Aave/Morpho: A clash of different worldviews. Both design have their pros and cons.

Aave as an entity manages all the risk and also covers any loss. Aave needs deep expertise on all coins and the dynamic of their corresponding markets. You trust the brand, Aave, and they did a very good job of shielding users from risk.

Does it scale?

It has limits, as many different assets, crypto native and non crypto native ones come into existence. It's a jungle, and how should one entity have deep expertise about all assets?

Aave chose their risk parameters always on the safe side, and if they don't have the expertise, they don't list assets. Having risk parameters on the safe side also lowers the capital efficiency.

Morpho has dedicated, independent risk managers, which manage metamorpho vault and and create or attached markets to it, if it fits their risk profile. Risk managers can be specialized in markets and if you know markets well, you can choose more risky parameters for your markets, which makes it more capital efficient.

The pure Morpho way, would be that they only manage the protocol, maybe with a costume white label front end, where the risk managers use the infrastructure, but any hiccups do not affect the Morpho brand.

Now Morphos brand suffers from spill over of quality issues from one of the risk managers.

Does it scale?

It may scale better than Aave, but has reputation risk for Morpho, even if they are not risk manager. And: In an easy markets, users may flock to the risk manager who takes more risk, the same risk manager who are whipped out if the markets are in turmoil.

What out of questions: Aave and Morpho are both highly professional teams, Aave is battle tested over more than one cycle, while Morpho and risk managers on Morpho are still in the learning phase.

Curve has a lending market too, but Curve has always chosen the path to try to solve issues with technical solutions.

The benefit of soft-liquidation for users allows us to set conservative LTV values, because we don't compete to be the most capital efficient markets, but compensate users with the benefits of soft-liquidation which helps save their position in rough markets.

As tweet:
https://twitter.com/martinkrung/status/1783092537353248972

The forever cyclic nature of crypto

A nice version of this with some memes:

https://twitter.com/martinkrung/status/1746284429750730799

Or just as a wall of text:

The base of crypto is tokenization of for profit projects, in fact very early stage ventures, some are only ideas put on a sheet called whitepaper.

In a normal economy this kind of ventures never have tradable shares in the public. Most don't have investors at the stage, and if, only fools, friends and family.
In addition most tokens of these ventures don't have a use-case in that project, the token is only a virtual share of that project, in a sense like a NFT collection.

BUT: As the tokens have no fundamentals, no tokenomics and no use-case they are a perfect place for everyone's projections of how successful that venture will be.

Tokens are the perfect vehicle for speculation, where the mere narrative of a possible success is enough for others to buy and invest.

If the cycle is started, every player in this market: founders, teams, investors and early token buyers fuel the hype by telling the outsiders how their venture is changing the world and how big the potential will be.

Normies have close to zero chance to value this venture rationaly, they invest left and right, attracted by the gains early token buyers have made and brag around.

We all know how crazy these bull markets are, it's a form of collective euphoria and my bet will be for this cycle that the craze will be the same or maybe even bigger than all we have seen until now.

My personal top: if I start believing that this time everything will be different and numbers will never go down again, at that time I feel an urge to call all my friends and tell them they should invest and everyone will be a millionaire with me. This is the time myself and maybe you should sell everything, but it's so damn hard to do.

Then the wave breaks, first the multi-cyclers start to sell, the latecomers still filled with greed and hope for the next 10x.

BAM: suddenly it's 4 o'clock in the morning, the music stops and somebody turns on the light. At this point, even the most stupid participants in that cycle understands that the whitepepper he did read from that copy cat of a copy cat is worthless bullshit and the next bera with bloody infights and people losing the last shirt and more, has started. As the pile of bullshit is so big, it takes a long time to get rid of it.

To end the forever cycle tokenization of early stage projects would have to be banned, which will never happen and is impossible.

May be the zupercycle with you!

Crypto has slow innovation cycles. Here’s why:

Discuss here: https://twitter.com/martinkrung/status/1700040547698643342?s=20

Complexity of Technology

Given that every project is build on cryptography, fast iterations are challenging. Cryptography doesn't allow incremental adjustments easely. You can't have a semi-functional blockchain or smart contract – it either operates as intended, or it doesn't.

This contrasts with other software types, which can be improved upon incrementally while in use. For instance, if you're developing blogging software, you can release initial versions within days and refine it during users using it. In crypto just migration from one version to another is a major undertaking.

Misleading Signals in Product Usage

Crypto represents the merger of code and money. It's an industry standard to monetarily reward users. For instance, when you mine Bitcoin, you're often driven by the financial incentive rather than bitcoin beeing of use for you.

Many crypto projects heavily compensate their users. This leads to wrong data about the usage of the product. Users may engage with a product primarily for the payout, not its utility. Consequently, many projects never truly achieve a product-market fit, and those that do find it challenging to iterate swiftly due to the underlying technology.

