Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Pedro Gomes, Founder of WalletConnect, discusses the origins of WalletConnect, architectural changes in v2, and the EIP-6963. They also explore the intersection of WalletConnect with embedded wallets and smart accounts.

My guest today is Konrad Kopp, co-founder of Rhinestone. Rhinestone is an exciting project that's researching and developing smart account modules atop the ERC-4337 Account Abstraction standard. AA modules promise to allow smart contract account owners to safely add new functionality and permissions to their accounts, without having to upgrade to new smart contracts. The module pattern described in the draft ERC-6900: Modular Smart Contract Accounts and Plugins aims to create an ecosystem of interoperable modules to augment the various 4337 implementations that choose to support it. On this episode, Konrad and I discuss the different approaches to account abstraction contract architecture, including Safe and the ERC-2535 Diamond standard. We dive into the details of ERC-6900, and discuss the compelling Rhinestone video demo, which shows how a user might activate and disable smart account modules like Passkey validation, dollar cost averaging, and recurring payments. We also cover the grant that Rhinestone recently received from the Ethereum Foundation's 4337 team to develop a Module Registry, a public goods venue where security audit firms and others can attest to the safety of specific modules. Links Hosted by @nnnnicholas Konrad Kopp's twitter Rhinestone Docs EIP-2535 EIP-6900 Rhinestone Blog Modular Account Abstraction EF Grant announcement App-layer Innovation with Modular Smart Accounts Introducing ModuleKit Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:02:00) Rhinestone starter at EthDenver (00:03:54) What is Rhinestone? (00:06:30) Authentication as a module (00:08:14) Types of AA Modules: Validators, Executors, and Hooks (00:15:25) Modular Accoints vs Hot/Cold Wallets (00:16:10) Approaches to Modular AA (00:16:45) 4337 implementation approaches: Diamond ERC-2535 vs Safe (00:23:30) State of Bundlers (00:25:15) State of AA Modular Accounts ecosystem (00:27:25) Diamond ERC-2535 vs Safe, continued (00:30:45) ERC-6900 Modules: Run anywhere & no vendor lock-in (00:33:11) State of ERC-6900 (00:34:05) Will we converge on one 4337 implementation? Gas vs security (00:35:30) What does ERC-6900 specify? (00:36:10) Rhinestone & the Module Registry (00:39:00) EF Grant (00:40:00) Migrating AA to a new interface (00:42:40) Modules terminology (00:43:20) Modules Summary (00:44:30) Reference modular wallet implementation (00:48:10) ModuleKit for Module devs (00:49:25) Singleton registry (00:53:15) Cool Module ideas (00:56:45) Recovery module (00:58:06) Session Keys Permissions Modules (01:01:00) WalletConnect? (01:02:15) Farcaster Passkeys and largeBlob (01:03:45) Is Rhinestone for devs or end-users? (01:04:50) Wallet vs Account (01:06:12) ERC-6492: Signature Validation for Predeploy Contracts and ERC-1271: Standard Signature Validation Method for Contracts (01:09:27) Mutating AA predeploy (01:11:27) Cross-chain Smart Accounts (01:13:45) Standardizing module frontend (01:17:19) Outro

Smart contract wallets are gaining traction amongst devs, because they offer several advantages over traditional EOA accounts. ERC-4337, the Account Abstraction EIP, proposes a standard for creating smart contract accounts that can have interchangeable signers and authentication schemes, allow for gas to be paid by third parties, and create a new mempool of transactions that can be bundled and put onchain by motivated third parties. My guests today are Will Hennessy and Noam Hurwitz, who work on Alchemy's Account Abstraction team. In this episode, Will and Noam walk me through the ins-and-outs of Account Abstraction. We discuss the actors in the lifecycle of an AA transaction, how different signing schemes like Magic link and onchain r1 verification fit in, and how AA wallets will connect to dapps. We also dive into Alchemy's latet offering, AccountKit, which provides a suite of options for building smart contract accounts. It was fantastic getting to talk to Will and Noam who are knowledgable builders making quality implementations at a crucial software frontier. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Links Hosted by @nnnnicholas Will Hennessy Noam Hurwitz ERC-4337 EIP-1193 Noam's AA ELI5 Understanding AA from Alchemy AccountKit Announcement Alchemy

