Hi,

So, Trump has officially signed an Executive Order to establish the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve and a Digital Assets Stockpile.

But before you get too excited (or worried), here’s the key part: they’re not using taxpayer money to buy new crypto. Instead, they’re just holding onto digital assets that the U.S. government has already confiscated. On top of that, they’re exploring ways to accumulate more Bitcoin—again, without dipping into public funds.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, this move undeniably legitimizes Bitcoin and, to some extent, the broader crypto space. That’s a big deal.

On the other hand… this feels completely disconnected from the cypherpunk ethos that first drew me to crypto. Begging the Gov to buy our bags? Feels weird, right?

Plus, this order essentially elevates BTC while tossing ETH into the same bucket as XRP and ADA. As a proud ETH supremacist, this is disappointing tbh.

Anyway, enough of that—let’s dive into today’s newsletter.

📖 2077 Research

Spectra Finance: Moving Toward a More Robust DeFi IRD Ecosystem

Interest Rate Derivatives (IRD) are gigantic in the TradFi market worth >$570 trillion.

This research report explains the basics of interest rate derivatives (IRDs), their strengths and flaws in traditional finance, and how Spectra's IRD design supercharges DeFi on Ethereum.

We also dive into the technical details of the Spectra protocol and explore the future of IRDs in DeFi.

If you want the summary, check out our X thread. The full report is below.

How To Make Cross-Chain Tokens Fungible Again: Part II

Fragmentation is Ethereum's biggest challenge right now.

There are several aspects to solving this issue. Making cross-chain tokens fungible is part of it. In the first part, we covered why bridged tokens lose fungibility and the challenges this creates.

In part two of the series, we cover ERC-7281 — the standard that fixes this while preserving security and sovereignty. If you want the X thread version, click here.

A Complete Guide to Uniswap V4

DEXes are a foundational primitive of DeFi.

Uniswap recently released its v4. It converts liquidity pools into a platform that can be customized further by developers. There are many more innovations with the v4.

This report is a deep dive into Uniswap v4. If you want a shorter version, here’s the X thread.

Can DeSci Save Science?

Science is a major driver of civilizational upgrades.

But Academia actually has some structural problems. Research incentives, funding inefficiencies, the capture of research publications, and more. Crypto might be able to help here.

Our latest article explores how decentralized science (DeSci) can help improve science. Here's the X thread as well.

🌍️ Ecosystem Updates

Ethereum Foundation leadership is changing. Aya Miyaguchi has transitioned to the President role. Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak is stepping up as co-executive directors.

Vitalik wants the Ethereum mainnet to ship Fusaka with PeerDAS 2025. This is a much faster timeline than what many people were expecting.

Holeski faced some issues after the Pectra fork on the testnet. This raised some concerns and devs are pushing the mainnet Pectra upgrade back.

Etherealize has added new cofounders to their team. Danny Ryan, who was in the Ethereum Foundation, and Grant have joined them.

ZKnox is a new advanced cryptography research organization backed by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. Their mission is to create open-source code that improves Ethereum.

Ethereum Foundation introduced The EF Silviculture Society. They're a collection of unpaid individuals who help EF connect with the community and get feedback.

Jokerace is conducting the Ethereum Brand hack competition. You can see many interesting Ethereum marketing proposals here.

Base is testing flashblocks on testnet. It'll allow Base to give users txn confirmations in ~200 milliseconds, which is 2x faster than Solana.

Growthepie is a great tool for tracking Ethereum L1 & L2 data. They've now added application-level metrics to the platform as well.

Backed brings stocks and ETFs to blockchains. They've launched $COIN stock on the Base chain. You can now buy $COIN like any crypto other asset.

Worldcoin introduced World Chat. It is a private messenger for humans, with free global payments built-in.

Warpcast introduced its own wallet. This will allow users to perform onchain actions like buying without leaving the application.

Michel and Matheus designed a version of Uniswap v2 for an AMM for a decentralized energy network. They proposed a mathematical framework for a local smart grid and defined key market-design properties for decentralized energy trading.

Aave is updating its tokenomics in its Aavenomics proposal. They're introducing many changes like using millions for massive token buybacks over the next couple of months and more.

Protocol Berg v2 is a technical conference focusing on protocol research, decentralized infrastructure, and core-developer experience. Researchers can now apply to speak or host a workshop on relevant topics.

🧪 Nerd Corner

Preconfirmations allow validators to guarantee transactions without fully completing the block. The new framework allows you to evaluate protocol designs for such preconfirmations.

The gas fee mechanism of Ethereum isn't perfect yet. There are significant gas inefficiencies in storage operations. The new solution claims to reduce these costs by about 30%.

Delayed execution decouples block validation from immediate transaction execution. Here are three delayed execution designs and their analysis.

Wallets currently display the transaction's input data as an incomprehensible hexadecimal-encoded string. A new post outlines a possible technique to address this issue.

Minimum extractible value is a big headache for all L1 users. There have been several proposed solutions. The new post explores "sealed transactions" to protect against MEV.

Encrypted memepools are designed to prevent MEV. Smart accounts can be used to validate that encrypted memepool rules are followed.

Centralized builders build a majority of blocks on Ethereum. A new suggestion is to build blocks using all Ethereum clients rather than specialized builders.

Rainbow staking unbundles various roles that the staking set should assume. A new research post is exploring the limits of a maximally unbundled staking set.

Various audit tools that leverage AI are being developed. CTFBnech is a new method for evaluating AI smart contract auditors.

The blob market is currently inefficient for small rollups with low L2 data throughput. Dynamic Blob Sizing is suggested as a potential solution. This is different from other solutions like Blob Sharing and Blob Aggregation.

Fraud-proof rollups should theoretically allow anyone to raise challenges. However, it creates several attack vectors using sybils. Dave Fraud-Proof Algorithm is a potential solution to these problems.

Peer-to-peer message passing is a critical operation of the ETH network. The new post suggests a way for all nodes to work together to decide whether to share or reject these messages.

Stackelberg attacks make use of smart contract commitments. While these aren't practical now, they could be feasible in the future. This post explores these types of attacks.

Gossipsub is a protocol for nodes to share messages. The proposed version introduces an efficient mechanism that removes duplicates. This can potentially double the blob count. Top Tweets

🐦️ Top Tweets

That’s a wrap for this week!

Got any suggestions to make the newsletter better? Just hit reply — I’d love to hear them.

Cheers,
Yayya