By Nancy, PANews

Recently, after the Blockchain identity platform Humanity Protocol announced that it had received $30 million in financing at a valuation of $1 billion, the CEO was revealed to have founded a unicorn company Tink Labs and went bankrupt, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of investors' funds to be lost. At the same time, Worldcoin, which also belongs to the DID track, is controversial due to the upcoming huge Token unlock, global regulatory setbacks, and the failure of OpenAI's blessing effect.

The new unicorn Humanity Protocol is off to a bad start, Worldcoin is mired in word-of-mouth and business development difficulties, and the two major $1 billion market capitalization unicorns in the DID track are facing a new test.

**DID protocol using ** palm recognition technology, CEO Zeng Zhi founded a former unicorn company bankrupt **

Humanity Protocol is considered to be the same track project as Worldcoin.

Established in 2023 as a Polygon CDK-based identity system, Humanity Protocol was developed by the Human Institute, Animoca Brands, and Polygon Labs to provide an accessible and non-intrusive way to build human proofs in Web3 applications. Humanity Protocol plans to launch a testnet in the second quarter of this year, and its waiting list has exceeded 510,000 people.

In terms of biometrics, unlike Worldcoin, which uses iris scanning, Humanity Protocol uses palmprint recognition, which is considered a less intrusive authentication scheme. However, iris recognition has the advantages of uniqueness, stability and non-replicability of identity recognition compared with palmprints, and has more advantages than other biometric technologies in terms of comprehensive security performance, and due to the high requirements for the accuracy and stability of this technology, the difficulty of development and the cost of research and development are also large.

In terms of complete ownership of user data and identity, Humanity Protocol, like Worldcoin, has introduced zk-SNARKs technology; In terms of financing background, Worldcoin has completed longing rounds of luxury financing, but its valuation of 1 billion has been realized in Series A financing, and Humanity Protocol has also completed longing rounds of financing. At present, Humanity Protocol has officially announced that it has received a $30 million seed round led by Kingsway Capital and participated by long 200 institutions including Animoca Brands, Blockchain.com and Shima Capital, and has raised about $1.5 million among a group of KOLs, according to PANews, the KOL round is valued at $60 million.

Not only that, but Humanity Protocol is just as easy to access on smartphones as Worldcoin. The project will release an app that uses a phone camera to scan palm prints for identity verification, and will later introduce another layer of security, using a network of palm veins and a small infrared camera for identification. In the future, this system is expected to be applied to the KYC process of financial platforms, and even to enter physical places such as hotels and office buildings through palm prints. In addition, Humanity Protocol plans to issue tokens to pay for verification fees.

Commenting on the launch of the project, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal commented that Humanity Protocol is not only truly resistant to Sybil attacks, but also natively integrates verifiable credentials into a network of Decentralization validator Nodes, laying the foundation for building a wider range of Blockchain and real-world applications.

After attracting market attention due to its high valuation, Terence Kwok, CEO of Humanity Protocol, was later reported by foreign media Protos to reveal that the smartphone company that had almost bankrupted its $1.5 billion valuation and burned $170 million of investors' funds.

It is understood that Terence Kwok founded Tink Labs, headquartered in Hong Kong in 2012, with 12 million users worldwide, and has received joint investment from FIH Group (a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group), Kai-Fu Lee's Innovation Factory and Meitu Chairman Cai Wensheng, mainly to provide hotels with smartphones for guests to use during their stay, with the goal of providing guests with an alternative to roaming fees to improve their hotel experience and sell the collected customer preference data. Interestingly, one of the reasons behind Tink Labs' acquisition of heavyweight shareholders is that Terence Kwok's father, Guo Desheng, is a former Goldman Sachs star private banker, and his major clients include Lee Shau Kee, Kwok Henian and other super-wealthy.

According to the Financial Times, Terence Kwok began to lose money for longest reasons, including aggressive expansion policies, roaming fees becoming cheaper and more popular, and hotels not wanting to pay for the phones he gave away, with losses of nearly $200 million in 2017 and 2018 alone, and then a liquidity crisis. SoftBank, an investor in Tink Labs, was concerned that the company was "moving funds from the Japanese joint venture to other regions to maintain operations," forcing the company to abruptly halt a major project, according to a former employee. Kwok allegedly struggled to pay its employees and contractors and eventually made mass layoffs before closing Tink Labs on August 1 of that year. In January 2020, Tink Labs' European division began liquidation, followed by bankruptcy proceedings.

The former head of HR operations at Tink Labs said, "I never thought it would last, but I didn't expect it to close so soon, Kwok only cares about 'making money.'" According to a previous report by Fortune Insight, Terence Kwok also said during the startup of Tink Labs, "Once the business fails, you can return to school, the opportunity cost is the lowest, and starting a business for three months is like studying an MBA." ”

Worldcoin** is about to unlock large Tokens, facing regulatory investigations in longest countries**

While Humanity Protocol is being hotly debated in the market, Worldcoin is in dire straits due to issues such as Token unlocking, regulation, and insider cash-outs.

According to the analysis released by Decentralized Finance researcher @DefiSquared on the X platform recently, Worldcoin may become the largest wealth transfer event in this cycle, and Worldcoin has a serious inflation problem, with a fully diluted market capitalization of Token WLD as high as $60 billion, which depreciates by 0.6% per day due to the token issuance of issuance and operator claims, and the unlocking volume of WLD will increase significantly in the next few months, which may lead to a large-scale sell-off.

According to @DefiSquared analysis, on the one hand, the supply of WLD will increase by 4% every day once Worldcoin's VC and the team's Token start unlocking. According to Token Unlocks data, WLD will face $31.5 million per day selling pressure starting July 24 (based on May 16 prices).

