This is a tea.

A special tea.

11.2023

Take a seat, let me roll out the TV.

This is a documentary, where you read and imagine Psilocybe going through some crypto history. I am going to touch on ETH, Aptos, Solana, contracts, venture capital and most importantly 0L Network.

0L Network is a fork of Diem. Remember those days of Diem and Libra? It has been quietly in construction since those days and is, well, I will let you find out.

Get cosy.

Humans came out of the tree and it has been a debatable decision ever since. We are simultaneously fragile and incredibly resilient, we can literally walk an animal to death but die pretty quickly in any environment due to it being hot, cold, too mild, too damp, no sun, too much sun, too much rain, big animals, tiny little things that climb up your piss, or in the recent news where a woman who ate some Australian salad and ended up with a worm in her frontal lobe. She isn’t dead but high chance the worm laid a load of eggs around her lungs and heart, so… Bless her soul.

However, one benefit of our ape forefathers touching grass - makes it easier to get cooking. Cooking led to smaller guts and bigger brains. Bigger brains meant we could adapt, overcome the obstacles of our disadvantages. We built tools to take on the trees, made pointy sticks to take on the large cats that have the strength of 5 men and things with horns that are the size of a family car.

We used these stone tools to take on other humans. Then one lot of humans would devise of to utilise certain metals a particular way and boom, Bronze beats Stone. And we have been doing this game of evolution but with rock-paper-scissors ever since.

How we organise socially is crucial along the way too. There were people who had massive stones that stayed in one place, this was effectively a contract represented deals and transactions and each time a deal was done with these large stones that did not move, everyone in the social cohesion knew about it. They were the social equivalent of what tech-aficionados call “Distributed Ledger”.

Other cultures used sticks of wood or then shells. It really depended on what a culture was exposed to in terms of natural material. Those exposed to gold and silver tended to use gold and silver. And this arrangement lasts for a long time. Our technology took a boom when we made dead dinosaurs combustible and wait until the alchemists here what we did with glass, copper and silicon in the end. They will be astounded.

As you read this on your funny, magical light, we did something with the currency, we used to represent gold with coins and slices of trees with fancy human faces on. Then those represented something else we changed the peg from gold to dead dinosaur liquid.

This currency left a negative space, one which Satoshi et al exploited and filled with the Bitcoin network, the first digital payment system that was not privately owned by some form of corporate social organisation. It was complicated to get and send around but that is to be expected, it took us a long time to get banks and from banks to electronic cards.

In short amount of time, from 2008 to 2023/24, we have gone from Rust, C+ to Solidity to MOVE.

Tech and social organisation that drives change but there is one more piece to this trinity. That is language.

Unless something springs up from a lab contrived by some shadow agency, Move is the future.

The two dominant developer languages in crypto present some issues. One began development prior to the Satoshi whitepaper and the other is a pioneer of smart contracts, these are respectively, Rust and Solidarity.

Rust development started in 2006 as a passion project by Graydon Hoare, a quick respective head nod towards the name. The passion came from a broken elevator, he lived on the 21st floor and his elevator kept, well, not-elevating due to the computer language C++ or C, infamous for having memory bug issues.

Hoare got to work and began creating Rust. The name was inspired by the fungi – eeeeey - that causes rust as they are “over-engineered for survival”. Hoare emailed it around and had mixed responses, though perhaps the crucial positive intrigue came from the Mozilla executives.

Executives at Mozilla, though, were intrigued. Rust, they realized, could help them build a better browser engine. Browsers are notoriously complex pieces of software with many opportunities for dangerous memory bugs. By 2009, Mozilla was sponsoring its development. 2010, at a Mozilla conference in British Colombia, Rust was presented as a talk on an experimental language, the room was full of curious minds. 2013, Rust developers improved its ownership mechanics making the programme much faster, efficient and its memory was getting safer and safer. 2015 saw the drive to create a stable version to make it sellable software to companies and in post-2016 saw Rust spread across the world and the commercial. 2021, the major tech firms paid to set up a nonprofit Rust Foundation to support volunteer coders.

It helps go past the “garbage-collection” era of language, an era that was a response to the memory issues arising from C++. Rust helped

Rust has and is still proving to be of great use to companies and the world. To name a simple few companies that utilise it, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox, Cloudflare, Huawei, and Discord, not much surprise there as the aforementioned foundation was established by Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Mozilla, et al. Going into 2023, there were 2.2 million Rust developers.

In crypto, some examples of Rust-based projects include Solana, Qanx, Near, and Elrond or known as MultiversX now. A key thing to recognise its genesis was prior to crypto and smart contracts.

2008 saw Bitcoin begin to enter the public consciousness. Bitcoin was showing a decentralised system of sending funds from point A to point B with no borders. It was an apolitical currency, Anarchists, Libertarians, cyberpunks, anti-bankers and more had this flagship invention/asset that provided an alternative to centralised systems. The real barrier was the tech and the hassle to get into bitcoin and use it.

Amir Taaki was a Bitcoin core dev and he had a divide with the Bitcoin core dev leader, Gavin Andresen. Taaki can be taken as the orthodox of Bitcoiners, he wanted to stay close to Satoshi’ core values and build a decentralised financial system. He set up Britcoin exchange and Intersango exchange. He established the bitcoin standardisation procedure known as BIPs, he was active in developing products around Bitcoin such as DarkMarket, wallets, consultancies, and poker rooms. At one point Wired named him among the most dangerous men on the internet.

If you watch this video, you can see one of the most dangerous people EVER, squat in a flat, chat on video call - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0KV0lesSK8&ab_channel=WorldCryptoNetwork . If you go to 27.46, you will hear Taaki talk about Andresen

Andresen wanted Bitcoin to tap into institutional money. Taaki left the team and with that Bitcoin was slow on innovation. Taaki in the previous link highlights Andresen’s words, “After the transaction issue is resolved, the work of looking after its code will increasingly be the job of caretakes, not master builders… I am optimistic going forward… I hope in 10 years Bitcoin is really boring.”

Taaki is offended by this and calls him a weak leader and says due to his weakness he needs to create titles such as ‘Chief Scientist’ and ‘Lead Developer’ to give him a sense of respectability. Taaki points out a quote like this dumbs down the fact Bitcoin is driven by passionate, creative artists and individuals but instead engineers developing according to process.

At 31.43ish, Taaki is negatively talking about companies that go from the top down, “Oh we are going to do a big project,” he mocks, “We need $8mm…” then Chris Ellis quips:

“Just like Ethereum.”

And with that, people pull out guns and everything gets violent. Well not quite, Chris Ellis defends his quip and Taaki, after a few seconds of remaining silent, takes the stance that Ethereum is a different topic.

After all, Taaki plays a pivotal stepping stone in what becomes Ethereum.

We can thank Blizzard for Ethereum. The quick story, a young Vitalik Buterin played his beloved World of Warcraft until he was in shock one day for the damage component from his beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell was removed. So hurt, he thought of the evils of centralised services and what they can do. His father would later show him Bitcoin and his decentralised career took off.

Vitalik co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2012 with Mihai Alisie, who would play an important role in Ethereum. He invited Vitalik to Europe, which Vitalik took up the offer. At the Berlin Bitcoin Summer Meetup at the Yesterday Room77, the original Bitcoin-accepting restaurant. This is where Mihai and Vitalik met Yanislav Malahov and Amir Taaki, not long after the crew hopped over to Calafou, situated in Catalan-region of Spain.

Due to the Bitcoin Magazine project, Buterin was in collaboration with Amir Taaki.

Kasa de la Muntanya is one of the squats in the region where Amir would frequent. He was working on projects such as the Dark Wallet, Libbitcoin and Amir developed pybitcointools - Amir’s methods inspired Buterin to make a Python Bitcoin library himself. Vitalik writes about Lib Bitcoin here - bitcoinmagazine.com/business/what-libbitcoin-and-sx-are-and-why-they-matter-1376064919.

Here is a snippet:

“Amir Taaki’s libbitcoin has come to be one of the most advanced alternative implementations of the Bitcoin protocol in existence. Although there are now dozens of alternative implementations on the market, libbitcoin is one of the few that re-implements the complete Bitcoin standard, allowing users to run a deterministic wallet, an elliptic curve message signing interface and, of course, a fully functional Bitcoin node. Even multisignature transactions, which many popular wallets including blockchain.info and Bitcoin Wallet for Android still do not support, libbitcoin handles just fine… Amir Taaki, Joerg Platzer and others have long supported diversifying and internationalizing the Bitcoin ecosystem. And libbitcoin just might be the catalyst that finally sets the process going.”

