What do @jumperapp's new Solana Wash Trade campaign and Japanese folklore have in common? Much more than you think, degen-san. As your sensei for today, I will be your guide on our mythological journey.

@puff_drgn Ultimate Trilemma is finally out: a Season 1-ending event, or the Season 1 ultimate game theory experiment, as initially conceived by @gametheorizing Talking about numbers, here are the current total deposits (in $PUFF) for the 3 choices: ⚫️Burn $PUFF into $COOK: 102.1M ⚫️Store $PUFF in @methlabxyz for 6 months: 37.6M ⚫️Commit to keep $PUFF: 41M The current rates between the choices therefore are: - Choice 1: 56.48% - Choice 2: 20.82% - Choice 3: 22.70% In general, interactions data over choice 1 and choice 3 has been linear. But not for choice 2, where in fact, despite a 2% difference in deposits compared to choice 3, the on-chain data tells the number of interactions for the first one have been way lower in proportion to that small difference. This means a whale probably aped into choice 2. Now, the UT will roughly last for other 6 days, so if deposits were to continue at the same rates, we would have more than half $PUFF burned (about 225M, if taking as a benchmark @puff_intern previous calculations: 450M PUFF available for UT). But game theory often gives curious results, so we don't expect the same rates to stay during the whole trilemma. Obviously, to know which % of $PUFF total supply is going to be burned, we would need to know the final deposits amounts. We at ChainEye expect to see 150-200M $PUFF burned, representing therefore a range of 33-44% of $PUFF total supply. Finally, let us know the strategy you chose in the comments!

@zaponchain tokenomics is out! Curious about $ZAP's perks and role? Exclusive Rewards, Ecosystem Airdrops, XP Multipliers: with this thread, we got you covered ⬇️

Last time we covered @zaponchain we focused on the Base deployment and the reason behind the "Launch" product, followed by a tutorial covering this last one. Keeping up with the development, today we interface with "Drops" 🧵

@zaponchain announced its new memecoins launcher on @base, followed by a massive rewards campaign: Base Gigadrops. The project decided to go multi-chain, partnering with the Coinbase-backed L2 to launch their new product. Everything you need to know ⬇️

@DriftProtocol just launched BET, its flagship prediction market, implementing one of the most successful verticals from this cycle into Solana DeFi’s ecosystem. 🔮 With this integration Drift adds another arrow to its quiver, expanding its already comprehensive product suite, which currently includes perpetual derivatives, lending&borrowing, staking, and swaps. Consistently building regardless of the dramatic market conditions, Drift establishes itself as the first Solana super dApp, a one-step hub for all traders’ needs. After DRIFT’s TGE and despite bleeding markets, @DriftProtocol hit several key milestones: ☑️ $1B daily volume (August 5th) ☑️ ATHs for TVL ($560M, currently sitting at $320M) and Borrows ($100M) ☑️ $4B monthly volume in July, August to follow (+$2B after first two weeks) ☑️ $1M in Trading fees in just 5 days (August 1-6th) ☑️ First perps DEX to integrate $sUSDE/$USDE as collateral ☑️ Highest yield on Solana for $PYUSD (18-20%) Even considering MC and circulating supplies, Drift appears to be an undervalued play compared to other majors dApps from Solana: $JTO: FDV $2.4B - MC $340M - TVL $1.7B $JUP: FDV $7.9B - MC $1B - TVL $690M $KMNO: FDV $512M - MC $51M - TVL $1.3B $DRIFT: FDV $321M - MC $64M - TVL $353M In addition to being the largest perps DEX on Solana and having a 360° products offering for all things DeFi, Drift Protocol now boasts a new unique product, throwing down the gauntlet to @Polymarket. With over 950M in volume since the beginning of the year, prediction markets are one of the few successful consumer apps whose rise we’ve witnessed during this cycle. Thanks to their first mover advantage, @Polymarket has monopolized prediction markets so far, with little to no competition. However, several factors could make @DriftProtocol the perfect duelist to challenge @Polymarket's dominance: 🟣Solana vs Polygon: with $4.8B in locked on-chain assets, Solana TVL is almost 6x bigger than Polygon TVL ($824M). By creating a Solana native Prediction Market, Drift can prevent its users from having to bridge assets to access prediction markets, so that Drift can leverage the chain's substantial TVL while Solana users can sleep soundly knowing that their assets remain on their fav chain. Given its cult-like community, it’s logical to assume that the Solana community will push the utilization and adoption of Drift’s Prediction Market instead of choosing Polymarket, as well as for reasons of convenience (no bridging, composability). If the community support is strong enough, Drift Protocol could seriously dent Polymarket market share and finally give it a worthy competitor. 🟣 Yield-generating collateral: Thanks to Drift’s borrow/lend engine, all collateral on Drift earns yield. With partnerships w/ @OndoFinance and @ethena, Drift also enables users to collateralize their perps positions with yield-generating assets such as $USDY and, for the first time, $USDe/ $sUSDe. By depositing $USDY, users can leverage tokenized RWAs as collateral while accruing additional borrow/lend yield, on top of those generated by the T-Bills. Similarly, $USDe depositors accrue yield both from Ethena’s revenue sharing mechanism and from their activity on Drift. There are more than 30+ crypto assets available to use on BET, ranging from yield-bearing stables to Solana tokens and LSTs, empowering users to create structured hedging strategies while turbocharging composability and capital-efficiency. This yield can offset funding expenses for traders, dramatically increasing their capital-efficiency: no longer a basket of assets that stay idle, but rather a new stream of revenue. 🟣 Unique features: Based on what we know so far, @DriftProtocol will set itself apart by introducing the first capital-efficient prediction market. Users will be able to short one asset while longing another (e.g. longing Trump’s win while shorting $BTC), all on one platform. This is a big win UX-wise, which will empower users to build delta-neutral strategies by using Drift platform only: currently, there’s no other PM where this is possible. Powered by Drift’s Borrow/Lend engine, users will also be able to earn yield on all bets. The initial focus will obviously be on elections-related markets, but there will also be non-political markets related to sports, crypto, and culture. Drift has also announced that it will eventually move to permissionless market creation. With the elections held in November, Drift’s timing is perfect! @DriftProtocol checks all the requirements necessary to threaten its competitors: an experienced and communicative team, easy-to-use products with smooth UX and, most importantly, a willingness to deliver on its promise even in complex market times. Do you think @DriftProtocol will be able to unseat @Polymarket from its throne? We’d love to hear your opinions!

