For me pace is the deciding factor in whether we are in a Bull or a Bear. Though we are (as I write) ~10% down from BTC’s ATH the pace of play is no less frenetic, a sure sign that we are astride the Bull.

In the Bull, Crypto Twitter is in no short supply of Advice Guys. These are the types who remind you of the importance of bankroll management after %50+ alt drawdowns. These are also the types who, when the pace quickens, pat you on the head and say:

                       “The man who chases two rabbits catches neither.”

It’s a reasonable implication that we should focus on one thing and do it well rather than focus on more than one things and do them poorly. Crypto is a game that has historically and dramatically rewarded concentrated bets and it feels near-consensus that diversification and aggressive portfolio growth are not friends.

That said, I think for many market participants - those with a certain personality type, those with a <7 figure portfolio size - the adage is wrong. We - I am firmly in their number - should not be chasing one rabbit; we should not be chasing two rabbits. We should not be chasing at all as much as grasping at the forest air in frenzied delirium, pulling as many fluffy bunnies to us as humanly possible.

Naming the Pig

For the moment let’s follow the adage and chase that one rabbit. What happens next? First let’s assume we are rewarded for our myopia and we catch it. Ideally we would dispatch, skin, and eat it, bolstering our fat stores and moving expeditiously to our next quarry. Ideally.

Markets and market participants are not Ideal! Some of us are idiots. Some of us don’t even eat the rabbit because, as you might expect, the rabbit is quite cute. Soon we began to mistake our food for our friend. A bit later we name the proverbial pig and rather than calling it Dinner we call it Fluffles or Cuddles or Thumps.

Maybe I’m not giving us enough credit. Maybe we do eat the rabbit before naming it. But then, rather than standing up and dusting off our trousers and looking for the next rabbit, we rest. And why shouldn’t we? Our bellies and egos are full. We conquered the wild, worked for our dinner. And so we build a fire and recline and are awoken the next day by the pangs of hunger that remind us that that rabbit wasn’t particularly large.

Ok, maybe I’m still underestimating us. Instead we wipe the rabbit grease from our mouths, repack our bag, and are off at once. In a matter of minutes we see another rabbit but, alas, it’s a bit too quick. The next is a bit too small, hardly worth the effort. A third is plump but far off, sure to see us and retreat before we can catch it.

The issue of course is not the rabbits, but us. Our bellies are full and our drive is down. We are hunting from a place of security rather than desperation.

So what? We’ll get hungry again. Really hungry. And then we’ll just catch another rabbit, right?

The Ones That Got Away

Let’s go back to the beginning. There were two rabbits and we know the fate of the one we chose. What of the other? Likely it is long gone, underground, content to nibble the grasses at the edge of its hole until our scent is a distant memory.

This seems…fine? There were two rabbits and we got one. Soon we’ll see two more rabbits and get one of them and we’ll iterate until we can live off the interest on our pelt-and-meat accounts (somewhere around here the metaphor breaks down, admittedly).

But this assumes a literal interpretation of the adage, wherein there are two and no more than two rabbits and one and no more than one us. Consider instead standing in a forest clearing with five hundred rabbits. We select one rabbit and chase it out of the clearing and into the woods and, once again, catch it.

Let’s assume the best of ourselves. We don’t Name the Pig, or Rest on our Laurels, or Lose our Desperate Drive. We kill and eat the rabbit efficiently and move on. Still, what happened while we were away?

While we chased and ate one rabbit there were hundreds of others who ran around our clearing and have since returned to their nests. The proverbial Ones That Got Away, got away. We paid the opportunity cost.

Catch as Catch Can

There are two main differences between the world that spawned the adage and the world of five hundred rabbits. The first is obvious: there are more rabbits. The second, and most important, difference, is that in this new world we recognize we don’t even need to chase the rabbits but rather can reach out and grab them by the armful.

If we accept these differences our goals and behavior should change dramatically. Catching one rabbit should not be celebrated or even noticed. Eating should happen a few nibbles at a time, in between catches, a necessary part of the process rather than a celebration.

To stretch this metaphor to its breaking point, consider the behavior of other hunters. If we know there are other hunters in the clearing all grasping at rabbits like we are, we need to grab what we can as fast as we can. Moreover, if we want to keep up, we need to account for the likelihood that our competitors in rabbit-grabbing will likely get more efficient in their task over time, and we, too, need to continually improve.

