As I learned more about what they do here. I became excited about the possibilities. Of not just combining my passion for writing earning some crypto in the process, but also exploring a potential partnership with these guys.

How could LonesomeShark, a liquidation protection platform on Ethereum work with Reserve Protocol is for another time.

With my limited understanding, Reserve protocol solves the problem of inflation.

They believe access to stable money is a human right. Almost two billion people around the world don't have a safe place to store their money or are excluded from financial services such as payments and credit.

This is because some banks do not see the unemployed, women, or low income people as worthy customers. Apparently, lack of formal ID is one of the main reasons why women don’t have access to financial services. Source.

This is the reason why Muhammad Yunus started Grameen Bank. They pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. Loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.

Struggles with inflationary currencies prevent families and communities from building basic economic security. To help solve this, Reserve Protocol offers financial services in high inflation economies. Their app (aka Rpay) users in Latin America can easily save and spend in US dollars, without worrying about their money devaluing overnight. They are not a bank. They are a new way to store and move money, creating new saving and spending experiences beyond borders. Source.

The Reserve protocol is a really interesting approach to enable the permissionless creation of stablecoins.

The success of the protocol and the first RTokens will depend on the participation of $RSR holders.

What are $RSV and $RSR tokens?

1. $RSV is the stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar that people use on Rpay.

2. $RSR on the other hand, is an ERC20 token common across all Reserve tokens (RTokens). RSR can be staked on a particular RToken, where it has two roles:

   1. Staked RSR receives a portion of the RToken collateral’s revenue in exchange for being the first capital-at-risk in the case of collateral default. (This is how we can earn).

   2. Staked RSR proposes and votes on changes to the RToken’s configuration.

For more info see this page.

Currently, Rpay is only available in Latin America (Spanish). However, the team plans on releasing an English version in the near future.

In summary, how reserve protocol fights inflation is that users can exchange their local currency pesos or boliviano (in the case of Latin America), with RSV coin, the Locals can then use the Reserve app to save, spend, and receive money without the need for a foreign bank account. You can use your local bank account and move money between them or use the app to make payment at online merchants that accept cryptocurrency.

Why am I excited about this? It is because this is another proven use case of a protocol finding product market fit.

Blockchain isn’t suitable in all use cases. However, in this case, it is. And that excites me.

From the beginning Andreas Antonopoulos, co-author of the book “Mastering Ethereum” was already talking about one of the benefits of DeFi - providing universal access to basic finance for the unbanked.

What Reserve Protocol is doing in high inflationary countries is a testament to that.

Kudos.

Mirror’s editor was a bit funky. Think I’ll feedback this to the team. Formatting and alignment is a bit off. The main topics are highlighted in bold.

• 1) How much of a problem is MEV? What are the different methods of MEV extraction? There are both positive and negative consequences to MEV on Ethereum. Below I rate each of them. Here’s a link to the ethereum developer docs on MEV. Reminder: not all MEV is bad.

  1. Exploitation - sandwich attacks aka sandwich trading, backrunning or frontrunning. Bad.

  2. Neutral - eg. DEX arbitrage opportunities. Good.

  3. Liquidations - Good for lending protocols. Bad for crypto users who lose a portion of their collateral due to liquidations. 50/50

Should dapps have MEV resistance built-in? The verdict is still open on that. As a           builder, I'll leave that to you to decide.

2) What was the rationale for the core dev team to build certain features in house and outsource others? What was their thought process in prioritising activities.

1. a. EIP-4337: account abstraction using alt mempool.

   b. EIP-1559: fee market change for ETH 1.0.

2. These two EIPs were of higher priorities. In my words, the Ethereum core dev's team rationale for deciding what to work on was this: core devs have limited bandwidth. Therefore it is preferable to outsource some tasks if possible.

3. 3) Danksharding was split off. That is, the dev. work was outsourced to external parties. They mention who this party is but it escapes me now. This keeps the ethereum base protocol simpler and faster which enables faster roll outs.