My guest today is artist, Rhea Myers. Rhea is a programmer, essayist, researcher, thinker, and art practitioner who has been working in the medium of blockchains for over a decade. In this conversation, Rhea takes us through some of the works and writing in her 2011-2021 retrospective, Proof of Work, which is a gorgeous book in the print edition. I've been wanting to interview Rhea for some time. It was exciting to sit down with her for this sprawling and deep conversation about art, technology, culture, politics, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Links Hosted by @nnnnicholas Rhea Myers' site Rhea's github Brainfuck Rhea's ongoing shows (at the time of recording) GEN/GEN Gazelli Art House London Exploring the Decentralized Web – Art on the Blockchain: Notes From the Ether Mark Fisher Exiting the Vampire Castle Charles Harrison) Erin Hoffman, "EA Spouse" Donald Norman on Jacques Carelman's "Coffeepot for Masochists" @cybourgeoisie Marguerite deCourcelle Thread of excerpts from Rhea's book Is Art Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:17:50) Is Satoshi the best artist (00:18:35) DuChamp’s art coefficient / art leverage (00:19:29) Baron von Munchausen (00:25:00) Fungibility & politics (00:29:00) The World’s First Bitcoin Artist (00:31:27) MYSOUL (2014) (00:35:05) Project based art practice (00:37:10) Do you feel ethical obligation to improve the world? (00:42:30) Facecoin (2014) (00:43:45) Secret Artwork (2018) (00:49:15) Art Coins (Coloured) (2015) (00:50:50) Dogecode (2014) (00:53:00) TORCHED H34R7S (2015), Marguerite deCourcelle, and Cybourgeoisie (00:58:45) Dogecode continued (01:01:30) Bitcoin VMs via Indexing: Counterparty, Dogecode, Ordinals, Ethscriptions (01:17:50) Working as simple as possible with the primitive at hand (01:25:06) Critical Coins (2015) (01:40:00) Andreas Anronopoulos

My guests today are James McComish and Peter Ferguson, co-founders of Forum. Forum is an iPhone app where every groupDM has its own shared wallet. James and Peter are among the most knowledgeable builders working with WebAuthn and Passkeys that I've encountered. On this episode, we discuss the ins-and-outs of WebAuthn in production, including largeBlob, cross origin domains, session keys, and the three versions of the spec to date. We also delve into the team's journey building Forum. It was a treat talking to James and Peter about their experience building with Passkeys. I hope you enjoy the show. While Forum is fundraising, as always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Links Hosted by @nnnnicholas Forum WebAuthn Explainer W3C ERC-4337 ERC-137 Stackup account abstraction SDKs ERC-6900: Modular Smart Contract Accounts and Plugins Secure Payment Confirmation WebAuthn W3C WebAuthn MDN CanIUse WebAuthn Chrome's WebAuthn support Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:25) How Forum got started (00:06:10) Passkeys and Account Abstraction (00:12:00) WebAuthn: User Agents, Relaying parties, and Users (00:16:30) Cross origin (00:20:30) largeBlob (00:29:30) iCloud recovery (00:32:00) Passkeys as Smart Wallet Signers and secp256r1 onchain (00:35:00) largeBlob revisited: k1 private keys and cross device sync (00:43:34) Cross-domain Passkeys (00:48:00) Secure Payments Confirmation: Sign arbitrary data with Passkeys and native API (00:57:20) Session keys (01:02:00) ERC-4337’s design (01:09:00) Upgrading AA wallets (01:09:55) ERC-6900 Modular AA accounts (01:12:45) Key rotation with AA (01:13:25) Permissions: MPC and AA solutions (01:15:25) Cross-chain state & AA permissions (01:19:45) Consolidation of Paymasters and Sequencers (01:20:58) The Forum app (01:26:00) Onboarding in Forum (01:28:00) How to get into the Testflight (01:30:10) Where Forum is going next (01:33:00) The Belfast dev scene (01:33:45) Where to learn more (01:34:30) Outro

The consumer crypto stack enables 100x UX improvement in crypto apps. Topics discussed include passkeys, smart contract wallets, L2 solutions, and gasless interaction design. The challenges of self-custody and creating user-friendly experiences are explored. The capabilities and advantages of smart contract wallets, as well as Layer 2 solutions, are discussed. The use of on-chain actions and passkeys in WarpCast is also explored.

