “the pro-XRP lawyer” on Crypto Twitter, John Deaton has had an eventful life.

While his dream of becoming a rapper didn’t work out, John Deaton’s 260,000 Twitter following would make many up-and-coming rappers envious.

“That was about 10 years before Eminem came out — I didn’t have that level of school,” Deaton says of his music biz dreams.

He has become a legend among the XRP army over the past couple of years, fighting in their corner after the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple, alleging it had issued unregistered securities.

Deaton has a strong belief that the “innocent holders” of XRP deserve a knight in shining armor standing up for them in the same way Ripple has a squad of lawyers fighting for the company. 

ZK-rollups are the hottest thing in Ethereum right now, having seemingly appeared out of nowhere in late 2018 to fundamentally reshape the “Eth2” plan to scale via sharding alone.

Zero-knowledge, or validity proof rollups, essentially perform the computations for many thousands of transactions away from Ethereum and then write a tiny cryptographic proof back to the blockchain that verifies those transactions were performed correctly. It’s much faster and cheaper than using the base layer and has the potential for virtually unlimited scaling.

To an outsider, it looked like the technology went from 0 to 100 in a couple of years, but from the perspective of Polygon Miden founder Bobbin Threadbare, it doesn’t seem fast enough.

“Your internal perception is that it’s moving slowly,” he says. “People say, ‘We’re going to be doing this in a year,’ and it takes longer because people overestimate [how quickly it can be done].”

“But if you take a step back out of your own bubble, I do think that the tech is moving at an amazing pace. A lot of the things we’re doing now did not exist 10 years ago — or even maybe like eight years ago — they were just theoretical concepts.”

Top Stories This Week

Bitcoin white paper is apparently hiding in Apple’s modern macOS

Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper laying out the thesis for the Bitcoin network is seemingly hiding within every modern version of the operating system for Apple’s Mac computers. An April 5 blog post from technologist Andy Baio revealed that a PDF of the Bitcoin white paper has “apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.” Baio told Cointelegraph he was trying to fix his printer and scan a document when Nakamoto’s white paper first appeared. He created a prompt in Terminal that enables others to easily access the white paper.

Binance Australia Derivatives license canceled by securities regulator

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has canceled the license of Binance Australia Derivatives after a targeted review of its operations in the country. The company’s clients will not be able to increase derivatives positions or open new positions with the platform from April 14, and existing derivatives positions must be closed before April 21. The Australian securities regulator also revealed that it has been conducting a targeted review of Binance’s financial services business in Australia, including its classification of retail and wholesale clients. Spot trading on Binance is still available for Australian residents.

FTX philanthropic donations have created a complex dilemma for recipients

FTX philanthropic arm had pledged $1 billion in donations toward research academics across prestigious universities. Its team, however, resigned after FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022. Now, many scholars and researchers who were early recipients of the grant are now stuck in limbo over payment of further grants for their programs, while many studying on the FTX grant were forced to drop out of their courses due to the fear of repayment. FTX Future Fund’s grants were focused on research projects for the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic bio-risk, improving institutions, economic growth, great power relations and effective altruism, among many others.