The Catalan region has a culture of anarchism, there is the CIC (Catalan Integral Cooperative) and Calafou was one project within that, which settled at an abandoned factory in 2011. The initiative turned it into a proto-network state of around 200 people living with the principles of self-management, ecological sustainability, free culture and technological sovereignty.

Innovation really comes from communities with members in service of one another, with ideas being communicated, tested, pragmatism applied. On this site there was an ethos of here is a technology, use the technology, have a culture and community that utilises the tech, people are not alone as they try to figure and work things out. Not too dissimilar to a uni and that is the beauty to innovation: there are principles but not an method, you can do this with your family, at a uni, on a caravan site, it is all about a community connecting with one another rather than, say, a class exploiting another such as the Spartans and their Helots.

It raised revenues from the housing cooperative; from the contributions made by Calafou’s productive projects and cultural events such as a festival.

An example of tech they built was the “Zoo Pass”, a zk-proof based ID system that enabled people to make polls and vote anonymously through this pass. With the nature of these bright minds and their principles, they would move on, Amir and Vitalik went to Milan before going off on other adventures. Amir is someone Vitalik highly respects and visa versa. Vitalik would start conjuring up the idea of Ethereum.

Amir and his stays in squats would be all over Europe. When in London, he brought attention from a British newspaper, The Guardian (www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/mar/22/bitcoin-currency-video).

This piece peaked the intrigue of a certain Gavin Wood. At the University of York, he got an MEng in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 2002. He then went on to complete his PhD on ‘Content-based visualisation to aid common navigation of musical audio’ in 2005. He went on programme and consult, including consulting research at Microsoft.

In 2011, Wood was not really enticed by Bitcoin but 2013, his opinion changed. When he saw Amir talk about Bitcoin in the Guardian where Amir is in an abandoned office building in the centre of London where tradfi-towers can be seen a couple of miles away, he decided to go down and meet him.

Through this meet he also met other people, one of them being Jonny Bitcoin. Wood and Jonny would drink at the same pub and eventually one of their chats turned to a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin and his idea called Ethereum.

As you can see from the photo Gavin Wood reached out to help Vitalik with making the ideal practical. Wood said he got on well with Buterin, where Buterin had a great maths brain as well as the rest of his intellect, Wood had the knowledge, skills and academia to help that. During a walk in San Francisco, the two came up with the re-factoring of the gas; the gas would still be forfeit, if the transaction runs out of gas but the entire execution would be reverse, this was to cut out partial attacks.

Much development went on to the point by 2014 the protocol was stabilising and 2015 saw the Yellow Paper drop under the title – “Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger”.

History was made and Ethereum has gone on to advance the cryptocurrency world massively. Decentralised Finance arrived and with time solid projects by hard working, bright people that serviced the community of projects have stood the test of time, such as Uniswap.

However, conmen and their flimsy whitepapers took a lot of money but that is going to happen, bastards can be found everywhere. In 2022, 97% of projects on Uniswap were rug pulls. An issue that has arisen from the pioneering project is the vulnerabilities in the coding. The language devised was called Solidity and programmes built with it have lost millions. Uniswap has complicated code of around 10,000 lines and it lends itself to getting hacked. 2023, saw Uniswap exploited for $25.5 million. There is the infamous 2016 DAO hack, $50 million was taken in the DAO heist. 2017, the Parity wallet had to helpless watch 153,037 ETH be drained from it. BadgerDAO lost $120 million in 2021. Poly Network saw $600 million stolen from a hacker. Uranian Finance is a fork of Uniswap, based on BSC, a heist took $50 million. 2022 can brag $4bn was stolen from DeFi exploits. The Ronin Network has the biggest exploit, which topped $616 million.

Furthermore, Ethereum has a transaction speed of 15 transaction per second, ETH 2.0 is going to push that up to 100,000 TPS but with the vulnerabilities in its language and TPS this has led to an opening in the market for protocols and projects that offer an alternative to Ethereum.

One project Radix offers a language that cuts out the hacks that are possible on Solidity using its Scrypto language. Solidity is not intuitive, it came from a heuristic environment and a landscape of few projects were in creation, it was an early universe.

Personally, I entered crypto in 2021, there was Binance, Ethereum is large, Solana is coming, I can access fiat-on ramps fairly easily, the DeFi environment is going. Yet, it is easy to forget that this space is relatively young, it feels like a lot happens in 6 months.

Radix is an example of DLT-based protocol that has a language intuitive with defi in order to reach higher TPS and have a more secure framework.

Another development has been Move. I have covered a bit of the history of Facebook and Libra in the deluge called “Diem Diaspora”, do check out that piece if you would like more detail on this episode of history.

https://mirror.xyz/pcybe.eth/bGNT8lEfaKtBKQ5TLJBezSPt0DR8XDKaNVuDIglbVx8

Move is another example of a language that benefits from the environment pioneers of Bitcoin and Ethereum has helped stimulate and the dodgy elevator Graydon Hoare took one day. It is also borne from the labs of Facebook, which, sorry to point out the obvious, is a bloody wealthy company.

Wealthy company with near unlimited funds, lizard looking owner, the ability to attract elite talent, bring them together and allow them to congeal and test ideas with state-of-the-art technology.

The Move language is reportedly relatively simple to use and developer centric. Here is a quick break-down:

Move smart contracts are published as Modules. There is the virtual machine (VM), containing the bytecode format, a bytecode interpreter, and infrastructure to generate the genesis block of the Libra blockchain as well as subsequent blocks of transactions.The bytecode verifier, containing a static analysis tool which is used by the virtual machine to verify any new Move code before executing.The Move intermediate representation (IR) compiler, which compiles human-readable program text into Move bytecode.The standard library, containing the Move IR code for the core system modules (e.g. LibraAccount and LibraCoin).The tests and testing framework for the virtual machine, bytecode verifier, and compiler.

Modules can be created onto the blockchain to be executed. Move has rules on how structs are to be used. To prevent a modules from mutating other inner fields there is the bytecode verifier analyses Move bytecode to check the adherence to type, memory and resource rules safety rules. This verifier and Move’s bytecode is the jewel, it allows the for structs to be passed across trust boundaries without losing their integrity

It is based on Rust, as established, a popular developer language, it is statically typed and linear, and digital assets are presented in type whereas in Solidity they aren’t. In other words, it is readable code and fewer errors, no one variable can be used for two different purposes

Digital assets are not tangible and it is needed to be expressed how they are scarce and access control and that is what the Resources do. From the start of the whitepaper “The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic” and a on page 6, “First-class resources are a very general concept that programmers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct business logic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies.”

A coin is represented as a Resource, the language allows it to be created, modified and destroyed

A Module (smart contract) protects the resource and it is containing function and struct definitions. Structs group together related data and can flow into other modules, and the modules have full control over how their types can and can’t be used.

It is pointed out in a few posts on Move that this loses a bit of flexibility in the Module but there is security from this.

Facebook sold its intellectual property to Silvergate and from there the talent drained to VC fuelled projects, notably Aptos and Sui.

Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching from Diem went to form Aptos. Intriguingly, Mo Shaikh worked for Shari Glazer – of the notorious Glazer Family – after they met through White & Case law partner Pratin Vallabhaneni in the summer of 2021. From there, Shaikh was hired as a consultant for Swoon Capital in August 2021. With Mo’s background and talent, he was a suitable candidate to help the Glazers find blockchain firms they can invest in or even purchase.

This employment had restrictive agreements, such as non-compete and non-disclosure. This was a close professional agreement where discussions of big business plans and forming a start-up were taking place. This business was called Matonee, pre-agreement contracts were close to being put in writing but this was never finalised. She would invest $10mm and then more if necessary but this project would avoid VC funding would dilute their shares.

The WhatsApp transcripts show he told her that the company would need “$75m-$100m” to launch. He also named the VCs he was speaking with about the project.

It is supposed that Shari was going to give Mo $10mm for what was going to become Aptos, in return she would get a large share that would not be diluted by venture capital investment, however, after $200mm was raised she was receiving less than 10%. The Glazier girl was not happy.