My guest today is Sam Hart. Sam is a developer, artist, and biochemist. He is Head of Product & Strategy at Skip Protocol and co-founder at Timewave Labs. He has contributed to the Cosmos ecosystem for years, and is also co-founder of Folia, a blockchain art collective. On September 1, 2023, Sam wrote a long and detailed post to the MakerDAO forums pitching Cosmos as an interesting option for the appchain aspect of Maker's endgame. Inspired by that post, this episode is an introduction to Cosmos for EVM devs. In this conversation, Sam and I discuss the major components of Cosmos: CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), VMs like CosmWasm, and client tooling like CosmJS. We also compare the design philosophy of Cosmos and Ethereum. Good starting points for interested builders are included at the end of the interview. It was fun chatting with Sam about Cosmos, which is an ambitious project whose many flexible affordances can make it challenging to get a handle on. My thanks to Sam for sharing his knowledge. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Links Hosted by nnnnicholas Sam's MakerDAO post about Cosmos Kronos Evmos Berachain CometBFT CosmWasm Neutron Osmosis IBC Cosmos Tutorials Become a Cosmos Validator Keplr Leap Wallet Tendermint Specs Paper Trail: FLP vs CAP Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:48) Sam Hart’s journey into Cosmos (00:06:40) Sam’s biochemistry DNA sequencing background (00:08:45) Cosmos’ origins: Jae Kwon & Ethan Buchman (00:12:10) Cosmos culture (00:14:00) Cosmos vs EVM architecture (00:17:40) Cosmos overview: Cosmos is a design pattern (00:22:15) CometBFT (00:28:00) Validators, operators, delegators, and liquid staking (00:34:00) Dydx on Cosmos (00:43:30) CometBFT Mempool (00:47:30) Cosmos validator selection (00:52:40) Modifying CometBFT (00:57:40) CosmosSDK (01:03:10) Getting started with Cosmos as an EVM dev (01:06:10) IBC: Inter-blockchain communication (01:13:20) Programming languages and wallets in Cosmos (01:15:00) Outro

My guest today is Scott Sunarto. Scott is the founder of Argus Labs, a decentralized gaming company. He was contributor to Dark Forest. On this episode, Scott joins me to discuss his Cookie Clicker Rollup, a toy L2 he built to better understand and demonstrate the architecture of optimistic rollups. We discuss optimistic and zk rollups, censorship resistance, offchain execution, sovereignty, the spectrum of EVM equivalence, and much more. If you're interested in learning more about L2 architecture from first principles, this episode is for you. My thanks to FirstMate who provided the recording studio for today's episode. If you're creating NFTs and want to run your own branded secondary market that aggregates listings across all NFT marketplaces and enforces NFT secondary royalties, check out FirstMate at firstmate.xyz. Links Guest: @smsunarto Hosted by @nnnnicholas NeverEnding Game - a16z OPStack Bedrock Starknet: What are Storage Proofs Verifying Ethereum Smart Contract State with Proof - Leo Zhang The Open Problems of Onchain Games - Charlie Noyes & Doug Feagin Brandon Gomes l2beat Vitalik's An Incomplete Guide to Rollups Vitalik's The different types of ZK-EVMs Pete Horne's 4th energy barrywhitehat Scott’s research day talk "How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Execution Sharding" Introducing World Engine by Argus Argus’s Agar.io game (private beta, ask Scott) Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:30) Interview start: Scott in Jakarta for Argus (00:03:15) A Toy L2: Cookie Clicker Rollup (00:08:00) What is an L2? (00:12:25) Sovereign rollups & fraud proofs (00:14:30) What happens when there’s a fraud proof? (00:16:40) Cascading rollbacks & bridges (00:21:10) Verifying with ZK (00:25:25) Finality and Instant finality (00:27:45) Can you verify L1 rollup state roots before the fraud proof period (00:29:45) Cookie clicker rollup: architecture (00:33:00) Nicholas attempts to make Cookie clicker clicks tradable (00:35:00) Proof systems (00:36:20) Data AvaIlability (00:38:00) Validiums and data availability committees (00:41:00) L2 Calldata posted to L1 (00:47:50) Proving systems are too opaque (00:48:00) EIP-4844 and data availability (00:50:00) Cost of proving should be public (00:52:40) Cookie clicker block step by step (00:57:40) What happens in a Fraud Proof? (01:01:00) L1 trapdoor forcing rollback of soft confirmed L2 txs (01:03:00) Red Team: Hypothetical attacks on L2s (and dapps) today (01:06:40) Cookie clicker’s fraud proof (01:09:30) Gas attacks on fraud proofs and Interactive verification game (01:11:20) Single shot fraud proof (01:17:55) Specialized settlement layer L1 could support gasless fraud proofing to enable Single shot fraud proofing (01:19:45) L2 Specificity: EVM Equivalence vs Prover performance spectrum (01:25:00) Argus’s World Engine Game Shards (01:30:00) World Engine is like a shared sequencer — multiple execution layers share one sequencer (01:36:30) Argus is building game engine and games (01:40:40) World Engine game UX: embedded chain native AA wallets (01:43:40) Realtime interaction AA Bundler signature batching (01:46:45) L2 gaming scene: Argus, 0xParc Autonomous Worlds, and Lattice (01:49:30) Try today: Primodium, SkyStrife (01:50:35) Outro

