researcher, mathematican, coder and start-up lover

Joined July 2016
The next AMM generation will likely be about MEV: Ideas as described here ethresear.ch/t/mev-capturing… allow AMMs to capture MOST OF THE MEV they are causing. This would generate new revenue for LPs and remove toxic mem-pool fights. 🧵
I don't think there's much alpha left in designing new AMM invariants The next generation of DEX features are going to be about fair execution and tx cost minimization, not new shapes for reserves curves
Herminator retweeted
Alexander Herrmann is in Cinema 6 presenting a new approach to auctions: Synchronized Priority Auctions. It’s all about MEV capture, trade execution, and syncing across AMMs. Built on “Priority is All You Need.”
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Herminator retweeted
Congratulations to these devs for winning the @UniswapFND prize for their UHI4 hooks 👏 - MEV capture: @o_herminator - IVT AMM: @whoislewys - Detoxer: @web3yurii - Weth++: @SocksNFlops
Such an UI for re-verification and re-simulation is simple and could be hosted by different providers or via ENS. "verification diversity" seems easier to build than "client diversity".
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I agree! One extra feature that would help a lot is to allow for easy verification and re-simulation of the tx-payload that was signed by previous signers on an external website. Even a fully compromised backend/UI can not fake what has been signed to the external site!
People see an incident and say: “Oh, that would have been easy to fix. Just do XYZ.” And they are right about that one. But actually, to fix the next incident you need to fix ALL POSSIBLE INCIDENTS SIMULTANEOUSLY which is like 1000x harder.
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TLDR's call for submissions will be open for one more week. Submit your theoretical results, empirical analyses & software implementations by February 14. 🔗 thelatestindefi.org/conferen…
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GIF
Excited to see the vision of McAMMs being realized by many teams via hooks. Let's gooo... Can't wait to see the first real world analysis of the new LPing experience.
Uniswap v4 is here🦄 Users can LP on v4 through the Uniswap web app and swapping is rolling out over the coming days on web and wallet as liquidity migrates to v4 Live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, Base, BNB Chain, Blast, World Chain, Avalanche, and Zora Network
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🔈 Announcing TLDR's 2025 Conference: May 12-13! Submit your research on DeFi, its underlying infrastructure & governance. Our mission is to showcase new theoretical results, empirical analyses & software implementations. Learn more: thelatestindefi.org/conferen…
Reducing solo staker capital requirements drastically—exciting!
Introducing SOLO: a protocol that lets anyone run an Ethereum validator with just 1.25 ETH instead of 32 ETH. It enables an LST backed by the portion of a validator's stake unlikely to be lost, without relying on governance or trusted hardware. Here's how it works 👇
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Super stoked to research the MEV-L2 landscape. Looking forward to work with this excellent team!
Replying to @thelatestindefi
Fellow: @o_herminator Council: @danrobinson Mentor: @ciamac Alex is an independent researcher focused on advancing DEFI. He and Diego will be designing a MEV-resistant solution for L2s that significantly hardens the sequencer by enabling censorship-resistance and releasing a prototype using the OP Stack.
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Sooo OG, sooo knowledgeable.
Be like @edmundedgar and share your experiences with the community at the DappCon! 🤩
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This is a great chance for all solidity devs go get some 👀 on their code.