4. 4) UniswapDAO has tons of funding still. On a side note, at Mainnet2022, I met a guy who was working on creating a market maker within Uniswap V2. They got angel funding from Kain Warwick, Synthetix and mentorship. I could have sworn I took a selfie with him. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is if you got an idea for a dapp or protocol that uses Uniswap’s tooling in someway, you could try and apply for a Unigrant. Note: from my experience with LonesomeShark applying for grants, protocols will not fund you merely because you use them Eg. if you use Chainlink Keepers in your dapp that doesn’t qualify you for a Chainlink grant. I imagine every protocol has a different eligibilities. Read their docs.

5. I'm passionate about public goods and making a difference in people's lives. That was one of the motivations I decided to make LonesomeShark a public good. Token based public goods funding needs to let layer 2's prosper by offering separate revenue streams. Today, Optimism's funding comes directly from the centralized sequencer, accruing to The Optimism Foundation for redistribution. More info. Then, that can be further distributed to public good projects.

6. The other thing I'm passionate about is security. The notion of shared security is different from interchain protocols that build on an architecture of bridges. When it comes to Ethereum, it uses a shared security model. Rollups derive security from the base layer. Where unlike bridge protocols, Each chain is considered sovereign and must maintain its own validator set and economic security. More info.

Listen to the full episode here: https://epicenter.tv/episodes/467/

What you may or may not know about brain injuries is that right after the injury there’s a small window, a sweet spot if you will where you can dramatically boost your recovery rate. All you have to do is push yourself by doing things that make you uncomfortable, learning new things, and connecting with people. That is it!

Of course, all of which require you to be thick skinned. The point I’m trying to make is that because of my brain injury, mental health is the one thing I struggled with the most. I get these highs and lows. When I was in a low, I found myself escaping and not doing the things I was supposed to be doing. This sometimes affected my ability to hold on to a job. That is why in January 2021 an opportunity came up for me to be my own boss and I took it!

I was accepted into a startup incubator with an idea for building 1-click infrastructure provisioning web app. It was a 3-month program. By March 2021, that idea turned into “Mental Health Stack,” a resource for finding self-help tools & apps for managing mental health. During the ideation phase that is how things sometimes are. You are constantly pivoting and embracing new ideas. As an entrepreneur, you’re encouraged to move fast and not be fixated on any one idea.

During the program, I met a few blockchain enthusiasts who turned me onto Ethereum. It is a decentralized, open-source blockchain technology. It was founded by Vitalik Buterin, a boy genius, Russian-born Canadian programmer. I would recommend reading his blog except sometimes I’m scared to.

There are many different explanations to the question “What is Ethereum” that you can find on the web from technical to non-technical. I describe it in 2 ways.

1. It is a world computer. It uses the fundamental principles of Math and Cryptography to solve a fundamental problem, how do you get strangers to trust one another.

2. It is an underlying blockchain technology that provides the ability to build decentralised applications (aka dapps) on top of it.

From that initial conversation about buying crypto led me down the rabbit hole to doing cryptozombies, reading the Ethereum whitepaper, and joining my first blockchain hackathon, 2021 Virtual Chainlink Hackathon.

This was what we built.

My background is CS. The more I learned, the more it occurred to me that this was going to be the future. I knew I wanted to start a blockchain company. As this was all new to me, I didn’t know what problem I was going to solve. This article by Chainlink has a good summary of the different use cases for smart contracts. What are smart contracts you may ask? In layman terms, a smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. Source.

But this was all new to me and there were different use cases for it. I knew blockchain and the entire ecosystem built around Ethereum was where I wanted to be. And it is a robust ecosystem from the vast array of tools and dapps available.

I’m not sure how many dapps there were in 2021 but as of this writing there are 2,970 (according to stateofthedapps).

My plan to learn faster, validate ideas, and find out where I fit in would be best done by becoming a full time hackathoner. That was what I did for the rest of 2021.

To be continued…

I wasn’t going to even post this but after some inspiration from Grant. Thanks! And some inspiration from crushing the fear of posting). I’m posting this 344 words short. I figure, it’s better to be imperfect and publish than perfect and not.