The picture Shari paints is Mo cheated her out of an agreed amount and Mo points out without a contractual agree this is a misunderstanding. If I was to empathise with Mo, I allege Shari isn’t an easy going type and did not put concerted amounts of pressure upon him, one he squirmed out. And if he went to the other firms for funding, I am sure they were not so receptive of the supposed Shari agreement, if it was at all ever brought up.

Mo did enter a professional contract with a Glazier and it was talked over text about setting up funding for Mo’s start-up, it was not contractual however. And the ideas from Shari about her share were diluted by VC money.

He was in a tight spot and a protracted court case was going to sap both their energies but the Glaziers have deeper pockets to pursue this even without the necessary contractual evidence. The case seems to have been settled out of court, I am sure with Shari getting some form of a larger pie, though that is only speculation.

I give leeway to Mo here but what happens after this is still shady behaviour. The Glazier noise started a short while before the $200mm raise announcement. Aptos boasted it could reach 160k TPS and it was valued at $4bn, which was more than Uniswap Labs ($1.6bn), a project that dominates the Defi landscape and actually provides. It can be argued then this shows the enormous potential Move and Aptos will bring.

Now, the VC behind Aptos are the heavy weights, here are some: Andreesen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Binance Labs – the notorious a16z along with three exchanges, two of which have had their CEO’s taken down due to certain practices that are deemed naughty.

On paper, Aptos seems great. High TPS, security in the language; Coinbase, Anchorage, Paxos, Rarible, BNB chain, Nodereal, are some of the devs; large amounts of backing, strong team; it seems a no-brainer.

Upon the token release, Aptos did not release their tokenomics despite it being live on Binance and FTX. Utter madness and quite clearly a shady play. It transpired that an investor accidently leaked the tokenomics in a PDF report, the leak came from Upbit, a Korean exchange.

Mo gave a weak excuse as to why they were not released… it was because they were too busy… Well, that tickled me pink. I appreciate it is hard work making a project and releasing it, what isn’t tough is providing tokenomics to the public after all, Aptos were not busy when they provided it to their Venture investors. I want you to remember that too busy line, it will come up again in a moment.

The tokenomics for Aptos are as follows:

The investors have staking and they may have their initial supply in lock up, they still receive staking rewards that unlock monthly.

On top of this, the TPS was below Bitcoin’s. Admittedly a project is not going to be at maximum capacity to begin with but even so that is a shoddy exit from the gates, you expect to Usain Bolt and get Butterbean instead at the 100m sprint.

Over 2023, Upbit has seen a few events of Aptos manipulation. At the start of the year, with no real news, it saw a 450% rise, in the midst of a bear market. The eye-brow raising data was the fact that the Upbit exchange had 3 times the volume of Binance. In July 2023, Aptos saw a big jump on the Upbit exchange ago, this time people suggest it was a short squeeze. Then the spooky season of October saw Upbit exchange have $3.4bn worth of fake APT tokens on its exchange.

It is an exchange is favoured by the FSC and has had a history of employees done for market manipulation.

Aptos is often called the “Solana-Killer”, a cringe inducing marketing term, I see it as a similar play to Solana. A venture capital pet with a high TPS blockchain and dishonest business is conducted for VCs to dump on retail.

With Ethereum’s TPS and its slow upgrade cycles it has left itself vulnerable to competition who come along and claim really high TPS. Solana is such competitor.

Heavily backed by Venture Capital, Solana in 2020 was the hot new thing, the Ethereum killer for it could do 60k TPS. Yet these transactions were not time stamped on the native Blockchain explorer (explorer.solana.com) is a hot piece of garbage. CEO Anatoly Yakovenko stated that the community should build one. The community, for free, should build the explorer and not the a16z et al back Solana devs. Yakovenko stated the team was too busy. There it is again.

Anatoly has openly admitted in a Fireside Chat that they launched blind in 2020 and did not optimise their product, Solana is a beta product that went live with 40 validators. To be a validator is notoriously expensive with Solana, Anatoly said that hardware gets cheaper over time therefore in the long run it works out. In other words, silicon is the bottleneck and others will copy the SOL design when the hardware becomes cheaper. The cost to start up a node will be half price in a few years.

Depends on your source but a node can costs tens of thousands annually, then it costs roughly 150 Euros a day. You need a minimum of 100 SOL. Hardware costs $3k a year, hardware can cost $3k, then you need to think of your internet connection and electricity bills. The cost of nodes has kept

Here is a link to one break down - https://laine-sa.medium.com/running-a-solana-validator-lessons-tips-6e6d08c0c589

Another source says it is $6 million a year to run a node - https://www.cyber.capital/news/a-solana-critique-lies-fraud-dangerous-trade-offs. To quote Justin Bons, “In SOL several consensus mechanisms are counted as transactions, which validators have to carry out. Which means validators also have to pay the TX fee for these mechanisms, unlike most other chains. This results in validation being far more expensive then it needs to be!”

Like Aptos, Solana had a deceptive start to their coin, in March 2020, Solana had an ICO where it sold 8 million tokens for $0.22 each and raised $1.8 million. Then they have a private sale in June 2021, $314 million in a private sale to venture capitalists was raised.

When the coin initially released, they claimed only unlocked a little above 8 million tokens. Then an audit found there were a further 12 million that were also released. The excuse given was the tokens were for a market maker as a loan. They promised they would bring these coins back into lock-up and also announce when they would release tokens.

Instead, they only took 3.3 million SOL back from this “market maker” and then released another 8 million tokens. Bad news of SOL is still to come as FTX estate still holds 55.8mm SOL tokens, 42.2mm is locked up. It is alleged SOLs ride recently was a manipulation to dump on retail as early November 2023, 750,000 SOL was released from the FTX estate to Binance and Kraken exchanges, this was worth around $30 million.

Though that may alleged to say that is an absurd allegation would be wrong, for Solana was a darling of SBF. Fortune have a headline quoting SBF saying the most undervalued project was Solana. He was a big investor of Solana and we also know he is a massively corrupt thunder-bastard.

His FTX exchange would take the order data and provide it to Alameda Research, which Sam claimed he did not run despite him owning 90% of this fund. It also turns out FTX had a third of USDT supply, after FTX starts, Tether’s minting grows rapaciously. On top of this, Solana also partnered with Tether.

This is the tricky phase for crypto. This emerging space is a wild west, who would have thought there would be such clandestine behaviour to contrive a market around cryptographic-based technology?

VC’s bring their connections, their wealth, their talent pools, those are enticing to someone who wants to make-it, to become something, to get their idea from 0-1. Bitcoin had no ICO as such but it had to start out with a small pool of people and over time it has become more decentralised. Ethereum’s token allocation to insiders is tiny compared to the norm in 2023, though Ethereum was a first mover, now it has imitators and one of the methods of those imitators to bootstrap is to have allocations for airdrops, devs, VC’s and so it, diluting the supply of tokens to the public.

Aptos had a large amount of tokens given to FTX and the contagion spreads to the Move-cousin Sui. Sui’s largest investor was FTX. The fallout of FTX is still continuing and both Sui and Aptos have failed thus far to provide the TPS it bragged.

Solana came about in a bull-run where Ethereum gas fees were high. Solana was cheap and fast therefore, it provided something the market was looking for. Solana has been caught faking TPS and it has forfeited security in order to scale. What use is scalability if it is shutting down the network often?

On top of that, Anatoly recently said to the Defiant that the difference between a Solana conference to an Ethereum conference there is less chance about scaling… The cheek of it, such outrecuidance.

Anatoly has complimented Move and I sense he feels somewhat threatened by it. Move

Instead of smart contracts Solana has programs and Move has modules. Modules the type system is global and this Type and resource safety across smart contracts is guaranteed by bytecode verification at compile/publish time. Resources can safely flow in and out of untrusted code.

Programs does not have any native resource safety.

If you would like to read a great breakdown of Move vs Solana’s Rust, there is a piece by Krešimir Klas that I thoroughly encourage to read - https://medium.com/@kklas/smart-contract-development-move-vs-rust-4d8f84754a8f

Move is a fantastic opportunity to develop and build. In 2019, Facebook’s Libra was starting to unravel was to become Diem, at this time a group of devs started OpenLibra. Facebook is a centralised entity that built a consortium chain, Zaki Manian, said, "One potential pitfall for Libra is that its members are mostly from California. It's not global enough."

