About This is my internet notebook. I scribble thoughts, bookmark things, and post the occasional photo or video.

I’m not an Ethereum maximalist I sometimes get accused of being an Ethereum maximalist. I’m not. First let’s define what a maximalist is. Historically the definition was someone who thought that Bitcoin was the only chain that had any right to exist, and all other chains were scams. Now amusingly, aside from Ethereum, for most of the history of “blockchain,” I would argue that there’s some validity to that opinion. The non-Bitcoin chains up until Ethereum were very low quality. A few of them still survive, but…objectively they probably do not deserve to.

Second, let’s talk about our mental model. I’d say most people fall into one of 4 camps: 1) one chain accrues 100% of value, 2) one chain accrues 80% of value, 3) two chains accrue most value (eg, it appears that Andreas Antonopoulos focuses his energy on Bitcoin and Ethereum), or 4) it’s a true multi-chain world where many chains accrue value. I fall into the “one chain accrues 80% of all value” camp because I think Pareto-style power laws model most of the world around me. Now, which chain is likely to win that 80%? If you’re a hardcore “efficient markets hypothesis” person, then I suppose you’d say Bitcoin. There’s many problems with that of course. Probably the most important three: 1) Bitcoin is not sustainable, 2) Bitcoin has no path to sustainability, 3) Bitcoin seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever reach any legitimate scale. From where I sit, Bitcoin’s market cap is just a legacy of its first mover advantage combined with the fact that tech progress (scalability) has been slower than expected. The clear leader is Ethereum. Of course, while the lead is quite large, it’s not insurmountable. Current gas prices on ETH mean that some use cases will move to other chains. While many will move to the xdai chain as a stopgap, some may choose other chains and there’s always a chance that one use case or app explodes on another chain and becomes the “killer app.” Basically all the Ethereum competitors that are liquid today are already functionally dead. They have no fundamental innovation, few builders, and an even smaller number of users. These are the “ghost chains” that have been live for awhile and have billion dollar market caps but no reason to exist. The only scalability they provide is by trading off centralization, which means they will not accrue value in the long-term. Almost everything that raised money in 2017 or before is dead, but some of the chains going live this year may end up being valid Ethereum competitors.

What else will accrue long-term value? So my opinion is that Ethereum (or something like it) will accrue 80% of value. What will fight over the remaining 20%? More niche use cases. Things like storage networks, perhaps some chains that make different tradeoffs. Or perhaps most of the remaining 20% will simply be chains that change to anchor into Ethereum as layer2. What about “digital gold?” Bitcoin may accrue some chunk of the remaining 20%, much like gold accrues a small sliver of wealth in the current economy. Of course this depends on BTC eventually becoming sustainable.

In conclusion, as I’ve said before, while my bets may color my views, the reality is that my views determine my bets. Photo credit: from DeviantArt found by searching “free to use”



$EVAN tokenized sponsor slots update 1. When I started the Balancer pool to put my $EVAN tokenized sponsor slots on sale, I put 20 ETH into the pool. I have now withdrawn the excess liquidity over 20 ETH, so there is now again ~20 ETH of mine in the pool. The price has not changed: see point 4 below. Here’s a visualization of trades on the $EVAN Balancer pool from Pools.fyi 2. I’ve had one redemption so far for 4200 EVAN. That will be burned when gas prices aren’t so crazy. 3. All redemptions will be burned. 4. Withdrawing ETH without changing the price meant that I also withdrew ~537,753 $EVAN. I’m going to burn 333,000 of these (plus the 4200 already redeemed = 337,200 burned now). Why? Well the goal was always to sell the 4 sponsor slots (1 per Week in Eth News issue) that I had available through April 30, 2021. I added the other redemption options (and will add a few more soon™) because selling them on a curve meant that there would be partial newsletters bought. Currently there are a bit more than 170k tokens sold. 5. My goal is to burn at least 500k $EVAN (that’s 50% of the entire supply), though I can’t burn them all now so that there is some $EVAN left in the Balancer pool for liquidity, plus the EVAN i’ll keep for OTC (see point 7) Put differently: most of the token supply was minted solely due to the way automated market makers work.

