Lisa Akselrod

If your beloved zero-knowledge proofs are so awesome – why don’t we have multiple multi-billion companies serving ZKPs for real-world use cases?Timing matters and is not always obviousIt’s not always about solving the problems of yesterday. Not all products are built for clear existing Product Market Fit, especially when it comes to DeepTech. Some technologies take time. Some products are based on intuition and guesses about the future. Think about AI. One of the largest AI companies, Palanti...

No good actorsWhen it comes to money and power, there are no good actors. It’s a business game where those having power try to preserve and multiply it and those not having power try to acquire it. No one has good intentions, everyone serves personal interests, regardless of wether they are a web3 marketer or a president. When it comes to business the value extracting formula is well-known: Income = Revenue - Costs i.e. earn as much as possible while spending as little as possible. As you can...

This last Polynya's blog post is strong, painful, and mostly very close to the truth. https://polynya.mirror.xyz/ptscXuh3J3KOj2uJAn0vrEanpn2nauwA7iytYZ4cM9U The one-liner summary of my answer is "we should take the responsibility for this shift right now" Below are more thoughts around the topic and if it resonates with you – feel free to reach out I say something :) I agree in many things: > "It’s the same story every time - there’s some grandiose narrative for what’s nothing more than ...

Before coming to blockchain, I used to work in web2 dealing a lot with DeepTech communications: how to tell the story of the product, how to pitch to investors, enterprise, and governments, how to talk about your technology in a way that people understand it, feel it, and want it. I worked with different projects from BCI and NanoTech to SpaceTech and BioTech. The last three years I am doing the same in blockchain. In this article, some of my thoughts on how we can do it better and why for ou...

IntroductionI know we usually blackbox pairings calling them moonmath and putting e(dot,dot) instead. But enough is enough. This article explains the math behind pairings. It relies on the course on ECC led by Matan Prasma and organized by PSE and Carlos in particular. How to read: the article consists of two parts: prerequisites and pairings. It might make sense to go to the section “Pairings” be surprised and then come back to the prerequisites but maybe you know better. All the proofs are ...

We stuck between two realitiesThe world is currently blended consisting of the physical realm and the digital realm. People operate sometimes in the first one, sometimes in the second one, sometimes in between. For example, take a nuclear factory where the verification of agreements between nuclear powers also include radiation measurement techniques on a facility. The measurement should be done in a digital realm. But it will be transmitted to a controlling party in a digital realm. How will...

Disclaimer: This write up introduces some basic tricks and definitions that one will bump into while trying to learn Plonk. This article is neither precise nor exhaustive. Its objective is to provide some intuition for those jumping onto Plonk and some fun for those who love math. Is it an ELI5 article?Lagrange interpolationThe idea of Lagrange interpolation is that, taking a number of points, one can reconstruct the polynomial passing through all of these points. In particular, first we cons...

The full title should sound like “Why Ethereum Foundation is an absolutely unprecedented phenomenon in human history and why Vitalik should get the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences”.How heavy tech adoption usually worksThere is this phrase “dual use product” – a product that can be utilized for both civilian and military purposes. When it comes to emerging heavy technologies (airplanes, AI, Internet, nuclear power, etc.) – they require huge investments into R&D. By huge, I mean billions and b...