OpenLibra is the reflection to that, the opposite. It had members across the globe, who were also from different political and economical backgrounds.

It saw that the dream of Satoshi was losing, the one where open, permissionless tech would bring innovation. Facebook could reach 4 billion people, crypto in 2019 is not the size it is now, and the size it is now will be tiny compared to where it is going, therefore, if Facebook were success in 2019, they would have captured crypto. Essentially being the defacto bank and currency of the internet.

You can see why not just the ordinary person but the centralised authorities did not want the Zuck Buck.

China is rolling out its surveillance coin.

The dream was dying. Therefore, it needed initiative to kick start it.

Open Libra was started and the idea was if it can run on Libra it will run on Open Libra, a decentralised system as opposed to the All-Seeing-Eye!

Democracy Earth put it succinctly, “We are 21st century citizens interacting with 19th century institutions based on 15th century information technology.” Demo’ Earth see the need to progress our institutions and the technology we have here will enable a more fluid participation that is not constrained by locality. Civil democracy has been eroding since the 70s and our tech can be distracting, though, DE see an avenue to elevate civil democracy by ourselves utilising the tech for our favour.

One of their leading ideas is Liquid Democracy, which is direct democracy – one where everyone votes on everything – combined with a representative democracy. In other words, you vote or you delegate it to someone else.

DE decided to have a congress representative that would make decision based on the outcomes of votes passed through DemocracyOS – an app where those that participate with and vote on issues. This is similar to Taaki and Buterin back in 2012 at Calafou with ZuPass, an app that Buterin used in 2023 at his network Zuzalu in Croatia. This is a way to have censorship resistant democracies, what a great idea to strive for.

The Danish Red Cross was brought into help, the Red Cross Foundation does a lot of work to help the bottom billion across the globe and it has a Digital Transformation initiative to help educate digital literacy, build data, form purposeful partnerships to over 100 countries. Local actors, governments, and businesses are brought together to form strategy, common goals and raise the interconnectedness of aid from local to global. They will also provide sustainable financing to help localities with income generation.

OpenLibra had a group of people from across the space form it: Ethan Buchman (Cosmos), Zaki Manian (Cosmos), Jae Kwon (Cosmos), Sunny Aggarwal (Cosmos), Naol Duga Jebessa (Synestate), Michael Zargham (BlockScience), Ankur Shah (Math Shop), Andrew Dickson (Math Shop), Lane Rettig (SpaceMesh), Sofie Blackstad (hiveonline), Tony Arcieri (iclusion), Althea Allen (Ethereum), Dan Tsul (Kyokan), Eletherios (Radicle/Oscoin), Alexis Sellier (Radicle/Oscoin), Lucas Geiger (wireline), Barnabe Monnot (Singapore Uni, a year after OpenLibra announcement he became a Research Scientist for Ethereum Foundation), Tim Roughgarden (Columbia Uni), Alex Shin (hashed), Alex Tabarrok (GMU), Rick Dudley (Vulcanized), Santi Siri (Democracy Earth).

Block Science started in 2017 to apply the academia behind socio-technical economies and applied it to practice in real-world businesses, transforming systems towards increasingly decentralised ecosystems. One example is Block Science provided the mathematical framework that enables portfolios to continuously self-rebalance, this was utilised by Balancer. Interchain Foundation provided a generous grant towards OpenLibra as members of Cosmos saw the potential in the tech of Libra. Cosmos today has facilitated 272 apps and services, collectively managing $60bn. With OpenLibra – and now 0L Network – it has had a lot of funding from its members within or from grants, there aren’t Venture Capitalists providing funds to the project.

OpenLibra forked Libra when Libra was still Libra-ing. Then Libra became Diem and Died. OpenLibra members through Facebook were going to get the slam dunk, they thought us, in 2023, would be utilising a Libra stablecoin across the internet. The landscape had changed but the goals were the same, to utilise the Move system in a permissionless, decentralised manner.

OpenLibra changed to 0L network, it had a testnet for a year and it was in October 2021 when the mainnet of 0L Network went live, the same month as Bitcoin just 13 years later. The majesty of Bitcoin is the fact it is a public, digital payment system with no single entity that owns it. Private infrastructure has held onto chokepoints but Bitcoin has liberated one of them.

To paraphrase Peter Von Volkenburg, Corporations are becoming fewer, larger and more powerful and their errors have higher consequences. Facebook almost took the cake and ate it, there maybe a future “Facebook” size entity that attempts to do the same, you can see this with Chinese companies in the Sino-realm.

DLT/Blockchain is a massive space and all sorts of players are involved in it, just because there are centralised entities in the space does not mean we can’t build more decentralised services. One issue for crypto is how the SEC and equivalent authorities in other countries label crypto’s – is a security, is it a chicken, what will it be?

What if a chain did not have an ICO?

There is an attempt to proof itself from regulation to come by opting for the Satoshi method – mining.

0L Network developed the Carpe Miner Wallet. This can be downloaded for Windows and Mac. A crypto-curious fellow would download this, create an account, get onboarded via the 0L discord. Once onboarded, on the Carpe app, the user can turn the miner on. You had to have between 8 and 72 proofs per day to be provided the rewards, which is 0L gas token. Michael Zelbel – officially an IT Consultant for Infosys – provides a tutorial on how to utilise Carpe, he also contributes his efforts to the 0L Network.

Now, this project isn’t a rocket to the moon – to start with anyway – as it doesn’t have the leverage VC’s can bring in the short term. The project does have the essence of crypto, where the project is pulling itself up by hard work and developments without the steroid-pumps and marketing of VC coins. There are no market-makers, airdrops, no ICO. With this, the project has a less-gamed system and more organic growth. It also aides its protection from regulation in the future. Currently, there are 3 ways to get compensation: (1) Using Carpe; (2) Contributing to the Hustle Karma bounty system; and (3) running a Validator Node.

On Twitter/X, you can follow the likes of Micahel Zelbel, 0L Network provide a blog, Daniyal provides positive efforts such as speaking at Movecon, there are anonymous announcements from 0tt0 (@0x0tt0x0), Lemonium has writes up Medium 0L posts. As this is a community-driven chain, work and effort is rewarded through the Hustle Karma system. Tasks are proposed and the labour is given a reward, it depends on the task but some do provide a sizable bounty. Where Aptos and Solana are “too busy” to provide such things.

0L has been adapting and adjusting as it goes and all of this hard work and co-operation, tech moves fast and it can make some protocols out-dated. 0L is releasing V7 of its network, with each update it is to provide a more secure network and enhance features of the protocol. The years of endeavour will provide the soil for a strong eco-system. (https://medium.com/@lemonium9962/upgrading-to-0l-network-version-7-enhanced-security-reliability-and-developer-friendly-features-eac9014a397d)

0L has cousins. Here we can see different methods of social organisation around a similar tech. Aptos and Sui are two VC methods and Starcoin is an intriguing combination of PoW and Move. Aptos can be considered the closer cousin in relation and with the V7 upgrade, 0L is aiming to be compatible with Aptos, what functions on Aptos functions on 0L, a great business move. Furthermore, the ambition of 0L is to bridge with other chains such as the Ethereum and beyond.

0L and Mysten Labs have a partnership, one of Mysten’s goals is to expand the amount of Move devs to 5 million by 2025, they want to speed up the building of Move applications.

0L Network is a unique opportunity in the crypto space. It has the decentralisation of Bitcoin with the ability for an ecosystem such as Ethereum. Move is going to be a dominant force, Facebook started a language from scratch with some of the hindsight that Ethereum perhaps wished it had, it has the potential to be the lingua franca of blockchain. The Move cousins of 0L will build out their ecosystems and the will be able to interact with 0L. Plus 0L will also bridge with the multi-chain present and future of crypto.

It is a project that is providing regulatory certainty, with a high-throughput, fair launch, faster finality and decentralised from the roots up with permissionless creation of accounts. The Crypto space is young and it was a teenagers lifetime ago when Bitcoin came onto the scene, there is still a long way to go, there is a lot of wiggle room, a lot of room for Move-ment….. okay I will get my red coat and leave now.

This is a tea.