In this episode, Jose Aguinaga, Head of Digital Custody Services at SEBA Bank in Switzerland, discusses topics such as elliptic curve cryptography, passkeys, homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, and account abstraction smart wallets. They explore the differences between passkeys and ECDSA, the challenges of using passkeys in blockchain authentication, and the applications of multi-party computation (MPC) in protecting private information and collaboration. The episode also covers the concept of distributed key generation (DKG) and its application in signing data, as well as the permissions architecture and challenges in limiting access to transactions.

My guests today are Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen, two of three co-founders of Obvious. Obvious is a smart wallet company with three products. The Obvious Wallet is a multi-chain 4337 account abstraction smart wallet that was among the earliest full featured AA consumer products on the market. Obvious Embed is an AA wallet that third-party devs can integrate into their own dapps. Obvious Money is a stablecoin focused smart wallet app aimed at emerging markets in Africa and South America. On this episode we discuss the team's path from building a traditional EOA software wallet to account abstraction smart wallets. We get into the tradeoffs of Shamir, MPC, and Passkeys, and the challenges building smart wallets in a massively multichain world. We also talk about fiat money platform incumbents, like M-Pesa, India's Unified Payments Interface, IBAN, and how crypto fits into the mix. It was a pleasure chatting with Himanshu and Jebu who are moving quickly at the intersection of cutting edge smart wallet tech and global consumer applications. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. Links Himanshu on X Jebu on X Obvious UPI Bangalore on Google Maps Monerium Biconomy Know Nothing Labs No Seed Phrases Silence Laboratories ERC-3668: CCIP Read jebu.obv.id Chapters (00:00:00) Intro (00:01:42) Interview start: What is Obvious? (00:03:10) Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen's backgrounds (00:06:40) The Obvious Smart Wallet UX (00:07:58) Why embed an EOA in a smart wallet? (00:09:30) Obvious product offering overview (00:12:13) Obvious Money: hedge inflation with easy access to stablecoins (00:15:35) Regulation compliance (00:16:50) Digital banking status quo worldwide: M-PESA, UPI, Interac, Venmo (00:20:17) Bangalore: vibrant for crypto startups (00:23:52) Obvious Card: An AA signer Credit Card (00:28:00) Paymasters with Biconomy: Paying gas in any token (00:30:10) Login services (00:30:45) Obvious Shamir and seedless recovery (00:36:30) Does AA require an EOA admin? (00:38:20) Passkey challenges in multichain world (00:39:40) Seedless recovery cannot key rotate (00:40:40) Why MPC?: Lit Protocol MPC Distributed Key Generation (00:45:16) Passkey synchronization between platforms, EIP-7212 secp256r1 verification onchain (00:48:00) L2s with 7212, Halo2 Know Nothing Labs (00:50:30) Silence Laboratories: Jay Prakash (00:54:00) Is secp256r1 curve safe or compromised? (00:55:00) Future of Account Recovery (00:59:00) Permissions architecture for AA wallets (01:01:14) How the smart wallet wars will play out (01:02:15) Social login != smart wallet passkey signer (01:04:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:04:20) Address book and AA wallets importing phone contacts (01:06:20) CCIP-Read: How Obvious is using EIP-3668 to build obv.id vanity ENS-style addresses (01:04:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:13:15) Obvious combining cross-chain assets into a single token balance (01:15:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:16:30) Westerners' blind spots (01:20:05) UPI in India (01:21:13) Goodbye