I’m betting $500 that I will find at least a single Medium/High severity issue in your Solidity protocol’s code in 24hrs Try me, weak devs, this will be the easiest cash ever😈
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Custom GPTs are quite cool. This one helps you with improving your pronunciation for a talk, or just in general. Just opening the OpenAi-App on the phone and read/speak your text. It will recognise words that are pronounced unconventional: chat.openai.com/g/g-kDNjhnIx…
The GENES1S collection of our streetwear brand is live. Five high-quality, 100% cotton garments made locally in Portugal: pastelle.shop RT this tweet & follow us to get whitelisted for our first NFT airdrop with a chance to receive free merch! More details below
I love my pastelle shirts ❤️
The GENES1S collection of our streetwear brand is live. Five high-quality, 100% cotton garments made locally in Portugal: pastelle.shop RT this tweet & follow us to get whitelisted for our first NFT airdrop with a chance to receive free merch! More details below
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Herminator retweeted
Great news! XTX Markets has just announced the launch of the Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize (AI-MO Prize), a $10 million challenge fund. This initiative is designed to accelerate the development of AI models for mathematics. aimoprize.com
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RT @silkenoa: The development of decentralised secure oracle + adjudication mechanisms are fundamental to #web3, but most attempts only off…
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Agreed that smart contract implementation risks are a big unsolved problem for Defi. Here is an ethresear.ch post on how to contain security issues affecting contracts deployed on an L2. ethresear.ch/t/recovering-fr…
Smart contract implementation risks remain the biggest unsolved problem of Defi. L2s are equally affected. Let me pitch an idea: L1 Fork as the Court of Final Appeal. First, why existing solutions don't work: 1) Time-locked upgrades are great for scheduled changes, but obviously don't work for emergency situations. 2) Converting to an alt L1s only adds more problems and solves nothing. Even though an alt L1 can be forked, assets bridged over from Ethereum cannot, and the fork choice resolution is no different than an upgrade problem. See this thread for example: nitter.net/gluk64/status/16… 3) Security councils can mitigate the problem, but not solve it. Any gov multisig empowered with emergency upgrade rights poses regulatory and security risks of a different kind, rendering a Defi system immature (@ChrisBlec won't let us forget about it). 4) Combined gov mechanisms are better: a security council could only freeze the contract temporarily, requiring a token governance approval for an emergency upgrade. But now a malicious majority of undercollaterized stakers could perform an evil take-over upgrade and steal all the assets. L1s don't face the same problem because they are forkable: any user can opt-in into the fork branch which they subjective believe to be correct and canonical. This doesn't work for L2s and Defi protocols, unfortunately, because we can't fork underlying native assets bridged from L1 (such as ETH). Or can we? What if we forked the L1 itself and let the L1 social consensus resolve an issue for a specific protocol? This is tempting and perfectly possible technically, but creates two problems. First, it would only work for large protocols – for the smaller ones, L1 users will likely not bother to take any action. But second, even with the big protocols, we run into a risk of overloading L1 social consensus, which Vitalik has explicitly warned against: vitalik.ca/general/2023/05/2… Now, hear me out. What if we built a hierarchical system of onchain courts similar to the real-world judiciary? Every protocol will have its own governance with normal and emergency upgrade mechanisms defined. The protocol must also designate a special contract that serves as an instance of appeal. We'll need a standard ERC interface for it. For an emergency upgrade there must be an appeal period, during which anyone can submit a challenge to the higher court. They will have to put a pre-defined bail deposit. This court can then cancel the emergency upgrade (and do nothing else). Different courts will have different members, prices and reputation, in a completely decentralized manner. Each court will also have to specify the a higher court where any decision can be appealed – until at some point we reach the Ethereum Supreme Court. The decision of this smart contract can only be determined by a (technically soft) fork of the L1. Of course, anyone can deploy a contract like this, and there is no guarantee that the users will bother to soft-fork. So the idea is to form a social consensus argound this idea, and deploy a "canonical" instance of the court that be configured to be so expensive to use, that only truly extrodinary cases will be brought before it, and thus will likely be worthy of the attention of the entire Layer-0 (the social consensus) of Ethereum. Think of a bug in @Uniswap, a major L2, a Defi protocol with a systemic risk, etc. The most important function of such a system will be to protect protocols against political inference from the outside. It will serve as a great deterrence mechanism, and will elevate the role of Ethereum as a powerful network state. What do you all think? Is anyone working on something like this already? We at @zksync will be more than happy to fund such a research.
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Imagine suddenly we have a non-manipulable crypto oracle. What would you build with it? Would it enable new use cases for you?
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