A special tea.

11.2023

Take a seat, let me roll out the TV.

This is a documentary, where you read and imagine Psilocybe going through some crypto history. I am going to touch on ETH, Aptos, Solana, contracts, venture capital and most importantly 0L Network.

0L Network is a fork of Diem. Remember those days of Diem and Libra? It has been quietly in construction since those days and is, well, I will let you find out.

Get cosy.

Humans came out of the tree and it has been a debatable decision ever since. We are simultaneously fragile and incredibly resilient, we can literally walk an animal to death but die pretty quickly in any environment due to it being hot, cold, too mild, too damp, no sun, too much sun, too much rain, big animals, tiny little things that climb up your piss, or in the recent news where a woman who ate some Australian salad and ended up with a worm in her frontal lobe. She isn’t dead but high chance the worm laid a load of eggs around her lungs and heart, so… Bless her soul.

However, one benefit of our ape forefathers touching grass - makes it easier to get cooking. Cooking led to smaller guts and bigger brains. Bigger brains meant we could adapt, overcome the obstacles of our disadvantages. We built tools to take on the trees, made pointy sticks to take on the large cats that have the strength of 5 men and things with horns that are the size of a family car.

We used these stone tools to take on other humans. Then one lot of humans would devise of to utilise certain metals a particular way and boom, Bronze beats Stone. And we have been doing this game of evolution but with rock-paper-scissors ever since.

How we organise socially is crucial along the way too. There were people who had massive stones that stayed in one place, this was effectively a contract represented deals and transactions and each time a deal was done with these large stones that did not move, everyone in the social cohesion knew about it. They were the social equivalent of what tech-aficionados call “Distributed Ledger”.

Other cultures used sticks of wood or then shells. It really depended on what a culture was exposed to in terms of natural material. Those exposed to gold and silver tended to use gold and silver. And this arrangement lasts for a long time. Our technology took a boom when we made dead dinosaurs combustible and wait until the alchemists here what we did with glass, copper and silicon in the end. They will be astounded.

As you read this on your funny, magical light, we did something with the currency, we used to represent gold with coins and slices of trees with fancy human faces on. Then those represented something else we changed the peg from gold to dead dinosaur liquid.

This currency left a negative space, one which Satoshi et al exploited and filled with the Bitcoin network, the first digital payment system that was not privately owned by some form of corporate social organisation. It was complicated to get and send around but that is to be expected, it took us a long time to get banks and from banks to electronic cards.

In short amount of time, from 2008 to 2023/24, we have gone from Rust, C+ to Solidity to MOVE.

Tech and social organisation that drives change but there is one more piece to this trinity. That is language.

Unless something springs up from a lab contrived by some shadow agency, Move is the future.

The two dominant developer languages in crypto present some issues. One began development prior to the Satoshi whitepaper and the other is a pioneer of smart contracts, these are respectively, Rust and Solidarity.

Rust development started in 2006 as a passion project by Graydon Hoare, a quick respective head nod towards the name. The passion came from a broken elevator, he lived on the 21st floor and his elevator kept, well, not-elevating due to the computer language C++ or C, infamous for having memory bug issues.

Hoare got to work and began creating Rust. The name was inspired by the fungi – eeeeey - that causes rust as they are “over-engineered for survival”. Hoare emailed it around and had mixed responses, though perhaps the crucial positive intrigue came from the Mozilla executives.

Executives at Mozilla, though, were intrigued. Rust, they realized, could help them build a better browser engine. Browsers are notoriously complex pieces of software with many opportunities for dangerous memory bugs. By 2009, Mozilla was sponsoring its development. 2010, at a Mozilla conference in British Colombia, Rust was presented as a talk on an experimental language, the room was full of curious minds. 2013, Rust developers improved its ownership mechanics making the programme much faster, efficient and its memory was getting safer and safer. 2015 saw the drive to create a stable version to make it sellable software to companies and in post-2016 saw Rust spread across the world and the commercial. 2021, the major tech firms paid to set up a nonprofit Rust Foundation to support volunteer coders.

It helps go past the “garbage-collection” era of language, an era that was a response to the memory issues arising from C++. Rust helped

Rust has and is still proving to be of great use to companies and the world. To name a simple few companies that utilise it, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox, Cloudflare, Huawei, and Discord, not much surprise there as the aforementioned foundation was established by Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Mozilla, et al. Going into 2023, there were 2.2 million Rust developers.

In crypto, some examples of Rust-based projects include Solana, Qanx, Near, and Elrond or known as MultiversX now. A key thing to recognise its genesis was prior to crypto and smart contracts.

2008 saw Bitcoin begin to enter the public consciousness. Bitcoin was showing a decentralised system of sending funds from point A to point B with no borders. It was an apolitical currency, Anarchists, Libertarians, cyberpunks, anti-bankers and more had this flagship invention/asset that provided an alternative to centralised systems. The real barrier was the tech and the hassle to get into bitcoin and use it.

Amir Taaki was a Bitcoin core dev and he had a divide with the Bitcoin core dev leader, Gavin Andresen. Taaki can be taken as the orthodox of Bitcoiners, he wanted to stay close to Satoshi’ core values and build a decentralised financial system. He set up Britcoin exchange and Intersango exchange. He established the bitcoin standardisation procedure known as BIPs, he was active in developing products around Bitcoin such as DarkMarket, wallets, consultancies, and poker rooms. At one point Wired named him among the most dangerous men on the internet.

If you watch this video, you can see one of the most dangerous people EVER, squat in a flat, chat on video call - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0KV0lesSK8&ab_channel=WorldCryptoNetwork . If you go to 27.46, you will hear Taaki talk about Andresen

Andresen wanted Bitcoin to tap into institutional money. Taaki left the team and with that Bitcoin was slow on innovation. Taaki in the previous link highlights Andresen’s words, “After the transaction issue is resolved, the work of looking after its code will increasingly be the job of caretakes, not master builders… I am optimistic going forward… I hope in 10 years Bitcoin is really boring.”

Taaki is offended by this and calls him a weak leader and says due to his weakness he needs to create titles such as ‘Chief Scientist’ and ‘Lead Developer’ to give him a sense of respectability. Taaki points out a quote like this dumbs down the fact Bitcoin is driven by passionate, creative artists and individuals but instead engineers developing according to process.

At 31.43ish, Taaki is negatively talking about companies that go from the top down, “Oh we are going to do a big project,” he mocks, “We need $8mm…” then Chris Ellis quips:

“Just like Ethereum.”

And with that, people pull out guns and everything gets violent. Well not quite, Chris Ellis defends his quip and Taaki, after a few seconds of remaining silent, takes the stance that Ethereum is a different topic.

After all, Taaki plays a pivotal stepping stone in what becomes Ethereum.

We can thank Blizzard for Ethereum. The quick story, a young Vitalik Buterin played his beloved World of Warcraft until he was in shock one day for the damage component from his beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell was removed. So hurt, he thought of the evils of centralised services and what they can do. His father would later show him Bitcoin and his decentralised career took off.

Vitalik co-founded Bitcoin Magazine in 2012 with Mihai Alisie, who would play an important role in Ethereum. He invited Vitalik to Europe, which Vitalik took up the offer. At the Berlin Bitcoin Summer Meetup at the Yesterday Room77, the original Bitcoin-accepting restaurant. This is where Mihai and Vitalik met Yanislav Malahov and Amir Taaki, not long after the crew hopped over to Calafou, situated in Catalan-region of Spain.

Due to the Bitcoin Magazine project, Buterin was in collaboration with Amir Taaki.

Kasa de la Muntanya is one of the squats in the region where Amir would frequent. He was working on projects such as the Dark Wallet, Libbitcoin and Amir developed pybitcointools - Amir’s methods inspired Buterin to make a Python Bitcoin library himself. Vitalik writes about Lib Bitcoin here - bitcoinmagazine.com/business/what-libbitcoin-and-sx-are-and-why-they-matter-1376064919.

Here is a snippet:

“Amir Taaki’s libbitcoin has come to be one of the most advanced alternative implementations of the Bitcoin protocol in existence. Although there are now dozens of alternative implementations on the market, libbitcoin is one of the few that re-implements the complete Bitcoin standard, allowing users to run a deterministic wallet, an elliptic curve message signing interface and, of course, a fully functional Bitcoin node. Even multisignature transactions, which many popular wallets including blockchain.info and Bitcoin Wallet for Android still do not support, libbitcoin handles just fine… Amir Taaki, Joerg Platzer and others have long supported diversifying and internationalizing the Bitcoin ecosystem. And libbitcoin just might be the catalyst that finally sets the process going.”