So what

Having been in the forest for about 3.5 years my main observation is that most of us see the rabbits and few of us grab enough. Sometimes we don’t grab a rabbit because we don’t recognize it as a rabbit. Sometimes we don’t grab a rabbit because of some specific obstacle - this rabbit requires us to use new bridge, that rabbit requires us to buy it using an unfamiliar or nontraditional marketplace. But mostly we don’t catch the next rabbit because we a) think we have enough rabbits and b) are tired of grabbing.

To be crystal clear and to depart from the metaphor, this is not a post about airdrop farming or NFT whitelists. This is a post about that project you saw on Twitter with 400 or 1000 or 5000 followers that may be worth 20 minutes of your time. This is a post about new token standards, new narratives, new trends, and the acknowledgement that the only thing that stays the same is how many new things there are.

I’ll admit this is a convenient interpretation for your author who is not a millionaire and who likely has some sort of attention-related mental itch that a frenetic pace scratches. But I suspect I’m not alone.

“Yes, you just get the money for nothing. It’s called an airdrop. Well not for nothing, usually you have to “test” something for them. I used the finger quotes because it’s more button-clicking than testing. Yes those are very different things, you’re right. No it isn’t really like an allowance.”

“M-E-M-E. Meeeeeeeeem. Meme coin. Because it’s a coin that represents a meme, which is sort of like a joke. I agree his hat is very cute. Yes it’s his hat. Yes, he wears it all the time. I’m honestly not sure if gets taken on walks. I’m not even sure he really exists.”

"Why? Hmmmmmm. That’s a goodie. Well it’s fun I guess. Yes, like games are fun. But I also make money doing this, sometimes at least. Only sometimes because I’m only good at it sometimes. Or I only get lucky sometimes. Yes I agree it would be better if I was good at it all the time.”

This week we’re discussing Wormhole, an “open source blockchain development platform connecting the decentralized web.” Ah yes, of course! That makes intuitive sense to me.

Matthew McConaughey go weeeeeeeeeeee

In my (moviegoing) experience a wormhole is a portal of sorts that turns interstellar travel up to 11. Where travel was once slow and incremental, a wormhole allows an intrepid adventurer to skip across space and time. Wormhole is much the same. Instead of skipping across the blackness of space one can bridge across the (blackness?) of blockchains; instead of transporting people or dehydrated food, one can transport tokens. Instead of…well just look at this table:

That was a dumb comparison; What does this actually do?

Glad you asked. Wormhole is a messaging protocol that allows applications to engage in a cross-chain fashion. What exactly is meant by “message” depends on the application. For instance, Pike is a borrow and lend application. While there are many such applications that operate within a single chain (e.g. marginfi on Solana; Nostra on Starknet), Pike allows users to deposit collateral on one chain and borrow against that collateral on a different chain. Wormhole is the communication channel through which Chain A and Chain B converse, such that Chain A can say to Chain B “Go ahead and allow that borrow on your chain, Jim has deposited collateral on mine.”

Of course there are many other things that Chain A and Chain B can talk about. They might discuss the trading of one token for another (e.g. cross-chain swaps at Hashflow), for instance, such that Jim can swap Eth on Chain A for USDC on Chain B. Then again maybe Chain A and Chain B are sick of talking about Jim and instead want to focus on their own relationship.

Start sending me this shit

Wormhole doesn’t just talk the talk, it also tokens the token (editor’s note: we’ll change this before you publish, right?). By that I mean that Wormhole allows users to bridge tokens across otherwise disconnected blockchain ecosystems. This means Solana can bridge to EVM chains (using e.g. Mayan Swap) and EVM chains can bridge to Cosmos chains (using e.g. Portal Bridge), among other permutations. In this way Wormhole allows for blockchain connections that increase flexibility and decrease liquidity fragmentation for users.

Zero Knowledge: That thing Wormhole and I have in common

Wormhole recently announced a partnership with AMD, which I thought was one of those movies-on-TV networks but is instead a semiconductor/computing company. The main takeaway I can gather from this partnership is that Wormhole wants to transition to zero-knowledge proof verification for its messaging (currently verified by a multisig), but it needs AMD’s horsepower to do that at scale. As an idiot that’s honestly as specific as I can be.

L8r sk8rs.

This week we’re discussing Hyperlane, the “first interoperability layer that enables you to permissionlessly connect any blockchain.” This text editor and the fine folks at The Internet are convinced “permissionlessly” is not a word, but then again they probably don’t yet know about Hyperlane.

