0/ Yesterday was my last day as the Rosetta Technical Lead at @coinbase. Starting tomorrow (crypto never sleeps, right?), I’ll join @el33th4xor, @kevinsekniqi, and the rest of the talented team at @avalabsofficial in building @avalancheavax.

1/ When I joined Coinbase out of college, I thought I “knew” blockchain. Boy was I wrong! Standardizing and scaling asset addition at Coinbase while collaborating with the top blockchain engineers at the top projects by market cap flipped my world upside down.
2/ I don’t think there is any other place that ramps you up into the magical moon math of crypto as fast as @coinbase and I firmly believe it is the best place for any crypto engineer to start their career. Good news! They're hiring! https://t.co/NOuZ2L5x1s
3/ To all my former coworkers, I want to say thank you for everything you’ve taught me. I’ll never forget all the time and energy you spent helping me become a better engineer and a better person. I have no doubt that you’ll continue pushing Rosetta forward for years to come.
4/ For the next few months, I’ll remain an advisor to the Rosetta project. I will lend a hand to asset issuers implementing Rosetta for the first time and chime in on high-level design decisions.
5/ On that note, it's great to see the work @figment_io and @avalabsofficial have already done to create a Rosetta C-Chain implementation for @avalancheavax. If you’re looking to test drive the C-Chain, I think this is one of the easiest ways to do so: https://t.co/UmTr9guM5L
6/ Now, why @avalabsofficial? Investment cycles in the L1 space occur every few years, at most, and we are at the end of the current period (credit to @el33th4xor for reminding me of this).
7/ When considering leaving Coinbase for the world of L1s, I had the option of doing something now (preferably 6 months ago) or to wait a few more years for the next wave of ideas to take hold. Long story short, waiting a few more years would have driven me nuts.
8/ Because of my position at Coinbase, it was my job to deeply study all of the consequential L1s launched in the last few years. Over time, I formed a pretty strong opinion that any project I would join must have certain attributes.
9/ I felt any project I would consider joining must support general smart contracting while retaining expansive composability, scale through loosely-connected but distinct subspaces, and enable thousands of people to serve as block producers in consensus.
10/ I looked long and hard for projects that checked all of these boxes but most promising teams ended up failing to check the last block, inclusive consensus. Enter @avalancheavax.
11/ When I came across the @avalancheavax paper produced by Team Rocket, I felt, like many others, there was something materially novel here. As I dug in deeper and deeper, I kept looking for the “but….”, however, I never found one.
12/ I felt @avalancheavax was finally the solution to the inclusive consensus problem that tripped up other PoS approaches. Don’t take my work for it. Ask @tederminant, the creator of one of the most performant PBFT protocols, why he left that work to co-found @avalabsofficial.
13/ As you can tell, I really really care about this inclusive consensus issue. To make it even easier for anyone to create, run, and monitor their own @avalancheavax validator, I created a tool called snowplow.
14/ This tool helps you back up your staking credentials, validator db, and even sends text message alerts if something goes haywire! https://t.co/5aNo4UzM8s
15/ Well, that’s all for now. Until next time...From Snowflake to Avalanche. Per consensum ad astra.

More from Crypto

Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

Short version:

The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from.

Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

Here's an example. This artwork is by Beeple and sold via Nifty:

https://t.co/TlJKH8kAew

The NFT token is for this JSON file hosted directly on Nifty's servers:

https://t.co/GQUaCnObvX


THAT file refers to the actual media you just "bought". Which in this case is hosted via a @cloudinary CDN, served by Nifty's servers again.

So if Nifty goes bust, your token is now worthless. It refers to nothing. This can't be changed.

"But you said some use IPFS!"

Let's look at the $65m Beeple, sold by Christies. Fancy.

https://t.co/1G9nCAdetk

That NFT token refers directly to an IPFS hash (https://t.co/QUdtdgtssH). We can take that IPFS hash and fetch the JSON metadata using a public gateway:

https://t.co/CoML7psBhF
2020 was a game changer for Ethereum.

The vast majority of its success was fueled by #DeFi.

Here's what happened in 5 Tweets 🔽

1) Governance Tokens 🪙

Projects gave complete ownership of billion dollar protocols to their users, often using retroactive airdrops.

Early adopters earned tokens for past usage, and token-based voting now dictates all technical


2) Liquidity Mining ⛏️

Power users were the first to earn on-going distribution by providing liquidity.

$COMP sparked the wave, with $BAL coining the term a few weeks


3) Yield Faming 🌾

Projects coupled liquidity mining and governance tokens to boost 'yields' by combining lending rates with an incentive layer.

APYs peaked as high as 1M% during 'DeFi summer', leading to a 'food coin' craze like $YAM and


4) Fair Launches ✅

Who needs investment when you can launch using yield farming?

@iearnfinance debuted $YFI with no formal funding, seeding a community treasury for self-sustainability.

The notion of a core team and community became one and the

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