The Catalan region has a culture of anarchism, there is the CIC (Catalan Integral Cooperative) and Calafou was one project within that, which settled at an abandoned factory in 2011. The initiative turned it into a proto-network state of around 200 people living with the principles of self-management, ecological sustainability, free culture and technological sovereignty.

Innovation really comes from communities with members in service of one another, with ideas being communicated, tested, pragmatism applied. On this site there was an ethos of here is a technology, use the technology, have a culture and community that utilises the tech, people are not alone as they try to figure and work things out. Not too dissimilar to a uni and that is the beauty to innovation: there are principles but not an method, you can do this with your family, at a uni, on a caravan site, it is all about a community connecting with one another rather than, say, a class exploiting another such as the Spartans and their Helots.

It raised revenues from the housing cooperative; from the contributions made by Calafou’s productive projects and cultural events such as a festival.

An example of tech they built was the “Zoo Pass”, a zk-proof based ID system that enabled people to make polls and vote anonymously through this pass. With the nature of these bright minds and their principles, they would move on, Amir and Vitalik went to Milan before going off on other adventures. Amir is someone Vitalik highly respects and visa versa. Vitalik would start conjuring up the idea of Ethereum.

Amir and his stays in squats would be all over Europe. When in London, he brought attention from a British newspaper, The Guardian (www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/mar/22/bitcoin-currency-video).

This piece peaked the intrigue of a certain Gavin Wood. At the University of York, he got an MEng in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 2002. He then went on to complete his PhD on ‘Content-based visualisation to aid common navigation of musical audio’ in 2005. He went on programme and consult, including consulting research at Microsoft.

In 2011, Wood was not really enticed by Bitcoin but 2013, his opinion changed. When he saw Amir talk about Bitcoin in the Guardian where Amir is in an abandoned office building in the centre of London where tradfi-towers can be seen a couple of miles away, he decided to go down and meet him.

Through this meet he also met other people, one of them being Jonny Bitcoin. Wood and Jonny would drink at the same pub and eventually one of their chats turned to a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin and his idea called Ethereum.

As you can see from the photo Gavin Wood reached out to help Vitalik with making the ideal practical. Wood said he got on well with Buterin, where Buterin had a great maths brain as well as the rest of his intellect, Wood had the knowledge, skills and academia to help that. During a walk in San Francisco, the two came up with the re-factoring of the gas; the gas would still be forfeit, if the transaction runs out of gas but the entire execution would be reverse, this was to cut out partial attacks.

Much development went on to the point by 2014 the protocol was stabilising and 2015 saw the Yellow Paper drop under the title – “Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger”.

History was made and Ethereum has gone on to advance the cryptocurrency world massively. Decentralised Finance arrived and with time solid projects by hard working, bright people that serviced the community of projects have stood the test of time, such as Uniswap.

However, conmen and their flimsy whitepapers took a lot of money but that is going to happen, bastards can be found everywhere. In 2022, 97% of projects on Uniswap were rug pulls. An issue that has arisen from the pioneering project is the vulnerabilities in the coding. The language devised was called Solidity and programmes built with it have lost millions. Uniswap has complicated code of around 10,000 lines and it lends itself to getting hacked. 2023, saw Uniswap exploited for $25.5 million. There is the infamous 2016 DAO hack, $50 million was taken in the DAO heist. 2017, the Parity wallet had to helpless watch 153,037 ETH be drained from it. BadgerDAO lost $120 million in 2021. Poly Network saw $600 million stolen from a hacker. Uranian Finance is a fork of Uniswap, based on BSC, a heist took $50 million. 2022 can brag $4bn was stolen from DeFi exploits. The Ronin Network has the biggest exploit, which topped $616 million.

Furthermore, Ethereum has a transaction speed of 15 transaction per second, ETH 2.0 is going to push that up to 100,000 TPS but with the vulnerabilities in its language and TPS this has led to an opening in the market for protocols and projects that offer an alternative to Ethereum.

One project Radix offers a language that cuts out the hacks that are possible on Solidity using its Scrypto language. Solidity is not intuitive, it came from a heuristic environment and a landscape of few projects were in creation, it was an early universe.

Personally, I entered crypto in 2021, there was Binance, Ethereum is large, Solana is coming, I can access fiat-on ramps fairly easily, the DeFi environment is going. Yet, it is easy to forget that this space is relatively young, it feels like a lot happens in 6 months.

Radix is an example of DLT-based protocol that has a language intuitive with defi in order to reach higher TPS and have a more secure framework.

Another development has been Move. I have covered a bit of the history of Facebook and Libra in the deluge called “Diem Diaspora”, do check out that piece if you would like more detail on this episode of history.

https://mirror.xyz/pcybe.eth/bGNT8lEfaKtBKQ5TLJBezSPt0DR8XDKaNVuDIglbVx8

Move is another example of a language that benefits from the environment pioneers of Bitcoin and Ethereum has helped stimulate and the dodgy elevator Graydon Hoare took one day. It is also borne from the labs of Facebook, which, sorry to point out the obvious, is a bloody wealthy company.

Wealthy company with near unlimited funds, lizard looking owner, the ability to attract elite talent, bring them together and allow them to congeal and test ideas with state-of-the-art technology.

The Move language is reportedly relatively simple to use and developer centric. Here is a quick break-down:

Move smart contracts are published as Modules. There is the virtual machine (VM), containing the bytecode format, a bytecode interpreter, and infrastructure to generate the genesis block of the Libra blockchain as well as subsequent blocks of transactions.The bytecode verifier, containing a static analysis tool which is used by the virtual machine to verify any new Move code before executing.The Move intermediate representation (IR) compiler, which compiles human-readable program text into Move bytecode.The standard library, containing the Move IR code for the core system modules (e.g. LibraAccount and LibraCoin).The tests and testing framework for the virtual machine, bytecode verifier, and compiler.

Modules can be created onto the blockchain to be executed. Move has rules on how structs are to be used. To prevent a modules from mutating other inner fields there is the bytecode verifier analyses Move bytecode to check the adherence to type, memory and resource rules safety rules. This verifier and Move’s bytecode is the jewel, it allows the for structs to be passed across trust boundaries without losing their integrity

It is based on Rust, as established, a popular developer language, it is statically typed and linear, and digital assets are presented in type whereas in Solidity they aren’t. In other words, it is readable code and fewer errors, no one variable can be used for two different purposes

Digital assets are not tangible and it is needed to be expressed how they are scarce and access control and that is what the Resources do. From the start of the whitepaper “The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic” and a on page 6, “First-class resources are a very general concept that programmers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct business logic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies.”

A coin is represented as a Resource, the language allows it to be created, modified and destroyed

A Module (smart contract) protects the resource and it is containing function and struct definitions. Structs group together related data and can flow into other modules, and the modules have full control over how their types can and can’t be used.

It is pointed out in a few posts on Move that this loses a bit of flexibility in the Module but there is security from this.

Facebook sold its intellectual property to Silvergate and from there the talent drained to VC fuelled projects, notably Aptos and Sui.

Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching from Diem went to form Aptos. Intriguingly, Mo Shaikh worked for Shari Glazer – of the notorious Glazer Family – after they met through White & Case law partner Pratin Vallabhaneni in the summer of 2021. From there, Shaikh was hired as a consultant for Swoon Capital in August 2021. With Mo’s background and talent, he was a suitable candidate to help the Glazers find blockchain firms they can invest in or even purchase.

This employment had restrictive agreements, such as non-compete and non-disclosure. This was a close professional agreement where discussions of big business plans and forming a start-up were taking place. This business was called Matonee, pre-agreement contracts were close to being put in writing but this was never finalised. She would invest $10mm and then more if necessary but this project would avoid VC funding would dilute their shares.

The WhatsApp transcripts show he told her that the company would need “$75m-$100m” to launch. He also named the VCs he was speaking with about the project.