Another bridge? More like Hyperlame

I first became aware of Hyperlane when I was linked to its Nexus bridge in a Discord chat. I was trying to figure out how to bridge some of my $TIA to the Manta network and Nexus fit the bill. I used the bridge once, staked my $TIA, and went about my day.

Later, I would refer to this experience as using “the Hyperlane bridge” and would be summarily corrected by an acquaintance blessed with much less of the Dum. Hyperlane wasn’t the bridge, I learned, but the tech that made the bridge possible.

The problem Hyperlane solves

If you’re reading this drivel you’re likely already aware of the concept of blockchain interoperability, the idea that my chain can talk to your chain and vice-versa. To-date interop has been pretty simple: I ask an interop protocol to let my new fancy chain (RizzChain) talk to your old reliable chain (BoomerChain) and, after some hemming and hawing, the two are connected. In that the interop protocol must bless this union of old and new, we’d called this permissioned interoperability.

This is all well and good when there’s one chain asking for permission; Imagine a single student asking permission to speak by raising her hand to catch the attention of a teacher. But now instead imagine hundreds of students simultaneously attempting to get that teacher’s attention and of each other. And consider that the number of students is growing exponentially. In this scenario permissioned communication is unsustainable.

Hyperlane enables permissionless communication between blockchains, the students in our hypothetical classroom, by providing a stack of tools that any of them can freely use. Any chain that enables a Hyperlane Mailbox can send to and receive messages from any other chain with a Mailbox.

Stop sending me this shit

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Permissionlessness (also evidently not a word) would seem to open the door for me (RizzChain) to catfish you (BoomerChain) by sending you misleading messages. You think you’ve sent me $5000 USDC for a BBL but, in reality, I’ve already gambled that money away on shitcoins. Fortunately Hyperlane has a fix for all this, and the fix is Modullllarrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

They’re called Interchain Security Modules (ISMs), and they’re not your grandparents’ security protocols. ISMs are customizable smart contracts that can be mixed and matched to create the security environment of yo’ dreams. Hyperlane calls them “security legos,” a term I love because it is cute and fun and obscures the no doubt complicated architecture that makes these sorts of things otherwise inaccessible to brains like my own.

So what do these legos do? A Multisig ISM checks that a subset of validators have positively attested to a message’s accuracy. A routing ISM deploys a different security model depending on the features of the incoming message (e.g. the source chain). A aggregation ISM checks all or a subset of multiple other ISMs for message validation. The list goes on but, critically, each chain can choose whatever configuration of ISMs it likes.

TLDR: More stuff probably

I don’t have a crystal ball or a fully-developed prefrontal cortex but I think it’s safe to say that the future will bring more blockchains not fewer. Permissionless communication and modular securitization are necessary to keep those chains connected and safe. Hyperlane provides both, and has a cool logo!

See you next week, Idiots.

Week 1 is all about Movement Labs, the first “network of modular Move-based blockchains.” I know some of those words!

Turns out this has nothing to do with Stepn

I, like you, initially assumed Movement Labs was providing a framework for some sort of physical activity/blockchain integration. Obviously step-to-earn had been done, but maybe move-to-earn, being broader, would include things like cartwheels-to-earn or deadlifts-to-earn.

Turns out the move in Movement is actually Move, a programming language which, at least in my limited exposure, has no athletics component. You may already be familiar with Move if you use Aptos or Sui or followed closely Facebook’s now-defunct stablecoin Libra. I don’t, and I didn’t, so I’ll start with the basics.

Move for Idiots

I don’t mean to force the label Idiot upon you. I wear it comfortably, like a sweater on its fourth season or a pair of running shoes with no semblance of tread, but it may feel itchy or constraining. If this is true of you, when I say “for Idiots,” just assume I mean for someone with Idiot-level intelligence or better.

In talking about Move for Idiots I want to focus on the why. Why would anyone choose to develop a blockchain in Move when Solidity, for instance, has much greater uptake and a much larger development community?

One answer to this question appears to be security. In Solidity, among other languages, smart contracts are written in source language and subsequently compiled into bytecode before execution. Compilation verifies the source code before translation to bytecode. However, if a bad actor were to write malicious bytecode directly, he or she could bypass verification entirely. In Move, however, verification and the protections that come with it are encoded after compilation.

A second answer is throughput. Solidity uses sequential processing, wherein independent transactions must be processed in sequence. Move (along with Rust) can process independent transactions simultaneously, also known as parallel processing or parallel execution. The result is more transactions per interval.