At the same time, not long ago, Worldcoin revealed on its blog that World Assets, a subsidiary of the foundation responsible for token issuance of the project, will sell 500,000 to 1.5 million WLD per week for private sale for the next six months, with a maximum value of $179 million at current value. @DefiSquared pointed out that this portion of the Token is equivalent to 16.7% of the existing circulating supply (based on 210 million Circulating Supply on May 16) and is sold at a discount, with this portion of the WLD Token supply being used to sell to counterparties for the benefit of the Foundation.

"Worldcoin's Token Economics model was designed from the start to be predatory to benefit teams and early investors. In December last year, the foundation even deliberately terminated the market maker contract (note: Worldcoin previously announced that it would terminate the protocol with 5 market makers on December 15, 2023), allowing the price to be squeezed up at a low Circulating Supply. "According to CoinGecko's latest research data, WLD is one of the four encryption projects with the lowest circulating supply among the top 300 market capitalization**. In this regard, @DefiSquared believes that this manipulative design of low liquidity and high valuation directly benefits insiders, as they can lock in shares through contracts and OTC Trading Hedging high valuations before unlocking.

In addition, @DefiSquared also noted that most long retail investors may not even know that Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) is no longer actively involved in Worldcoin and that the project has no relationship with OpenAI. According to a Bloomberg report in April this year, at that time, Worldcoin was looking for cooperation with tech giants such as OpenAI.

It is worth mentioning that Worldcoin is also facing regulatory bans or investigations in longest places around the world such as Spain, Portugal, South Korea and Hong Kong due to user data privacy issues, so Worldcoin's main supporters not only met with relevant governments to improve government relations, but also open source iris recognition inference system this year to enhance transparency and implement a new personal data self-custody strategy, and recently open source the new SMPC system and securely delete old iris code to help improve biometric data security. Similarly, for Humanity Protocol, it may also face regulatory issues arising from the collection of user data.

Author: Minta

1/n (continuous update) Open a post to record the secondary idea of Crypto & AI Web3 & AI Sector layering is similar to Web2, the data layer/Computing Power layer is the lowest infrastructure, then to the model layer, the service layer/agent layer, and finally to the application layer.

2/n Narrative From a narrative point of view, the lower the degree of standardization/homogeneity of the track, the greater the probability of alpha. For example, the Computing Power layer and GPU are homogeneous, so the Computing Power project side is mainly in the volume gameplay/GTM/Computing Power asset derivatives. The least standardized segments are: model layer, data layer, and agent layer.

3/n Model Layer The model layer is a track with very large variables, and the emergence of a new model can quickly change the market landscape. For example, OpenAI's GPT-4o opens up endless possibilities for new ways of human-computer interaction. Microsoft's release of Phi-3 and Apple's release of OpenELM on Hugging Face have both fast-tracked the process of mobile training. From a second-level perspective, large variables = high chance of non-consensus = high chance of alpha.

4/n Model Layer A good model platform has at least the following characteristics: 1. Model composability: support for longing large model rotation, rather than a single large model; 2. Need to understand/be compatible with the business logic of Computing Power resources; 3. Supervised Calculation/Model Scoring In summary, supporting the call of hybrid model libraries and Tools APIs, and being compatible with Computing Power resources, is the model platform that can cross the bull and bear.

5/n The current Top1 of the Bittensor Case model layer is undoubtedly Bittensor, in order to create an Incentive Layer, what exactly did Bittensor do right? A brief recap of Bittensor's Timeline (incomplete statistics): 1. Before October 23: Precipitating the community during the testnet; 2. Gradually open subnet registration in October 23: from the first batch of 9 subnets to 32 subnets; Gradually expanded to 64 subnets in May 24;

6/n Bittensor Case 3. Follow the ecological adjustment incentive model: from the universality of incentives to the survival of the fittest through incentives, such as: (1) The Halving time is advanced, and the first Halving is adjusted from 25 years to 23 years; (2) Tokenomics adjustment, the direct incentive distribution ratio of the subnet is completely left to the market to decide, adding more longer dimensions of the game; 4. Slowly form a flywheel effect

7/n Bittensor Case From a second-level perspective, the "wealth creation effect" that Bittensor has successfully created is very crucial. Several of Bittensor's decision-making inflection points have stepped on the Node of the time when liquidity surged. Successively expanding the number of subnets during Sep-Nov '23 to provide a large number of buys; At the same time, combined with its special stake mechanism, it has quickly promoted the pump of Token prices, and then attracted more long projects to register as subnet, forming a virtuous circle. Therefore, you will find that the subnet registration fee is the best weather vane for the $TAO price, and the subnet registration peak and the price peak always appear one after another.

8/n Bittensor Case As of this writing, the top 8 Bittensor staking are shown in the figure. The top 8 stakers have a combined Staking Rate of 61.2%, and the total Staking Rate of the projects is 84.61%. At present, MC is 2.5B, and it is estimated that MC can reach 10B+, and only need to predict the staking situation of large investors to complete the price estimate.

9/n Bittensor competitors For Bittensor's competitors of the same type, the problem of high entry barriers needs to be solved, and the current subnet registration fee of TAO is still not low; And it is necessary to rely on strong BD capabilities to roll out a large number of models in a short period of time, and do a good job of market capitalization management at the same time. Some of the early projects are:

@communeaidotorg, @zero1_labs, @arbius_ai, etc., are doing similar things, and if their ecology expands rapidly, it may be a good entry point.

10/n Bittensor competitors Take Commune as an example, which is the entrepreneurial project of the core builder of the TAO ecosystem, compared with TAO: 1. Commune has a lower barrier to entry, making it easier for Dev to register modules; 2. Commune's incentive system is greatly simplified/deleted, and decision-making relies on a simpler voting system; Overall, there are currently no projects in the second tier that can compete with Bittensor in the short term.