It is supposed that Shari was going to give Mo $10mm for what was going to become Aptos, in return she would get a large share that would not be diluted by venture capital investment, however, after $200mm was raised she was receiving less than 10%. The Glazier girl was not happy.

The picture Shari paints is Mo cheated her out of an agreed amount and Mo points out without a contractual agree this is a misunderstanding. If I was to empathise with Mo, I allege Shari isn’t an easy going type and did not put concerted amounts of pressure upon him, one he squirmed out. And if he went to the other firms for funding, I am sure they were not so receptive of the supposed Shari agreement, if it was at all ever brought up.

Mo did enter a professional contract with a Glazier and it was talked over text about setting up funding for Mo’s start-up, it was not contractual however. And the ideas from Shari about her share were diluted by VC money.

He was in a tight spot and a protracted court case was going to sap both their energies but the Glaziers have deeper pockets to pursue this even without the necessary contractual evidence. The case seems to have been settled out of court, I am sure with Shari getting some form of a larger pie, though that is only speculation.

I give leeway to Mo here but what happens after this is still shady behaviour. The Glazier noise started a short while before the $200mm raise announcement. Aptos boasted it could reach 160k TPS and it was valued at $4bn, which was more than Uniswap Labs ($1.6bn), a project that dominates the Defi landscape and actually provides. It can be argued then this shows the enormous potential Move and Aptos will bring.

Now, the VC behind Aptos are the heavy weights, here are some: Andreesen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Binance Labs – the notorious a16z along with three exchanges, two of which have had their CEO’s taken down due to certain practices that are deemed naughty.

On paper, Aptos seems great. High TPS, security in the language; Coinbase, Anchorage, Paxos, Rarible, BNB chain, Nodereal, are some of the devs; large amounts of backing, strong team; it seems a no-brainer.

Upon the token release, Aptos did not release their tokenomics despite it being live on Binance and FTX. Utter madness and quite clearly a shady play. It transpired that an investor accidently leaked the tokenomics in a PDF report, the leak came from Upbit, a Korean exchange.

Mo gave a weak excuse as to why they were not released… it was because they were too busy… Well, that tickled me pink. I appreciate it is hard work making a project and releasing it, what isn’t tough is providing tokenomics to the public after all, Aptos were not busy when they provided it to their Venture investors. I want you to remember that too busy line, it will come up again in a moment.

The tokenomics for Aptos are as follows:

The investors have staking and they may have their initial supply in lock up, they still receive staking rewards that unlock monthly.

On top of this, the TPS was below Bitcoin’s. Admittedly a project is not going to be at maximum capacity to begin with but even so that is a shoddy exit from the gates, you expect to Usain Bolt and get Butterbean instead at the 100m sprint.

Over 2023, Upbit has seen a few events of Aptos manipulation. At the start of the year, with no real news, it saw a 450% rise, in the midst of a bear market. The eye-brow raising data was the fact that the Upbit exchange had 3 times the volume of Binance. In July 2023, Aptos saw a big jump on the Upbit exchange ago, this time people suggest it was a short squeeze. Then the spooky season of October saw Upbit exchange have $3.4bn worth of fake APT tokens on its exchange.

It is an exchange is favoured by the FSC and has had a history of employees done for market manipulation.

Aptos is often called the “Solana-Killer”, a cringe inducing marketing term, I see it as a similar play to Solana. A venture capital pet with a high TPS blockchain and dishonest business is conducted for VCs to dump on retail.

With Ethereum’s TPS and its slow upgrade cycles it has left itself vulnerable to competition who come along and claim really high TPS. Solana is such competitor.

Heavily backed by Venture Capital, Solana in 2020 was the hot new thing, the Ethereum killer for it could do 60k TPS. Yet these transactions were not time stamped on the native Blockchain explorer (explorer.solana.com) is a hot piece of garbage. CEO Anatoly Yakovenko stated that the community should build one. The community, for free, should build the explorer and not the a16z et al back Solana devs. Yakovenko stated the team was too busy. There it is again.

Anatoly has openly admitted in a Fireside Chat that they launched blind in 2020 and did not optimise their product, Solana is a beta product that went live with 40 validators. To be a validator is notoriously expensive with Solana, Anatoly said that hardware gets cheaper over time therefore in the long run it works out. In other words, silicon is the bottleneck and others will copy the SOL design when the hardware becomes cheaper. The cost to start up a node will be half price in a few years.

Depends on your source but a node can costs tens of thousands annually, then it costs roughly 150 Euros a day. You need a minimum of 100 SOL. Hardware costs $3k a year, hardware can cost $3k, then you need to think of your internet connection and electricity bills. The cost of nodes has kept

Here is a link to one break down - https://laine-sa.medium.com/running-a-solana-validator-lessons-tips-6e6d08c0c589

Another source says it is $6 million a year to run a node - https://www.cyber.capital/news/a-solana-critique-lies-fraud-dangerous-trade-offs. To quote Justin Bons, “In SOL several consensus mechanisms are counted as transactions, which validators have to carry out. Which means validators also have to pay the TX fee for these mechanisms, unlike most other chains. This results in validation being far more expensive then it needs to be!”

Like Aptos, Solana had a deceptive start to their coin, in March 2020, Solana had an ICO where it sold 8 million tokens for $0.22 each and raised $1.8 million. Then they have a private sale in June 2021, $314 million in a private sale to venture capitalists was raised.

When the coin initially released, they claimed only unlocked a little above 8 million tokens. Then an audit found there were a further 12 million that were also released. The excuse given was the tokens were for a market maker as a loan. They promised they would bring these coins back into lock-up and also announce when they would release tokens.

Instead, they only took 3.3 million SOL back from this “market maker” and then released another 8 million tokens. Bad news of SOL is still to come as FTX estate still holds 55.8mm SOL tokens, 42.2mm is locked up. It is alleged SOLs ride recently was a manipulation to dump on retail as early November 2023, 750,000 SOL was released from the FTX estate to Binance and Kraken exchanges, this was worth around $30 million.

Though that may alleged to say that is an absurd allegation would be wrong, for Solana was a darling of SBF. Fortune have a headline quoting SBF saying the most undervalued project was Solana. He was a big investor of Solana and we also know he is a massively corrupt thunder-bastard.

His FTX exchange would take the order data and provide it to Alameda Research, which Sam claimed he did not run despite him owning 90% of this fund. It also turns out FTX had a third of USDT supply, after FTX starts, Tether’s minting grows rapaciously. On top of this, Solana also partnered with Tether.

This is the tricky phase for crypto. This emerging space is a wild west, who would have thought there would be such clandestine behaviour to contrive a market around cryptographic-based technology?

VC’s bring their connections, their wealth, their talent pools, those are enticing to someone who wants to make-it, to become something, to get their idea from 0-1. Bitcoin had no ICO as such but it had to start out with a small pool of people and over time it has become more decentralised. Ethereum’s token allocation to insiders is tiny compared to the norm in 2023, though Ethereum was a first mover, now it has imitators and one of the methods of those imitators to bootstrap is to have allocations for airdrops, devs, VC’s and so it, diluting the supply of tokens to the public.

Aptos had a large amount of tokens given to FTX and the contagion spreads to the Move-cousin Sui. Sui’s largest investor was FTX. The fallout of FTX is still continuing and both Sui and Aptos have failed thus far to provide the TPS it bragged.

Solana came about in a bull-run where Ethereum gas fees were high. Solana was cheap and fast therefore, it provided something the market was looking for. Solana has been caught faking TPS and it has forfeited security in order to scale. What use is scalability if it is shutting down the network often?

On top of that, Anatoly recently said to the Defiant that the difference between a Solana conference to an Ethereum conference there is less chance about scaling… The cheek of it, such outrecuidance.

Anatoly has complimented Move and I sense he feels somewhat threatened by it. Move

Instead of smart contracts Solana has programs and Move has modules. Modules the type system is global and this Type and resource safety across smart contracts is guaranteed by bytecode verification at compile/publish time. Resources can safely flow in and out of untrusted code.

Programs does not have any native resource safety.

If you would like to read a great breakdown of Move vs Solana’s Rust, there is a piece by Krešimir Klas that I thoroughly encourage to read - https://medium.com/@kklas/smart-contract-development-move-vs-rust-4d8f84754a8f

Move is a fantastic opportunity to develop and build. In 2019, Facebook’s Libra was starting to unravel was to become Diem, at this time a group of devs started OpenLibra. Facebook is a centralised entity that built a consortium chain, Zaki Manian, said, "One potential pitfall for Libra is that its members are mostly from California. It's not global enough."

