@MikeIppolito_ Shareholders own claims governed in court and token holders own variables in an unstoppable product governed in code

Name & Symbol: TokenFi ($TOKEN)
Address: 0x4507cef57c46789ef8d1a19ea45f4216bae2b528

New work with @ebfull on scaling Zcash and Zexe-derived protocols like Aleo and Aztec. zkSNARKs are now a (fantastic) commodity. They were always just one piece of the puzzle: building a secure protocol architecture for "shielded state" manipulation. https://t.co/uOSiNqNX6X

Name & Symbol: Aleo ($ALEO)
Address: 0x6cfffa5bfd4277a04d83307feedfe2d18d944dd2

There is often a saying in crypto that USDT, and now USDC, control the fork choice rule for Ethereum — in an event where there is a controversial chain split or proposed upgrade. Why? Well, they decide the value of the token trading onchain, and if they decide the token on the competing fork is not valuable, then DeFi will explode. With the rise of RWAs and array of stablecoins, it’ll be interesting to see how that governance evolves. It is somewhat a cooperative game — they all want to reach consensus on the same chain and rules, especially where there is a controversy. They’ll need to rely on some correlated signal that they can trust, that if followed, will ensure everyone agrees to the same thing. Will it be the largest RWA? Maybe a trusted foundation like the EF? A signal by the staked? It brings me back, many years ago to the block size wars, how miners would “signal” their intent and not make the decision on the upgrade. The signalling makes sense — since it is ultimately up to the user, and increasingly the entities that give value to tokens, an idea on what upgrade is coming and whether they’ll accept it. Governance — focused on people problems and preferences — technology to help coordinate but ultimately still people giving value and making the final decision.

Name & Symbol: Allo ($RWA)
Address: 0x9c8b5ca345247396bdfac0395638ca9045c6586e

There is often a saying in crypto that USDT, and now USDC, control the fork choice rule for Ethereum — in an event where there is a controversial chain split or proposed upgrade. Why? Well, they decide the value of the token trading onchain, and if they decide the token on the competing fork is not valuable, then DeFi will explode. With the rise of RWAs and array of stablecoins, it’ll be interesting to see how that governance evolves. It is somewhat a cooperative game — they all want to reach consensus on the same chain and rules, especially where there is a controversy. They’ll need to rely on some correlated signal that they can trust, that if followed, will ensure everyone agrees to the same thing. Will it be the largest RWA? Maybe a trusted foundation like the EF? A signal by the staked? It brings me back, many years ago to the block size wars, how miners would “signal” their intent and not make the decision on the upgrade. The signalling makes sense — since it is ultimately up to the user, and increasingly the entities that give value to tokens, an idea on what upgrade is coming and whether they’ll accept it. Governance — focused on people problems and preferences — technology to help coordinate but ultimately still people giving value and making the final decision.

Name & Symbol: Allo ($RWA)
Address: 0x9c8b5ca345247396bdfac0395638ca9045c6586e

I think the incredible early success of Plasma is ironically the best case study for why L2 architectures are superior. I know this seems awfully counterintuitive (and self-serving) so let me explain. Plasma has done a historic job in go-to-market and launch work. I don’t think any chain has attracted more TVL in its first week in history. Its users are comfortable with using the product and building alongside them and Tether. Yet, as the Plasma team notes in their docs, today they are the only ones that are currently running validators and there are no validator rewards live today. As part of their progressive decentralization, they will be onboarding external validators and the inflation rate rewarding those validators will be 5% annually to start. In other words, in order to secure and decentralize the system, Plasma (at today’s prices) is committing to spending more than $550 million, when their users and developers have signaled already it’s not really a conditional priority to deploying capital. Had Plasma launched an L2, they could have progressively decentralized (like most chains do) without having to commit to spending over a half a billion dollars a year. The L2 superpower is having security costs be variable as a % of transactions, not significant constant fixed costs. I don’t think that the experience of using Plasma would be any worse had the chain been an L2. It’s EVM, users are largely using the same apps that exist on rollups. It’s just a more cost effective way to get security. Congrats again to the Plasma team; but I think this shows the power of rollup architecture from a business operations perspective.

Name & Symbol: Plasma ($XPL)
Address: 0x405fbc9004d857903bfd6b3357792d71a50726b0