The 11/n model layer is not coin the project alternative @Nimble_Network a global orchestration layer is built to achieve general artificial intelligence operation and full-link access; @Gatling_X launched an EVM that supports computing scenarios; @ritualnet long a holistic approach, from incentivizing the network, to linking distributed computing devices, model hosting, sharing, inference, optimization, etc., to accessing the model's API layer, as well as censorship resistance and privacy.

In the wave of longing of digital assets, the NFT market has been at the forefront of innovation and change. Especially on the Solana network, an NFT marketplace called Blob is quickly attracting a lot of attention from the industry.

At the beginning of May, the Blob team successfully inscribed the rune "EPIC•EPIC•EPIC•EPIC" on the fourth Halving Block of the Bitcoin, which caused the Floor Price of the Blob NFT to soar to BTC.0699 in a short period of time. According to Magic Eden data on May 5, the floor price of the blob has reached an all-time high, reaching 0.07555 BTC (about $4807).

How BLOB, an NTF with its unique art style, gained popularity on Solana is what we will try to explore next.

If you're a regular Twitter user, you may have noticed a unique phenomenon these days: your timeline is occupied by a series of images adorned with explosive symbols 💥💥. These eye-catching images are often accompanied by short labels, such as #SendBlob or #BlobArmy, as if a mysterious force is rapidly spreading online, but the meaning behind these images remains a mystery to outsiders.

The images represent an NFT project that has gained a lot of attention on the Bitcoin network – BLOB, short for "Bitcoiners Love Bitcoiners." In the technical world, "BLOB" refers to "Binary Large Object", a term used to describe how large strings of data are processed and stored. More than just a digital collectible, the BLOB project was co-founded by @Elocremarc and @nurorealm, veteran members of the Ordinals community, to create a long community of scientists, artists, digital punks, and developer community leaders.

The highlight of the project is its free inscription strategy and unique approach to community engagement. Early on, the project team prioritized Ordinals OG members, artists, developers, and OG collectors in the Allowlist allocation, encouraging them to create and tweet BLOB artworks, so the wide spread of these works was one of the main reasons why BLOB quickly became popular. Many users have already received Airdrops from BLOB, and those who have not received them are also paying close attention, looking forward to the opportunity to publicly inscribe.

Each BLOB creation is not a simple static image, but achieves a unique dynamic effect by embedding HTML, CSS, and Java code directly on the Blockchain. This design allows BLOB artworks to dynamically retrieve inscription IDs and Metadata through recursive endpoints as they acquire and process Blockchain data in real time, bringing these artworks to life.

What's more worth mentioning is that BLOB is extremely interactive. The complex script allows these artworks to respond to the audience's participation, constantly changing and evolving, not only as a visual pleasure, but also as a new interactive experience. This is further confirmed by feedback from the community and longing media effects, making BLOB not just an NFT project, but an all-encompassing art and technology revolution.

BLOB has risen not only because of its novelty, but also because of the technological innovation and strong community support behind it. With the proliferation of NFT projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem, BLOB has broken through with its unique "grotesque" charm and innovative technology, indicating that it may become one of the most high-profile projects this year.

With the rapid evolution of the NFT market, projects such as Blob have become more than just collectibles of digital art, but also a fusion of community, technological innovation and cultural expression. The Blob project's success on the Bitcoin network, along with its unique interactive artwork, is a prime example of this integration.

Just as global tech giants are laying out the Metaverse and seeking to occupy a place in the next generation of the Internet, NFTs also play an important role in this process. As an emerging symbol of encryption culture, NFT is not only an object of investment, but also an expression of personality and identity.

In the future, as more long people begin to recognize and appreciate the unique value of this new digital asset, we can expect projects like Blob to not only compete with NFT projects in top markets, but also drive the growth and development of the entire market while providing more long value to users. Globally, as technology advances and communities expand, Blob and other NFT projects are expected to continue to demonstrate their unique charm and potential to lead us into a richer and more long digital future.

Original author | Bankless

Compile | Golem

The development of Bitcoin ushered in an explosive rise. New concepts such as Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 are coming into focus. This marks a major shift in the Bitcoin ecosystem, which is evolving from a focus on BTC as an asset, to a more vibrant ecosystem for people to use, build, and speculate.

Within the Bitcoin ecosystem, L2 is now the new hot topic. Everyone wants a piece of Bitcoin L2, but what exactly are we hyping it about? In this article, we will look at Bitcoin L2 from a global perspective and answer key questions about Bitcoin L2: the necessity, current situation, future prospects, and ultimate destination of Bitcoin L2.

Why Bitcoin needs L2

The Bitcoin network is designed with a focus on security and decentralization, but trade-offs are made in the scalability of its network. While this makes BTC a more valuable asset, it also means that the Bitcoin network is not the ideal infrastructure for building financial applications, as evidenced by the birth of Ethereum.

For nearly a decade, the Bitcoin community has struggled with scalability, with fees reaching tens of dollars during peak on-chain transactions. And now, thanks to experiments such as Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20, etc., the demand for Bitcoin Block short has reached new heights:

• Ordinals caused Bitcoin fees to pump by 280% during the year in December 2023;
• Since the launch of Runes, its volume accounts for 68% of total Bitcoin volume;
• BRC-20 has led to the long spike in Bitcoin Money Laundering in the past year, with these Money Laundering accounting for 74% of the Block Reward at one point.

Bitcoin's vision is to become a universally accessible and widely adopted coin. To achieve this, it must scale to handle more long transaction demands without burdening each transaction with high fees. The rise demand for Bitcoin Block short underscores the need to expand Bitcoin while also reflecting the intrinsic need for Bitcoin L2.