6. My goal is still to sell those slots, though I’m not going to insist that people redeem before April 30th. 7. I’ll have enough $EVAN to sell those newsletter slots OTC at spot price. It is significantly cheaper to buy 87654 EVAN at spot, then to buy on the curve. Any tokens bought OTC will be burned.

Sorry if this was confusing. I bounced between assuming you understood automated market maker curves and not, so I get that it was likely confusing. I’ll write up a longer list of lessons learned that will perhaps be useful for anyone else wishing to tokenize their sponsor slots or ad space. Here’s the tldr: 1. Withdrew excess liquidity. 2. Burning 333k of the withdrawn tokens 3. Burning all tokens redeemed 4. Since the goal is always to sell newsletter sponsor slots, I’m keeping enough $EVAN to sell 2 newsletter sponsor slots OTC at the spot price.

24 hours of $EVAN token So my experiment in tokenizing Week in Eth News’s sponsor space has been…interesting.

The real yield farming is the jokes It’s been fertile ground for joke farming. I’ve made a lot of them, but my favorite comes from $EVAN community member Scott Lewis Basically most of my jokes (”$EVAN is money”) involve pointing out that $EVAN has intrinsic value while memecoins like $DOGE or $BTC do not.

An experiment in independent media It can get lost in the jokes, but I consider this an experiment in tokenizing a good. Originally, the idea came out of selling the remaining 4 weeks of sponsor slots for Week in Ethereum News. Then, I decided to add a few things like RTs, because I was worried about whether I picked the wrong curve on Balancer (I probably did, for the record, but…hindsight is easy). Specifically, by putting the slot on a curve, if someone thinks I’ve underpriced the sponsor slot, then they can go out and find someone and sell that slot to the prospective sponsor. Viewed in that lens, it puts the “sales commission” on an “automated market maker” so it’s transparent and dynamic. For me, the $EVAN token provides more potential attention to sponsors and because the token is available on the curve, it also means that the sponsor slot prices itself. So it solves two problems that I have: finding potential sponsors and figuring out what is fair to charge.

No redemptions yet is very disappointing to me No one has redeemed their $EVAN yet, which is disappointing to me. With the price going up so much (partly because I picked a curve which went up quite a bit at the (unexpected!) level of demand and partly because I think quite a few people bought the tokens as a donation to support Week in Eth News), the price is relatively high in USD and ETH terms. In fact, I now have people who want to buy sponsor slots, but do not want to pay the price of buying $EVAN on the Balancer curve.

It’s a frustrating problem. One solution I have is to add more redemption options, and that will likely be coming very soon. A different solution I am likely to explore is tokenholder votes.

Stay tuned. It’s an experiment. It’s been fun, but also surprisingly occupied more of my time and thoughts than I expected.

$EVAN is live on Balancer As I wrote a couple weeks ago, I’m going to do an experiment in tokenizing Week in Ethereum News’s sponsor space….plus some other stuff. With the help of Austin Griffith (eg, he made me use eth.build!), I have minted 1 million EVAN using OpenZeppelin Contracts v3 and put them all into a Balancer pool. You can buy $EVAN on Balancer https://balancer.exchange/#/swap/ether/0x89E3aC6Dd69C15e9223BE7649025d6F68Dab1d6a At the moment you can redeem my tokens (by sending to evan.ethereum.eth) in the following way Week in Ethereum News sponsor space* = 87,654 EVAN Be the guest on my soon to be launched podcast = 133,700 EVAN (this will obviously be disclosed) Retweets (keep in mind Twitter has a long history of suspending me for no reason) = 888 EVAN (purchased RTs will be disclosed in tweet replying to the RT) Schedule 30 minutes with me by Zoom = 4200 EVAN

Prices may be adjusted, though I currently don’t intend to. I don’t make any promises about liquidity on Balancer either, though I currently intend to provide liquidity for the forseeable future.

I reserve the right to refuse you for any reason, so price that into buying your EVAN. Nothing popularly considered to be a scam (Forsage, Hex, etc), nothing my wife wouldn’t be happy with (so no lascivious content), nothing that might possibly be illegal, etc. * Need to schedule at least a week in advance. You get to choose the image, the copy, etc. People sometimes ask me, “are you a maximalist?” Yes, I’m an $EVAN maximalist.