Liquidity and Modular Movement

Aptos and Sui enjoy enhanced security and parallel execution via Move. While this is presumably very attractive to builders, what is less attractive is the fact that Aptos and Sui have a fraction of the liquidity of EVM chains. But what if you could have the security of Move and the liquidity of Ethereum? That is the highly-contrived question the fine folks at Movement Labs have paid me to ask (kidding).

Movement’s Layer 1 blockchain, M1, allows builders to deploy in Aptos-native Move on Avalanche, and thus take advantage of far greater liquidity. At the center of this integration is the modular Movement VM, which plays nice (this is as technical as I’m able to be) with different chains and consensus mechanisms. Haters will say I don’t fully understand what that means, and they’re correct!

TLDR and More Movement

From my perspective, the bottom line with Movement Labs is that it empowers builders of all origins to take advantage of improved security and parallel execution while tapping into that sweet sweet EVM liquidity. Movement does this by providing a modular VM that bridges existing Move-EVM gaps.

Beyond this, Movement is building an L2 called, you guessed it, M2. M2 will be a zero-knowledge L2 that is sequenced by M1. In its initial deployment it provides enhanced compatibility with Sui, but other features (e.g. using Celestia as its data layer) hint at future compatibility with Cosmos-ecosystem chains. Oh god it’s so modullarrrrrrrrr.

See you next week, Idiots.

“Explain to me how $DOGE isn’t worthless.” You hesitate. How to explain the attentional value of memetics? Might it be valuable to explain the historical context, or its adoption by Musk? Perhaps you should let numbers do the talking (“It has an ELEVEN BILLION DOLLAR MARKETCAP. That’s BILLION with a B!”).

Ultimately the path you choose is irrelevant, as crypto will not win hearts and minds by looking within. As with so many things in life, the best and often the only way to convince an otherwise opposed party is to explain how your thing affects things to which that party can relate.

Real World Assets: A Warm Handoff

Real World Assets (RWAs) are compelling because they are relatable. Relative to the global population, the number of people who have used Uniswap is a rounding error. But most people understand the concept of property ownership, whether they own a home or not.

To convince opposed parties, or even neutral non-participants, of crypto’s value, we must accept that people largely gravitate toward things that are familiar. The networking concept of a “warm handoff” is useful here. To successfully connect two otherwise unacquainted parties, we need a mutual acquaintance as the common denominator. This mutual offers familiarity and safety to both parties, but he or she also offers warmth, hence the term*.* RWAs are the warmth.

A Better World Is Possible

Perhaps warmth is not enough. While I, an opposed party, might concede the possibility that tokenizing real estate and real estate transactions is objectively valuable, that doesn’t mean I’ll jump in with both feet. No, to get me do that, I must be convinced that a better world is possible.

Imagine convincing that first opposed party that Bitcoin is “better” than the US Dollar. How would you do it? Again your strategy is irrelevant, largely because the Dollar is familiar and Bitcoin is not.

But instead imagine convincing them that tokenizing land deeds is better than using a title authority. “There’s way less paperwork, if any. There are no title disputes. Costs for all parties go way down because you are no longer relying on intermediaries.” Do you see the difference? Now you’re not even talking about crypto, but about improving a real world process. A better world is possible.

Friction and Liability

Up to this point we’ve been trying to convince hypotheticals individuals to jump aboard the crypto crazy train. But of course what we really want is businesses, and ideally well-capitalized ones. Fortunately for us, much of the above holds: to be successful, we must focus on familiarity.

But now we must consider the two things businesses, even more than individuals, hate. The first is friction. Imagine convincing a CEO or group of executives that tokenization is the way to go only to then fumble through the “how.” Imagine the term bridging, or uptime, or God forbid, Metamask, slips out. Conversation over. The second object of ire is liability. Imagine your interested party mentions they heard about the Wormhole leak, or crypto scammers. “Were there really millions lost, just because of a line of code?” Your damn right there were.

So what is to be done? Dear reader, I hate to say it, but I have no idea. But there’s hope!

RWAs for Them, Not Us

Up to now so-called RWA applications have still focused on crypto-native clients. Sure, we’re speculating on real estate prices rather than shitcoins. But it’s still us. We. Not Them.

To get to Them, we need something relatable, and we have it in RWAs. But we also need something frictionless and low-risk, and that will take intentional infrastructure. Whoever can build the first blockchain designed specifically for RWAs will reap the rewards.