The current state of Bitcoin L2

The Bitcoin community has been actively improving the scalability of transactions for longing years. An important development in this area is Lighting Network – a payment channel protocol that aims to enable faster and cheaper transactions by processing them outside of the Bitcoin Mainnet. Although the Lighting Network has long been the flagship solution for Bitcoin's scalability vision, the community is increasingly aware of its limitations. There is a growing consensus that the Lighting Network may not be the ultimate scaling solution for Bitcoin and that Bitcoin needs a better L2.

Eric Wall discussed the need to improve L2 in a recent episode of Bankless, suggesting that Bitcoin's scalability could go beyond what the Lighting Network can currently offer in the future.

BitVM's trust-minimization commitment

For now, the focus is on BitVM, a new model for executing Turing Complete contracts on Bitcoin that could pave the way for optimistic rollups on Bitcoin.

The main reason the community considers BitVM to be superior to other scalability options is its compatibility with Taproot upgrades. This means that BitVM can be deployed without further modifications to the Bitcoin network, being able to retain the existing rules of the Bitcoin network. It's a win-win situation for all kinds of people in the Bitcoin community.

BitVM's approach involves executing transactions off-chain and verifying those transactions on-chain with fraud proof during the challenge window, a mechanism similar to Ethereum's optimistic rollups.

The system can operate even with only one validator, but its trust assumption is that there must always be at least one honest validator in the system capable of detecting and broadcasting malicious transactions. However, this also means that if all validators are compromised, the integrity of Bitcoin will be at risk, as attackers can post fraudulent transactions on the network.

Simplified BitVM operation diagram. Source: The Bitcoin L2 Opportunity

BitVM only allows the creation of trust-minimized Bitcoin L2s, such as optimistic rollups, and not trustless Bitcoin L2s, such as ZK-Rollups. In addition, similar to the optimistic rollup on Ethereum, BitVM faces issues such as the prolonged controversy and the fact that operators must lock up large amounts of capital to ensure that there is sufficient liquidity available in the event of a bank run on withdrawals.

As a result, there is a degree of skepticism in the Bitcoin community about the usefulness of BitVM. However, it is worth noting that BitVM is still in the early stages of development, and although it is not the most ideal solution, it is expected to scale Bitcoin through optimistic rollups.

Zero-Knowledge dreams

So, what exactly is the ultimate vesting of Bitcoin L2? The answer is ZK-rollups.

However, it is not easy to build a ZK-rollups on Bitcoin, and even at the moment it is technically impossible...... This will require a Soft Fork to change the Bitcoin network, which is easier said than done. The Soft Fork will add a new Operation Code to Bitcoin, enabling it to natively identify and verify zk-SNARKs, allowing trustless interactions between Bitcoin and rollups. However, as mentioned earlier, this is a huge technical hurdle, and its feasibility is uncertain.

That being the case, BitVM is still in its early stages, and neither optimistic rollups nor ZK-rollups can be implemented on Bitcoin at the moment, so why is there already such long Bitcoin L2 in the Bitcoin ecosystem?

The reality is that, technically, there is no real Bitcoin rollups yet. But we can see that some teams are focused on laying the groundwork for the future of Bitcoin L2.

BOB's phased approach to building Bitcoin L2. Source: BOB official website

For example, some rollup teams, such as BOB, are taking a phased approach. They started by launching the ecosystem as an EVM rollup, attracting users, TVLs, and dApps; They then plan to transition to OP-Rollups when BitVM technology matures, and eventually they will evolve into ZK-Rollups if Bitcoin undergoes a soft fork to add the necessary Operation Code.

Conclusion

The hot hype in the market always leads to long scam projects. In this Bitcoin L2 craze, Xu long projects falsely claim to be Bitcoin L2, so investors and users alike need to be cautious. The jury is still out on whether projects that claim to be Bitcoin L2 are real Bitcoin L2 or simply use the title to attract venture capital and retail investors.

Despite the reality, these are still exciting times for the Bitcoin community. From Bitcoin Spot ETF launches, which mark institutional entry, to new concepts such as Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem is experiencing unprecedented rise and innovation.

The prospect of Bitcoin L2 adds longer expectations to the future of Bitcoin.

Author: Charlemagne

Compilation: Encryption Weibao

Pump theft incident lazy bag, thanks to the @0x_charlemagne brother for the wonderful analysis of the cause of the accident, here is the translation and add a little personal speculation of mine.

How does the attack work?

First of all, the attacker @STACCoverflow is not a bull Hacker god, but a former employee of @pumpdotfun. He has the Wallet account that Pump uses to create permissions for this feature for each Raydium transaction pair, which we call "hacked account". All Bonding Curve LP pots created on Pump before reaching the Raydium standard are called "reserve accounts".

An attacker borrowed a Flash Loans through @marginfi to fill up all the pools that had been created but were not filled enough to be in the Raydium state. Originally, the operation that would have occurred at this time was originally stored in the virtual pool "Preparatory account$Sol because it met the criteria of Raydium and would be transferred to this "hacked account". But at this point, the attacker siphons off the $Sol that comes in, so that none of the memecoins that are supposed to be on Raydium and locked the pool can go to Raydium (because the pool has no money)

So, whose money did the attackers hack?

To this @0x_charlemagne brother explained:

First of all, it's certainly not @marginfi. Because the money of the flash loan is returned in the same block, its purpose is only to trigger the operation of transferring money from the reserve account to the hacked account, and it will not be lost

Secondly, the earth dog that has been sent to Raydium in the past should not be affected because the LP has been locked (personal speculation)

The unfortunate thing should be that before this attack, all the unfilled pools in the entire Pump, all the users who bought in, their $Sol was diverted by the above attack. This explains why the damage could be as long as $80M (note: according to the latest information, the amount of damage is about $2 million).

Why does an attacker have this "hacked account" private key?

First of all, it must be the mismanagement of the team, this one has not been washed, and it is the same as Blast, the North Korean patriotic network development general.