Regulatory Hurdles

The fusion of code and money in crypto brings it into the arena of financial regulations, many of which are ill-suited for this new technology.

This misalignment often diverts innovation as projects modify their approaches to navigate these regulatory waters. A significant portion of the industry's energy goes into lobbying for regulatory adjustments. Traditional financial institutions leverage these regulations to protect their interests.

While older fields like AI aren't burdened by such legacy regulations, they have more influnce in crafting new ones. If you view crypto from a monetary business perspective, it operates within one of the world's oldest industries.

Limited Public Funding

Blockchain technology is one of the few fields where government public funding hasn't invested millions. In contrast, AI research, which spans more than 50 years, has benefited from extensive publicly funded research. Billions have been poured into AI over the past half-century. This hasn't been the case for crypto, with most successful projects being privately financed.

How to wrap ETH to WETH (on testnet or even mainnet)

How to wrap ETH to WETH on testnet

Look for the corresponding contract in this article:

https://blog.0xproject.com/canonical-weth-a9aa7d0279dd?gi=ad5edae916c4

For Rinkeby its: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/address/0xc778417e063141139fce010982780140aa0cd5ab

Go to the Contract > Write Contract and to connect your wallet, click on "Connect on Web3"

Go to function "5. deposit" and write the amount of ETH you would like to wrap to WETH, Click "Write" and wait until your tx is mined

History of hacks and incident in the crypto space

Bancor Hack (2020-06-16)

Short Version: A public call in the smart contract allowed anybody to withdraw token from the contract. The problem is not the function being public, the allowed input type has been set too general. Bancor did a white hat attack to withdraw all funds. Funds were lost by front running bots, not by hacker. Maybe part of it will be returned for a bug bounty.

What I think about this

It's crazy that an audit did not reveal this, because it looks like a trivial bug/mistake to me. It's not about logical problems, it's about allwod input type, if I am right (Not a smart contract dev myself). Bancor did fix this bug at June 13. It looks like the code fragment was introduced in one step, so like copy/past from another source?

Commit which introduced the bug:
https://github.com/bancorprotocol/contracts-solidity/commit/bd4060bf060cc55aaa11af86ec03a14026ee5b3d#diff-936d4cb65ef1b220e833b30f52f8d74f

Fix: https://github.com/bancorprotocol/contracts-solidity/commit/47d8663d720d49aed55710039875070d514baca4

At risk: $455,349
Lost: $135,229, not by the smart contract failure, but by some front running bot during white hat attack.
Solved: White hat attack and new contraced deployed
Code: https://github.com/bancorprotocol/contracts-solidity/blob/d4b1dc7b2e4d46a555b48ad34fd0fe235abad7b4/solidity/contracts/utility/TokenHandler.sol#L45-L47

Sources
I used these both sources for this short version:
https://blog.bancor.network/bancors-response-to-today-s-smart-contract-vulnerability-dc888c589fe4?gi=ccf539fc91b
https://medium.com/@1inch.exchange/bancor-network-hack-2020-3c71444fd59d

Parity Hack (2017-11-06)

"I accidentally killed it"
https://github.com/openethereum/openethereum/issues/6995

https://medium.com/solidified/parity-hack-how-it-happened-and-its-aftermath-9bffb2105c0

Gas Token on Ethereum

How a gas token works.

A gas token writes some garbage data on-chain and pays for this. Normaly you mint the gas token when gas price is low. (Around 1 Gwei). If gas price hight somebody destroys the gas token and ethreum pays back a refund and this refund can be used to pay for the gas cost of the including contract.

CHI

https://1inch-exchange.medium.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-chi-gastoken-a1ba0ea55bf3

To mint CHI:

  1. Go to https://etherscan.io/token/0x0000000000004946c0e9f43f4dee607b0ef1fa1c#writeContract
  2. Connect Metamask
  3. call mint with the number of chi token you want to mint
  4. set gas very low on tx and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait

GAS Token 2 (GST2), 19 September 2017

Creats contracts and deletes these for refund. Efficiency is 3.02

CREATE + SELFDESTRUCT is used for refund.

Read more on https://gastoken.iohttps://gastoken.io

https://etherscan.io/address/gst2.gastokenio.eth
https://etherscan.io/token/0x0000000000b3F879cb30FE243b4Dfee438691c04

GAS Token 1 (GST1) Mainnet 07 March 2018

Writes data to storage (SSTORE) and deletes these for refund. Efficiency is 2.60
SSTORE is used for refund.

https://etherscan.io/address/gst1.gastokenio.eth
https://etherscan.io/token/0x88d60255f917e3eb94eae199d827dad837fac4cb

Read more on GST2 and 1 GST1 https://gastoken.io

Gastoken on ETC

Gastoken also exists on ETC. And because ETC allows 0 gas transaction sometimes you can generate them for free!