Bitcoin has been that blockchain which saw more holding rather than on-chain financial usage. Wrapped versions have been issued to try mobilizing those native holders into other DeFi ecosystems. Secure native yields however were still lacking. On @goatnetwork 🧵

From proof generation to frontends, most of the infrastructure components still remain heavily centralized. Willy-nilly most ZK applications will decentralize their proof generation. @MarlinProtocol is guiding that flow🧵 medium.com/@researchchaineye…

Report | @biconomy: The Web3 UX Pioneer 1. Introduction: The Need for a UX Layer Account Abstraction brought previously Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to an established environment of programmability and composable economic dynamics. Efficiency has derived from this insertion so that DeFi and Web3 UX witnessed a new standard. We’re finally seeing a framework that is future-proof and embraces innovations: Account Abstraction. Account Abstraction was born with ERC4337, which completely avoids consensus-layer protocol changes, instead, it relies on higher-layer infrastructure. This implementation, other than improving general efficiency, has brought opportunities to leverage the composability of blockchain ecosystems, customisation, and abstraction of technical and frictiony tasks. In fact, almost every interaction on a dApp is a transaction, so several avoidable processes come up at a frequent pace. Users should not stake their time for multiple transactions that directly communicate with a virtual machine, and therefore propose signs and approvals backed by technicalities, to complete a single task. In addition, the whole gas paying processes should be optimized, hence the UX system is required to take charge of that. Biconomy is positioned right at the beginning of the track, helping the runner (user) avoid the obstacles (bad UX), and delivering him the gun so he can be the starter and there is no need to wait for a “Get Set” before action. Biconomy is laying the foundation for a UX platform, which features modular Smart Accounts, Paymasters and AI-optimized user operations. Now, by taking into consideration that 30% of Smart Accounts derive from Biconomy (one deployed every 17s!!), if we look at data we can see how it’s playing a key role in shifting the industry’s standard from EOAs to AA. UserOps are increasing, so more meta-transactions are in play, with bundlers generating more fees. This increase could also be due to the current airdrop season that’s going on in the crypto space, and thanks to Smart Accounts users can optimize their farming process by abstracting tons of transactions and executing them in batches, experiencing gasless operations and paying gas in any token. This is only one of the catalysts and use-cases that Smart Accounts powered by AA can offer. These last ones also impact other applications: gaming, for example, can be a very good field where implementing Smart Accounts so that the user just needs an email to be ready to play and set up an account. Also, customization in these cases is crucial. Users may want full abstraction when playing a game, while they need a different kind of UI/UX for a DeFi protocol. Let’s take Perp DEXes as an example. Perp DEXes’ volumes are still significantly lower compared to CEXes ones. We can see through this dashboard how percentages are declining, and it’s partly related to the low-quality UX that DEXes provided until recent times. Now, thanks to AA providers like Biconomy, some dots are going to be connected and a UX fundamental pillar is being developed. Biconomy is working with several DEXes in order to improve the poor experience problem and onboard many users into DeFi. Rage Trade is one of these, and it integrated Biconomy’s sessions module so that when a user creates a session, he won’t be asked to sign any action for 7 days. The session is created on multiple chains thanks to the multi-chain validation module, therefore the user can navigate and operate seamlessly between chains. However, this is just one of the benefits AA can bring to the table. As we have seen before paymasters also help, but above all the specialization of accounts is what makes AA provide a tailored solution for every application. 