Secondly, we can guess that this filling pool may itself be one of the previous jobs of this attacker. Just like when Friendtech V1 was launched last year, there were a large number of bots that snapped up your key, and in the first few days, there was a high probability that they would be the official own, which played the role of making a market for the key and guiding the initial popularity.

It is safe to speculate that at that time, in order to be able to do the initial cold start, Pump made the attacker responsible for filling the pool of coin with the project's own money (the estimated long was sent by himself, such as $test $alon) and let them go to Raydium and then pump to create attention. It's just that I didn't expect to become the key to the inner ghost in the end.

Lessons learned

First of all, imitation plates must pay attention, don't be stupid and just copy a fur, which means that someone will trade when the product is put there. To make a mutual aid disk, you have to provide an initial thrust.

Then be sure to do a good job of permission management and pay attention to security.

Original article by Foresight News, Alex Liu

Solana is a high-performance Blockchain platform designed to support dApps, known for its speed and scalability, which is made possible by a unique Consensus Mechanism and architectural design. In this article, we will use Ethereum as a comparison object and briefly introduce the characteristics of the Solana smart contracts programming model.

Smart contracts, on-chain programs:

A program that runs on Ethereum is called a smart contract, and it is a series of codes (functions) and data (states) located at a specific address on Ethereum. Smart contracts are also Ethereum accounts, called contract accounts, which have balances and can be traded objects, but cannot be manipulated by humans and are deployed on the network to run as programs.

The executable code that runs on Solana is called an on-chain program, and they interpret the instructions sent in each transaction. These programs can be deployed directly to the network core as native programs, or released as SPL programs by anyone.

• Instructions: Instructions are a term specific to Solana on-chain programs. On-chain programs consist of instructions, the smallest unit in which a specific operation is performed: each Solana transaction contains one or longer instructions. Instructions specify the actions to be performed, including calling specific on-chain programs, passing accounts, entering lists, and providing byte arrays. Instructions have computational limitations, so on-chain programs should be optimized to use a small number of computational units, or split expensive operations into longer instructions.

• Native program: A native program that provides the functions required by the verification Node. The most famous of these is the Program, which manages the creation of new accounts and the transfer of SOL between two accounts.
• SPL program: defines a series of on-chain activities, including Token creation, exchange, lending, as well as creating staking pools, maintaining on-chain domain name resolution services, etc. Among them, the SPL Token Program is used for Token operations, while the Associated Token Account Program is often used to write other custom programs.

You call it a smart contract, I call it an on-chain program, everyone says it differently, but they both refer to the code running on the Blockchain. Zhang San, Li Si, and Wang Mazi are all personal names, and other aspects have to be examined in terms of quality.

Account model, data decoupling:

Similar to Ethereum, Solana is also a Blockchain based on an account model, but Solana provides a different set of account models than Ethereum that stores data in different ways.

In Solana, accounts can hold wallet information and other data, and the fields defined by the account include Lamports (account balance), Owner (account owner), utable (executable account), and Data (data stored by the account). Each account designates a program as its owner to distinguish which program the account uses as a state store. These on-chain programs are read-only or stateless: the program account (executable account) only stores BPF bytecode and does not store any state, and the program stores the state in other independent accounts (non-executable accounts), that is, Solana's programming model decouples code and data.

The Ethereum account is primarily a reference to the EVM state, which smart contracts both the code logic and the need to store the user's data. This is often considered a design flaw left over from the EVM's history.

Don't underestimate the difference! Solana smart contracts are fundamentally harder to attack than Blockchain with a coupled programming model, such as Ethereum:

In Ethereum, the smart contracts "owner" is a global variable that corresponds one-to-one to the smart contracts. Therefore, calling a function may directly change the "owner" of the contract.

In Solana, the "owner" of a smart contract is the data associated with the account, not a global variable. An account can have longer owners instead of being linked one-to-one. To exploit the security vulnerabilities of smart contracts, attackers need to not only find the problematic function, but also prepare the "correct" account to call the function. This step is not easy, as Solana smart contracts typically involves long input account and manages the relationship between them through constraints such as account 1.owner==account 2.key. The process from "preparing the right accounts" to "launching an attack" is enough for security monitors to proactively detect suspicious transactions that create "fake" accounts related to smart contracts before an attack.

Ethereum's smart contracts are like a vault that uses a unique password, and as long as you get this password, you can get full ownership; Solana, on the other hand, is a vault with longest passwords, but to get permissions, you must not only find a way to get the password, but also figure out the corresponding number of the password before you can open the lock.

Programming Languages

Rust is the primary programming language for developing smart contracts on Solana. Because of its performance and security features, it is suitable for high-risk environments of Blockchain and smart contracts. Solana also supports C, C++, and other (very uncommon) languages. SDKs for Rust and C are officially provided to support the development of on-chain programs. Developers can use tools to compile programs into Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) bytecode (files with .so extensions) and deploy them to Solana on-chain to execute the smart contracts logic through the Sealevel parallel smart contracts runtime.

Because the Rust language itself is difficult to get started with, and it is not customized for Blockchain development, long there are many requirements that require reinventing the wheel and code redundancy. Xu long long's newly created programming language dedicated to Blockchain development is based on Rust, such as Cairo (Starknet), Move (Sui, Aptos).

Many long projects in production use the Anchor framework

The Ethereum smart contracts is mainly developed in the Solidity language (the syntax is similar to java, and the code files are extended with .sol). Due to the relatively simple syntax and more mature development tools (Hardhat framework, Remix IDE...). Usually we think that Ethereum is a simpler and faster development experience, while Solana development is more difficult to get started. So despite the popularity of Solana right now, the number of developers in Ethereum is still far long than Solana.