Have look here for the GST2 on ethereum classic:

https://etcblockexplorer.com/address/0x0000000000b3F879cb30FE243b4Dfee438691c04

Here you see a 0 gas tx which mints a GST2 token:

https://etcblockexplorer.com/tx/0x87dec4adcd5702ed59acc7a7229dc23d6bcc9bf14e0388db3a97c20592dee9c5

ethereum addresses

A #DEFI whale (ampl in 2020 and yeld farming)

https://etherscan.io/tokenholdings?a=0x964d9d1a532b5a5daeacbac71d46320de313ae9c

Vanity address generator for ethereum over GPU:

https://github.com/johguse/ERADICATE2

Monolith

Monolith Token Chest

https://etherscan.io/address/asset-contract.tokencard.eth
https://etherscan.io/address/0x24F0bB6c9b2C3DB66603Fa0Ec07Ab0CF55cDd387
https://medium.com/monolith/tkn-101-the-community-token-8ba00a13fbc7

Monolith Token2fiat Wallet

https://etherscan.io/address/0xab613544d53173e65e75a2390f7512f6fe941257#analytics

MCDEX (MCB)

https://etherscan.io/token/0x4e352cF164E64ADCBad318C3a1e222E9EBa4Ce42

Eine Plattform für den Domainhandel über Blockchain

Post in english

Analyse

Der Markt für den Domainhandel ist ein sehr illiquider Markt mit hohen Hürden:

  • Die Preisbildung ist intransparent
  • Es sind hohe Vermittlungsgebühren fällig (Vermittlungsplattformen/Escrow)
  • Es werden Domains angeboten, die gar nicht verfügbar sind.
  • Domains werden zwar zum Kauf angeboten, der Verkäufer ist aber schwer oder gar nicht zu erreichen
  • Der Kauf muss über einen Treuhänder abgewickelt werden und der Domaintransfer ist relative einfach, jedoch für Laien schwer zu bewerkstelligen.
  • Da zum Teil erhebliche Summen im Spiel sind und die Verkaufsparteien sich nicht kennen, ergibt sich es ein hohes Betrugsrisiko.
  • Käufe sind häufig in International und darum ist eine rechtliche Absicherung schwierig / teuer / aufwendig.

Lösung

Ziel ist eine Handelsplattform ist es das Domains zu Fixpreisen verkauft werden und sobald eine Zahlung über den Smart-Contract eingegangen ist, der Domaintransfer ohne Zutun des Verkäufers initiiert werden kann. Der Smart-Contract hält den Kaufbetrag, solange in escrow, bis der Käufer den Domaintransfer abgeschlossen hat. Der Käufer selbst muss den Kaufbetrag plus ein Deposit leisten. Das Deposit erhält er nach Abschluss zurück und bringt den Käufer dazu den Domaintransfer und den Kaufabschluss über die Plattform zu bestätigen.

Legt der Käufer nach einem Zeitlimit keinen Wiederspruch ein, erhält der Verkäufer sein Geld und der Käufer sein Deposit zurück. Bestätigt der Käufer den Kaufabschluss und führt er den Transfer nicht durch, verfällt sein Deposit und er erhält den Kaufbetrag zurück.

Herausforderungen

  • Der Domaintransfer muss nach Abschluss über eine DNS Eintrag bestätigt werden. Der DNS Eintrag muss über ein Orakel in den Smart-Contract eindeutig eingelesen werden können. Diese Schnittstelle muss Betrugsicher sein.
  • Der Transfer (Unlock/Transfercode/AK/DNS Eintrag) muss immer noch vom Käufer abgewickelt werden – könnte aber gegen eine Fee von extern gemacht werden.
  • Der Markt ist vielleicht an Preistransparenz nicht interessiert.
  • Auch geklaute Domains können so verkauft werden.
  • Ausweitung: Auch Domain-Aukionen sind über Smart-Contracts gut machbar

Crypto-Quiz

Idea is to create a Crypto-Quiz with token/batch as reward.

Research

Quiz Engine, WP

Demo Page:

http://wp-pro-quiz.examresultz.in

Login here http://wp-pro-quiz.examresultz.in/wp-admin with

User: demo
Password:
demo@123

With Google Forms

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TCsJHOons6QZ9Im4qI5glmCsXHqaxNq8LxaICDHIOG4/

How to buil this from skratch:

https://www.raymondcamden.com/2018/01/22/building-a-quiz-with-vuejs

Example Questions

Whats the desired Blocktime for Bitcoin?

a) 10 Minutes
b) 10 Bitcoin
c) 2.5 Minutes

Whats POW ?

a) Proud of Work
b) Proof of Work
c) Proof of Word
d) Proof of Wast (1)

Thanks to @Tetranode https://twitter.com/Tetranode/status/1255931887219904512?s=20