OpenLibra is the reflection to that, the opposite. It had members across the globe, who were also from different political and economical backgrounds.

It saw that the dream of Satoshi was losing, the one where open, permissionless tech would bring innovation. Facebook could reach 4 billion people, crypto in 2019 is not the size it is now, and the size it is now will be tiny compared to where it is going, therefore, if Facebook were success in 2019, they would have captured crypto. Essentially being the defacto bank and currency of the internet.

You can see why not just the ordinary person but the centralised authorities did not want the Zuck Buck.

China is rolling out its surveillance coin.

The dream was dying. Therefore, it needed initiative to kick start it.

Open Libra was started and the idea was if it can run on Libra it will run on Open Libra, a decentralised system as opposed to the All-Seeing-Eye!

Democracy Earth put it succinctly, “We are 21st century citizens interacting with 19th century institutions based on 15th century information technology.” Demo’ Earth see the need to progress our institutions and the technology we have here will enable a more fluid participation that is not constrained by locality. Civil democracy has been eroding since the 70s and our tech can be distracting, though, DE see an avenue to elevate civil democracy by ourselves utilising the tech for our favour.

One of their leading ideas is Liquid Democracy, which is direct democracy – one where everyone votes on everything – combined with a representative democracy. In other words, you vote or you delegate it to someone else.

DE decided to have a congress representative that would make decision based on the outcomes of votes passed through DemocracyOS – an app where those that participate with and vote on issues. This is similar to Taaki and Buterin back in 2012 at Calafou with ZuPass, an app that Buterin used in 2023 at his network Zuzalu in Croatia. This is a way to have censorship resistant democracies, what a great idea to strive for.

The Danish Red Cross was brought into help, the Red Cross Foundation does a lot of work to help the bottom billion across the globe and it has a Digital Transformation initiative to help educate digital literacy, build data, form purposeful partnerships to over 100 countries. Local actors, governments, and businesses are brought together to form strategy, common goals and raise the interconnectedness of aid from local to global. They will also provide sustainable financing to help localities with income generation.

OpenLibra had a group of people from across the space form it: Ethan Buchman (Cosmos), Zaki Manian (Cosmos), Jae Kwon (Cosmos), Sunny Aggarwal (Cosmos), Naol Duga Jebessa (Synestate), Michael Zargham (BlockScience), Ankur Shah (Math Shop), Andrew Dickson (Math Shop), Lane Rettig (SpaceMesh), Sofie Blackstad (hiveonline), Tony Arcieri (iclusion), Althea Allen (Ethereum), Dan Tsul (Kyokan), Eletherios (Radicle/Oscoin), Alexis Sellier (Radicle/Oscoin), Lucas Geiger (wireline), Barnabe Monnot (Singapore Uni, a year after OpenLibra announcement he became a Research Scientist for Ethereum Foundation), Tim Roughgarden (Columbia Uni), Alex Shin (hashed), Alex Tabarrok (GMU), Rick Dudley (Vulcanized), Santi Siri (Democracy Earth).

Block Science started in 2017 to apply the academia behind socio-technical economies and applied it to practice in real-world businesses, transforming systems towards increasingly decentralised ecosystems. One example is Block Science provided the mathematical framework that enables portfolios to continuously self-rebalance, this was utilised by Balancer. Interchain Foundation provided a generous grant towards OpenLibra as members of Cosmos saw the potential in the tech of Libra. Cosmos today has facilitated 272 apps and services, collectively managing $60bn. With OpenLibra – and now 0L Network – it has had a lot of funding from its members within or from grants, there aren’t Venture Capitalists providing funds to the project.

OpenLibra forked Libra when Libra was still Libra-ing. Then Libra became Diem and Died. OpenLibra members through Facebook were going to get the slam dunk, they thought us, in 2023, would be utilising a Libra stablecoin across the internet. The landscape had changed but the goals were the same, to utilise the Move system in a permissionless, decentralised manner.

OpenLibra changed to 0L network, it had a testnet for a year and it was in October 2021 when the mainnet of 0L Network went live, the same month as Bitcoin just 13 years later. The majesty of Bitcoin is the fact it is a public, digital payment system with no single entity that owns it. Private infrastructure has held onto chokepoints but Bitcoin has liberated one of them.

To paraphrase Peter Von Volkenburg, Corporations are becoming fewer, larger and more powerful and their errors have higher consequences. Facebook almost took the cake and ate it, there maybe a future “Facebook” size entity that attempts to do the same, you can see this with Chinese companies in the Sino-realm.

DLT/Blockchain is a massive space and all sorts of players are involved in it, just because there are centralised entities in the space does not mean we can’t build more decentralised services. One issue for crypto is how the SEC and equivalent authorities in other countries label crypto’s – is a security, is it a chicken, what will it be?

What if a chain did not have an ICO?

There is an attempt to proof itself from regulation to come by opting for the Satoshi method – mining.

0L Network developed the Carpe Miner Wallet. This can be downloaded for Windows and Mac. A crypto-curious fellow would download this, create an account, get onboarded via the 0L discord. Once onboarded, on the Carpe app, the user can turn the miner on. You had to have between 8 and 72 proofs per day to be provided the rewards, which is 0L gas token. Michael Zelbel – officially an IT Consultant for Infosys – provides a tutorial on how to utilise Carpe, he also contributes his efforts to the 0L Network.

Now, this project isn’t a rocket to the moon – to start with anyway – as it doesn’t have the leverage VC’s can bring in the short term. The project does have the essence of crypto, where the project is pulling itself up by hard work and developments without the steroid-pumps and marketing of VC coins. There are no market-makers, airdrops, no ICO. With this, the project has a less-gamed system and more organic growth. It also aides its protection from regulation in the future. Currently, there are 3 ways to get compensation: (1) Using Carpe; (2) Contributing to the Hustle Karma bounty system; and (3) running a Validator Node.

On Twitter/X, you can follow the likes of Micahel Zelbel, 0L Network provide a blog, Daniyal provides positive efforts such as speaking at Movecon, there are anonymous announcements from 0tt0 (@0x0tt0x0), Lemonium has writes up Medium 0L posts. As this is a community-driven chain, work and effort is rewarded through the Hustle Karma system. Tasks are proposed and the labour is given a reward, it depends on the task but some do provide a sizable bounty. Where Aptos and Solana are “too busy” to provide such things.

0L has been adapting and adjusting as it goes and all of this hard work and co-operation, tech moves fast and it can make some protocols out-dated. 0L is releasing V7 of its network, with each update it is to provide a more secure network and enhance features of the protocol. The years of endeavour will provide the soil for a strong eco-system. (https://medium.com/@lemonium9962/upgrading-to-0l-network-version-7-enhanced-security-reliability-and-developer-friendly-features-eac9014a397d)

0L has cousins. Here we can see different methods of social organisation around a similar tech. Aptos and Sui are two VC methods and Starcoin is an intriguing combination of PoW and Move. Aptos can be considered the closer cousin in relation and with the V7 upgrade, 0L is aiming to be compatible with Aptos, what functions on Aptos functions on 0L, a great business move. Furthermore, the ambition of 0L is to bridge with other chains such as the Ethereum and beyond.

0L and Mysten Labs have a partnership, one of Mysten’s goals is to expand the amount of Move devs to 5 million by 2025, they want to speed up the building of Move applications.

0L Network is a unique opportunity in the crypto space. It has the decentralisation of Bitcoin with the ability for an ecosystem such as Ethereum. Move is going to be a dominant force, Facebook started a language from scratch with some of the hindsight that Ethereum perhaps wished it had, it has the potential to be the lingua franca of blockchain. The Move cousins of 0L will build out their ecosystems and the will be able to interact with 0L. Plus 0L will also bridge with the multi-chain present and future of crypto.

It is a project that is providing regulatory certainty, with a high-throughput, fair launch, faster finality and decentralised from the roots up with permissionless creation of accounts. The Crypto space is young and it was a teenagers lifetime ago when Bitcoin came onto the scene, there is still a long way to go, there is a lot of wiggle room, a lot of room for Move-ment….. okay I will get my red coat and leave now.