In certain road conditions, top-of-the-line cars don't run as fast as modified cars. Rust is like a top-of-the-line racing car, which strongly guarantees the performance and safety of Solana, but instead of developing this track for on-chain programs, it has caused the difficulty of driving (development) to rise. Adopting a Rust-based public chain that develops a custom language for the on-chain is equivalent to modifying the car to make it more road-friendly. Solana is at a disadvantage at this point.

Summary

Solana's smart contracts programming model is innovative. It provides a stateless approach to smart contracts development, with Rust as the primary programming language, and an architecture that separates logic from state, providing a powerful environment for developers to build and deploy smart contracts, ensuring security and performance, but it is difficult to develop. With a focus on high throughput, low cost, and scalability, Solana remains the current choice for developers looking to create high-performance dApps.

Reference Links

1. Cash trading of USDT was convicted of illegal business operations

On December 16, 2023, the Guangdong Provincial High Court released an article "This kind of price difference can't be earned!" This is a criminal case that has been adjudicated in 2022, and the article emphasizes that U merchants moving bricks to buy and sell USDT is equivalent to buying and selling US dollars, which is a disguised act of buying and selling forex, and once the amount exceeds 5 million, it constitutes the crime of illegal operation.

Prior to this, the crypto world's understanding of virtual money transactions as constituting a criminal offense was only that stolen money was received during the transaction, and it was presumed that they subjectively knew it, which either constituted the crime of aiding and abetting or the crime of concealment. (This is limited to discussing the crimes that can be constituted by pure U business)

However, the results of the case released by the Guangdong Provincial High Court mentioned above have shattered this perception.

The case occurred in February 22, A is a U businessman, often collect U from retail investors, and the collected U is sold to the acquisition party in cash, this time with the acquisition C agreed to pay money in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, and hand over U, because after the transaction, he will carry a large amount of cash, for which A also specially hired a bodyguard B. A and customer C exchanged about 814,000 U at the Exchange rate between RMB coins and US dollars on that day, for a total of 5.1 million RMB coins. As a result, on the way back from renting a car, A and B were arrested by public security officers at the checkpoint.

This is a typical U business offline face-to-face cash selling U case, the entire transaction ** did not involve stolen money, there was no Exchange currency, only the act of buying and selling USDT, was convicted of illegal business **, but the defendant did not appeal, the judgment has taken effect.

The trial court held that A and B used the form of buying and selling virtual money to buy and sell forex in disguise, and the circumstances were serious, constituting the crime of illegal business operation, A belonged to the principal offender, and B participated in the whole process as a bodyguard, and knew about it, and was an accessory.

In the end, A was sentenced to 8 months in prison and B in 6 months in prison for the crime of illegal business operation. In addition, the 5.1 million people's coins seized in accordance with the law were confiscated according to law, and Li Si's mobile phone was a tool for committing crimes in the transaction of virtual money and was confiscated according to law.

The trial judge held that:

*In accordance with the provisions of Article 2 of the Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Criminal Cases of Illegally Engaging in Fund Payment and Settlement Business and Illegal Buying and Selling of Forex, those who carry out illegal trading of forex such as reselling forex or disguised trading of forex, disrupting the order of the financial market, and the circumstances are serious, shall be convicted and punished as the crime of illegal business operation in accordance with the provisions of Article 225, Paragraph 4 of the Criminal Law. *

In this case, defendant A used cash to acquire the USDT of retail investors in the "crypto world" at a price lower than the platform, and then resold it at the US dollar Exchange rate on the day to earn the middle price difference and profit from it. According to A's confession, in order to acquisition USDT reselling for profit, he even borrowed money from a bank, and the loan amount was as high as one million. This kind of behavior of converting large sums of money into US dollars through USDT will inevitably reduce the country's forex reserves, affect the state's macro-management of forex, undermine the sole legal status of the people's coin in the domestic market, and greatly interfere with the effectiveness of forex management and the stability of the legal Exchange Rate, disrupt the normal order of the financial market, and is an act of buying and selling forex in disguise, which should be punished.

Second, buy and sell USDT = buy and sell USD?

**Personally, I believe that there is a clear logical error in the inference of the above applicable legal provisions. I do not agree with the judgment that the act of buying and selling USDT is equivalent to illegal trading of forex. **

We first have to clarify what forex is?

According to Article 3 of the Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Forex Administration:

For the purposes of these Regulations, the term "forex" refers to means of payment and assets that may be used for international settlement in coin other than the following:

*(1) Foreign coin cash, including paper coins and minted coins; *

*(2) Foreign coin payment vouchers or payment instruments, including bills, bank deposit certificates, bank cards, etc.; *

*(3) Foreign coins securities, including bonds, stocks, etc.; *

*(iv) Special Drawing Rights; *

*(5) Other forex assets. *

**Obviously, USDT is not in this list. In addition, there are no laws, regulations, rules, normative documents and other documents in China that characterize USDT as forex. **

In addition, the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, and other ten departments led by the Central Bank also defined virtual coins in the Notice on Further Preventing and Handling the Risk of Speculation in Virtual Money Transactions (924 Notice) issued on September 24, 2021, Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the Notice:

*(1) Virtual money does not have the same legal status as fiat coins. Bitcoin, Ether coin, USD and other Virtual Money have the main characteristics of non-coin issuance authorities, the use of encryption technology and distributed account or similar technology, and the existence in digital form, etc., and are not legally compensatory, and should not and cannot be used as coin in the market for circulation. *

** To make it clear, virtual money belongs to specific virtual goods, not coins, since it is not a coin, it is even less likely to be forex. Therefore, buying and selling USDT is not the same as buying and selling forex in disguise. **

**3. Does buying and selling USDT constitute an illegal business crime? **

The views can be seen from the typical forex cases related to virtual money jointly issued by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and the Supreme People's Procuratorate:

Buying and selling virtual money constitutes the crime of illegal business operation Circumstance 1:

Using virtual money such as USDT as a medium to realize the exchange between RMB coins and forex constitutes the crime of illegal operation. The actor used virtual money as a medium, used the special properties of virtual money to circumvent national forex supervision, and realized the value conversion between people's coins and foreign exchange through the exchange of "*** RMB coins - virtual money - foreign exchange ****", which is a disguised purchase and sale of foreign exchange, and shall be investigated for criminal responsibility for the crime of illegal business operation in accordance with law. *

Buying and selling Virtual Money constitutes the crime of illegal business operation Circumstance 2:

• Providing virtual money perpetrators with illegal forex trading personnel colluding in advance, or knowing that others are illegally buying and selling foreign exchange, but still providing substantial assistance to them in realizing the conversion of local coins and foreign coins through trading virtual money and other means, constitutes a joint crime of illegal business operation. Providing virtual money trading services to persons who illegally buy and sell forex, but only have a general understanding of the criminal acts they help, and do not specifically realize that helping to illegally buy and sell forex can help pursue criminal responsibility for the crime of information network criminal activities. *

Only in the above two circumstances can it be determined that it is a disguised purchase and sale of forex, constituting the crime of illegal business operation. In the above-mentioned case of the Guangdong Provincial High Court, A's behavior model is only "people's coins-virtual money", which does not involve the conversion to US dollars, which does not meet the above situation 1 and has nothing to do with scenario 2.

According to Article 96 of the Criminal Law, the term "violation of state regulations" in the Criminal Law refers to violations of laws and decisions formulated by the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee, administrative regulations, administrative measures, decisions and orders issued by the State Council.

In other words, only those formulated by the National People's Congress, the Standing Committee of the People's Republic of China, and the State Council can be regarded as "state regulations". The "9.24 Notice" was issued by 10 ministries and commissions including the Chinese People's Bank of China, and the notice is a departmental regulation, not a national regulation. In addition, the "9.24 Notice" also clearly does not prohibit individual citizens from investing in virtual money, which means that ** buying and selling USDT does not violate national regulations, let alone constitute the crime of illegal business **.

IV. Conclusion

Therefore, I personally believe that ** buying and selling USDT does not constitute an illegal business crime. **In the absence of clarity in relevant laws and regulations, the criminal law shall uphold modesty, implement the principle of legality of crimes, and adopt relatively strict standards for criminalization, so as to avoid infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of citizens.

This is the motto of the judge in the case, which emphasizes that the law should be fair and just, and that everyone should be treated equally. But revisiting the case, is that really the case?

AUTHOR: JAY

Compilation: Deep Tide TechFlow

So, what's next for Ethereum? In this article, I talked about modular blockchains, database design, and quoted GCR to try to answer this question.

The argument for the innovator's dilemma can be summed up as follows: "Successful companies are often unable to adapt to paradigm shifts, especially when it comes to technological innovation. The reason for this is that they are overly focused on making their product a success, rather than trying to update and ideas that they are not familiar with."

In the world of Blockchain and smart contracts, we have made considerable progress over the past few years. Now, a million-dollar or $250 billion question is: What is the fate of Ethereum next?

Through this article, I will argue that Ethereum has peaked in 1) relative to the valuation of all encryption assets (ETH.D); and 2) relative usage and adoption. I'll start by exploring the concept of modular blockchain, comparing it to traditional database design principles, and then tie it all back to Ethereum and its future.

Modular blockchain

There is now a more principled way of thinking about what a well-functioning Blockchain is, and a reasonable way to decouple (and scale) the core components. This is the battle between monomers and modules.

The core idea behind Blockchain modularity is that there are four basic functions:

Perform. Determine the "after" status of the transaction. If I send Tokens to a specific Wallet, the execution layer will determine the relevant balance before and after the transaction.

Settlement. Determine if the submitted transaction is "legitimate". After sending the Token, the balance is xyz - Settlement determines if xyz is correct.

Consensus. Determine the final state after a bundle of transactions. This layer determines 1) the correct order for a given series of transactions, and 2) the final state after those transactions are processed.

Data availability. In order for any of the above three features to exist, there needs to be a prior state and an end state. The function of the DA is to provide state to the execution layer and update the state based on the end result of the Consensus.

As with any engineering problem, a "perfect" Blockchain only makes sense if well-defined use cases exist. The existence of this framework allows for more specialized Blockchain design, and Blockchain built for high-throughput games has very different needs than Blockchain that aims to become a global Decentralization Ledger. This frame of thought reminds me very much of the principles of database design, especially the debate around SQL versus noSQL.

Database design

Databases have been around for decades longer than Blockchain. Consensus on its design is that there is no such thing as a perfect database. Like longest engineering problems, everything needs to be weighed.

The framework for building scalable databases goes back to "What is the use case?" Before making a decision, I ask a few questions:

• What is the approximate ratio of read-to-write long less? On apps like Telegram or Slack, the read and write volumes are similar, while on Twitter, the read volume is orders of magnitude higher than the write volume.
• In a distributed system, there is a concept of consistency and availability. In other words, this can be rephrased as: Are we more concerned about inaccurate data or application downtime? Again, it depends on the situation. For fintech applications, consistency (accurate data) is long important.
• long old data is important vs. fresh data? How does this relate to read and write load? Does our database allow us to enforce a strategy to handle concurrent writes and reads? For example, my wife withdraws cash from my bank when I swipe my debit card, how can I prevent the classic Double Spending problem?
• What is the read mode? Do you need flexible access to your data, or do you often define data up front? Did you perform longest joins in different datasets?

In addition to technical considerations, it's important to understand the following:

• How many engineers long proficient in this technology? Longest engineers really want to build with this technology?
• If we want to fork the underlying code and make adjustments, is there a way to get positive support?

