Hi,

With the $LIBRA disaster last week, I hoped memecoin would die.

Nope. The degeneracy only got worse. Someone actually committed suicide and asked people to make memecoin. Guess what? Degens actually did it.

Then there's Ye (aka Kanye West). He's tweeting about crypto. Seems like he's getting ready for a token launch as well. There are rumers that he sold the account as well.

Oh, and the biggest crypto hack in history just happened. I’ll cover that later in the newsletter.

Let's start!

📖 2077 Research

Flatcoins: The Stablecoins With Their Own Price

Stablecoins are the most succussful product with consumer utility.

However, it is still tied to TradFi. We need stable tokens that are not pegged to any traditional currencies. They're called flatcoins.

This article briefly explores the evolving concept of stablecoins and their limitations and delves deep into the emergence of flatcoins.

Optimizing Ethereum Gas Efficiency With Multidimensional EIP-1559

Ethereum's gas pricing isn't optimal.

Transactions take up different kinds of resources: computation, storage, and calldata. But current gas model, EIP-1559, charges a single fee for all resources. This is inefficient.

Multidimensional EIP-1559 fixes this.

DeSci: The Blockchain-Based Academic Revolution That Isn't (Yet)

Dark pools aren’t some underground criminal gangs. They’re trading systems that allow investors to trade privately.

These are especially important for institutions and high-networth individuals. If they don’t do it privately, the market dynamics surrounding such massive orders will have many toxic impacts.

Bybit Hack & the Dumb FUD Storm

Normally, this is where I introduce a cool new application. But this week, something bigger happened—the biggest crypto hack ever.

Bybit, one of the top centralized exchanges, got wrecked. Hackers stole around $1.5 billion in ETH and its liquid staking tokens (LSTs).

The attack? A front-end spoofing exploit. The attackers tricked Bybit’s multisig signers into approving what looked like legitimate transactions. But behind the scenes, those transactions were funneling funds straight to the hackers.

ZackXBT, crypto's chief detective soon found the culprit: Lazarus Group, the north korean hacking group.

These attacks were similar to recent major hacks, like those against WazirX, Radiant Capital, and DMM Bitcoin. So this wasn't unprecedent. And it was a opsec error from Bybit.

Despite the disaster, Bybit actually handled things pretty well. They were transparent, covered the losses, and made sure withdrawals kept running smoothly. Considering the scale of the attack, that’s commendable.

Then came the dumbed part: ETH FUD

Instead of focusing on security lessons, some people decided to use this hack as an excuse to spread ridiculous FUD about Ethereum.

Arthur Hayes sparked it. He suggested Ethereum should hard fork to recover funds from North Korea.

And that was all BTC Maxis needed to kick off a fresh round of anti-ETH propaganda. Here are some of the brain-dead takes floating around:

• If ETH doesn't hard fork, they're funding North Korea.

• Old-school FUDs like Vitalik controlling Ethereum resurfaced.

• Some were calling for rollbacks. (Btw, Ethereum Rollback isn't possible.)

• Some people even wanted governments to go after Vitalik. (Seriously?)

Of course, this is all nonsense. Ethereum isn’t going to hard fork just because Bybit messed up. If you want a detailed rebuttal to these claims, click here.

Even Solana's co-founder took the opportunity to FUD Ethereum.

But thankfully, most of Crypto Twitter saw through the FUD and didn’t take the bait.

What's next?

Well... Ethereum will go on as is. Since the hack, the price has been great as well. Tether and Mantle have already frozen North Korea’s stolen funds in USDT & cmETH.

Bybit will have to eat the loss. They've promised ~$140M for fund recovery. But let’s be honest — that money is long gone.

As for us? We’ll move on, hopefully, we won't blindly sign txns anymore.

Learn more:

• Rekt.news coverage

• Track stolen funds on Measleuth

• Bybit hacker on Arkham Intelligence.

🌍️ Ecosystem Updates

Vitalik proposed to host Ethereum Devconnect 2025 in Argentina.

Stateless Consensus released Ethereum Stateless Book. It's a deep dive into every protocol change towards statelessness.

Fuel Network released an in-depth guide to their decentralized sequencer design. They've made hardware requirements low for wide participation as well.

Aztec announced up to $150K in funding for cross-chain apps that extend Aztec’s privacy and decentralization guarantees to other L2s.

Swellchain has announced rewards for builders in sectors like decentralized AI and AVS infrastructure. Click here to learn more.

Immutable is a chain focused on GameFi. Here's a long list of games set to launch on Immutable in 2025 Q1.

Ethdotorg teased the interactive roadmap of Ethereum. It should make it easier for the community to understand the roadmap.

StraitsX shipped XGUSD on Arbitrum. Its a stablecoin that is pegged to the Singapore Dollar and Indonesian Rupiah.

ETH Community store is live. Proceeds from the sales would go to support Ethereum Public Goods.

🧪 Nerd Corner

Ethereum Foundation announced Open Intents Framework. It's a modular framework to make it seamless for any chain to get intents into the hands of users & improve cross-chain UX.

Preconfirmations are necessary to provide a "fast" experience for based rollup users. New research shared a framework for pricing preconfirmations.

High number of blobs included in a block can slow down processing for local block builders. Max-blobs flag helps local builders limit the number of blob transactions.

Block proposer selection is important for any L1 blockchain. New research is setting direction for a general model for proposer selection mechanism design.

Quantum threat is a future vulnerability for L1 blockchains like Ethereum. The third post in a series on post-quantum signature scheme for Ethereum is out.

Ethereum has plans to eliminate state and history from validator duties. An enshrined L2 for long-term storage is proposed as a dedicated storage layer for Ethereum.

Data availability sampling is a method for scaling blobs. A new research post goes into the benefits of using relay-based data availability sampling.

Multi-agent applications will have multiple interacting autonomous agents. A dynamically programmable environment with an intent-centric settlement system can enable this.

🐦️ 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