Twitter incompetence in one small image As of last night, I’m suspended from Twitter again. This is the ~7th time that my account has been suspended for no apparent reason - the last time they actually suspended my account within 1 hour of unsuspending my account. Here’s what you see if you search my account right now on Twitter. There are 3 fraudster imitations of me which are not suspended, and have never been suspended despite the fact that I reported them as fraud imitations (something my account got a lot of in the last crypto bull market). Most likely Bitcoiners are mass reporting my tweets to try to get my account suspended. And it keeps working. But wait, there’s more In January, I created @WeekInEthNews to be a specific account for the Week in Ethereum News. About 10 days ago, I logged on for the first time since account creation and uploaded a profile pic. Specifically, this one that Alexey somewhat jokingly created for me: On uploading that pic, the account was suspended. I immediately appealed, but of course I have heard nothing.

So now I have 2 suspended accounts which I am appealing. Meanwhile the fraudster accounts are still live. Twitter in a nutshell.

Tokenizing Week in Ethereum News sponsorship space Week in Ethereum News has 4 major sponsors, who provided me with the opportunity to continue to publish Week in Ethereum News. Thank you Celer Network, Chainlink, Trail of Bits and 0x! They each bought 12 issues spread out over a year. Basic math correctly suggests that I have 4 weeks to sell over that year (the next ~9 months). One thing I uncovered in early April while discussing with prospective sponsors is that many projects were willing to spend very significant money to pick a specific date because budgets are set around launch. So while I’ve had lots of people inquire about sponsoring the newsletter, I have been quoting people $10k for an issue. No one has bought yet, but I have put exactly zero effort into it - I’m haven’t even responded to a decent chunk of inquiries (been busy, sorry!). It must be the start of a parabolic move if I’m thinking about tokenizing the newsletter. Jokes aside, I think it’d be a neat experiment to create the token and then put it on a dex, Unisocks-style. If people think I’ve underpriced it, they may even buy a couple issues and then go sell sponsorships for me and flips the tokens at a profit. Decentralized sponsorship sales! Also, you’d be able to buy a fraction of a token which I think adds some interesting game theory. So here’s what I’ve bumped up against: Initial pricing isn’t super easy. Given that I’ve been quoting people 10k an issue, it would likely be high. But it can’t be too high if I do it on constant product because the price goes up fast. But it also shouldn’t be an auction. Should the token have an expiry date? One reason I never tokenized back in 2017 is that I was very uncomfortable even giving them away given that only I know whether newsletter will continue. The solution? Expiry date, which would likely be May 1, 2021. That is, the last issue they could possibly be used for would be whatever issue comes before then (given that i’ve been sending on Sunday, that would make it the April 25, 2021 issue) What if a scam wants to redeem the token for the sponsor space? (in case it wasn’t clear before, 1 token = 1 week, for the sponsorship slot you can see on weekinethereumnews.com right now). Imagine it’s 2017 and Bitconnect buys the token and wants to redeem for the sponsorship slot. I could take the money - it worked for CoinMarketCap! Alternately, I could make it super subjective: make the rule be that I’ll take any logo/copy which my wife is fine with, AND that I may add any language about how I think it’s a scam. This means any prospective token buyer has to weigh the fact that this is (obviously) a trusted offchain decision and I have generally been very picky with who I am willing to have sponsor the newsletter. I should probably not just create 4 tokens and put them in an AMM dex. The reason is that the 4th token would never sell. So the solution seems to be: put ~5 tokens in the dex pool and that feels very odd to me. Do I guarantee not to withdraw my liquidity? Especially as we get closer to an expiry date, that has very interesting game theory!

I’m going to keep mulling this. In the meantime, if you’d like to buy the sponsorship slot, get in touch.

No ConsenSys conflict of interest Since I occasionally see people who have some conspiracy theory about me and ConsenSys, let me state clearly: I do not have (and never had) any equity, options or other conflicts of interest with ConsenSys. I had a salary for a bit less than 3 years, with exactly zero pressure at any time to include or exclude anything in Week in Ethereum News.

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