The future of Ethereum

Now to tie it all together in its entirety - there is no such thing as a perfect Blockchain. Good engineering is about trade-offs, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. So, how did Ethereum become such a "dominant" platform? Why is Ethereum priced as if it were the perfect Blockchain? Finally, what's next for Ethereum?

**How did Ethereum become such a "dominant" platform? **

Four years ago, Ethereum was the first choice for building smart contracts platforms. Compared to every other platform, it has excellent development tools like Hardhat, CryptoZombies, etc. In addition, it has a loyal user base, and the chain and tokens are "Decentralization". At that time, centralized Blockchain was more likely to be a scam. ETH is also cheaper as an asset, which means lower gas fees.

Today, developers have more long smart contracts platforms to choose from, each with unique trade-offs. While scams still exist, they have decreased significantly compared to four years ago with more long talent and capital entering the space.

The reason for Ethereum's past success is also the reason why it will fail in the future. There was a time when Ethereum was the only viable smart contracts platform for developers. Legitimate use cases (Decentralized Finance, NFTs) provide ETH with a huge head start. But at this stage, the focus shifted to value accumulation (super-stable coins) and competing with Bitcoin as the internet's native default store of value (flipping).

The desire to become both a smart contracts platform and a decentralization "super stable coin" adds significant friction (higher gas costs, congested networks) to marginal users and developers. AS CONFUCIUS (AND GCR) SAID: THE MAN WHO CHASES TWO XTZ CATCHES NOTHING

**What's next for Ethereum? **

Users will flow to where the app exists and the cost is reasonable, while app developers tend to be more cautious and long-term. Because their overhead is longest larger than the users themselves. Developers will build on platforms where their applications have the potential for long-term rise and expansion.

Now look at Ethereum, which has an average transaction speed of 15-20 TPS and gas fees typically soar to $200. There are very clear limits to the applications that can be built on Ethereum, and these applications require very little interaction. For example, borrowing protocol is a good app on Ethereum because I might interact with it a few times a year.

But if I'm an app developer and I'm going to build an app that intends to scale to 100,000 or 1 million users and has a higher usage pattern, it's not feasible to build such an app on Ethereum.

This is becoming more and more evident as viable alternatives come to the fore.

• FriendTech is built on Base L2
• Pacman and the Blur team are considering launching their own L2
• DYDX uses their own specific AppChain

The modular blockchain framework provides a set of trade-offs that Blockchain can choose from. We're now in a state where support for Blockchain infrastructure along the point of the trade-off curve is starting to emerge.

Last but not least, there are incentives.

As Charlie Munger has always said, "Show me incentives and I'll tell you the results." The incentive structure built on Ethereum is inferior among other existing Blockchains. Venture capital firms and new L1 teams are very interested in building a strong, thriving ecosystem. As an investor, I wonder why my team is still building on Ethereum when Tokens are so decentralized and the ecosystem is already so crowded? Why not promote app development on the Blockchain I have a stake, where L1 valuations are longer lower.

The reply in this tweet makes things very clear.

ETH is no longer at the effective forefront of Blockchain design. No matter where you want to be on the trade-off curve, there are better options for smart contracts platforms, as do incentive structures. Unless Ethereum undergoes fundamental changes in the way its community and organization operates, its relative advantage in valuation and usage has peaked.

Analysts say altcoins are a 'relatively big' risk as the days of big returns are behind us. Markus Thielen, head of research at 10xResearch, agrees that there are "tactical opportunities" for altcoins. However, he notes that they did not have the big gains seen in previous cycles.

Markus Thielen: Tactical opportunities exist, but...

According to analysts, big gains are now less likely due to the weak narratives driving the crypto market. For this reason, altcoins are leaning towards the former high-risk, high-bounty theory. Markus Thielen, head of research at 10xResearch, said: "Tactical opportunities exist. "However, the era of 100x returns may be behind us." The market predicts a bull market for altcoins this year. Despite this, Thielen warns that "individual participation remains low, and several new projects have emerged that attract non-crypto native traders."

Thielen says that altcoin bull markets in the past have had "distinct characteristics" that have attracted more money, but this cycle has seen "tighter capital, evidenced by lower total value locked and a scarcity of venture capital investments." In this regard, Thielen added, "In the last cycle, the discourse that crypto would replace traditional financial systems was widely adopted, but the rhetoric of this cycle is more ephemeral and lacks significant support."

Michael van de Poppe: A portfolio that mainly includes altcoins is a big risk!

Earlier this week, Solana-based memecoin GameStop (GME) surged 2,727% as GameStop's stock price soared after trader Keith Gill posted a meme from his "Roaring Kitty" X account for the first time in nearly three years.

During the price increase of GameStop shares, GameStop briefly rose 2,727%. Source: CoinMarketCapMN Michael van de Poppe, founder of trading consultancy and popular analyst, weighed in on this topic. Poppe claimed that a portfolio that predominantly includes altcoins poses a "relatively large" risk. The analyst asked, "What is the downside of this bet? It's comparatively huge. As soon as I published the post, I experienced a fall of around 20% in total investment within 1-2 weeks." Despite the risk, van de Poppe recently revealed that he had switched to altcoins by selling all of his Bitcoin (BTC), claiming that he could "lose 50-80%."

Fabio Andreatta: It's doubtful that there will even be a subseason!

However, crypto investor Fabio Andreatta is skeptical that "there will even be a subseason." In response to van de Poppe's X post, Andreatta said, "All you're doing is increasing your risk. You are very unlikely to outperform Bitcoin. "Most altcoin will never reach their ATH again."

As you can see from Kriptokoin.com, Bitcoin's dominance shows that the broader market is shifting capital away from altcoins. According to TradingView data, Bitcoin dominance has increased by 2.12% in the last 7 days to 56.05%. Thus, Bitcoin dominance approached an all-time high.

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