2. Biconomy: Building a Decentralized Account Management Network, aka The UX Network Fast and efficient specialization doesn’t come without a proper framework that supports it. The importance of a thriving ecosystem is obvious, but it’s both the catalyst and something that has to be led and nurtured by an underlying architecture. And so here’s where Biconomy has developed its products with consistent modularity, which enables composability across ecosystems, and allows for the customisation of modules according to needs. “By permissionlessly augmenting their smart accounts with modules, users would have access to wallets that more closely align to their web3 needs (much like LEGOs)” When developing applications for a similar target market, developers often face identical needs. However, they are forced to recreate the same functionalities from scratch, which can lead to duplicated effort, potential security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. Furthermore building and managing the infrastructure required for batched transactions, paymasters, and session keys is a complex and demanding task. Handling session keys, for instance, necessitates a robust and secure storage system. Modules require rigorous auditing. To ensure that future accounts can offer features that meet high-quality standards without the overhead of maintaining such infrastructure, it becomes more efficient to integrate bundlers, paymasters, and session key solutions provided by specialized third-party infra providers rather than developing these capabilities internally. Wallets may choose to integrate pre-audited and verified modules instead of developing everything from scratch. Modularity and standards like ERC-7579 enable this level of composability, and push towards leveraging web3 values to attain that thriving ecosystem we talked about above, which will be responsible for offering the best UX. Picture a scenario where numerous pre-built and pre-programmed functionalities are readily available for integration. Developers could effortlessly select the features they want to incorporate into their smart accounts, enabling them in a safe way and with ease. This is precisely where Biconomy Network wants to act. 3. Next Step: The Rising of the Intelligence Layer AA paved the way, and still remains the power pack behind the technological infrastructure and the network architecture, but new synergies have been created and AA is going to expand and support even more powerful and effective solutions. Intents are currently one of the most discussed ones. These represent a layer of abstraction on top of account abstraction, and with ERC-4337 that enables users to let the third party execute the order flows, so Intents can be part of and add value to Smart Accounts. AI Agents however are what, together with Intents, and powered by AA, will bring the enhanced user experience DeFi and Web3 are looking for. In this sense, the platform becomes a resource that the user can direct and offload his efforts to, rather than something which loads him with infinite computer-coded interactions. This way, the whole operational task workflow gets abstracted from final users, who just have to provide instructions on the goal they’re trying to reach with their transactions. That’s why ERC4337 plays a key role: it enables devs to create a standard on how the users’ instructions get abstracted, and AI agents take this to the next level, unlocking efficient activities and composability across Web3. These “order flows” instructions are then available to be executed by AI-powered Autonomous Agents, that help users achieve their initial goal without having to worry about all the hurdles that the fragmented web3 UX faces them with. Imagine for instance an interoperable dApp. It could support a network of AI Agents scouting for the cheapest solutions across chains and unifying the process into a single report to the user. As the combined product of crypto and AI, Autonomous Agents behave like on-chain performers of users’ will. AI Agents have the potential to disrupt the current Web3 landscape and reshape on-chain interactions as we know them, working as a catalyst to onboard new users to Web3 without having to subject them to the risky and cumbersome process of learning how on-chain transactions work. If we combine AI Agents with AA-powered features such as Gasless and batched transactions, simplified log-in and the possibility to recover your account in case something goes wrong, we can dramatically boost web3 user retention and engagement rate. Think about all the people who never entered, or worse, left Web3 due to the high technical know-how required to interact with dApps and chains: they could still be part of our ecosystem, if only we had provided them with the proper tools. Luckily, the music is changing, and soon the times in which every on-chain step had to be performed manually will be just a bad memory. Use cases for AI Agents are pretty much endless, but there are some trends worthy of being mentioned. The most widely adopted use-case for AI-agent is Portfolio Management, and it’s already deeply rooted in TradFi and DeFi. Thanks to their ability in identifying patterns and reliably executing fast and accurate data-driven decisions while complying with the given risk tolerance profile, AI Agents are already valuable resources for fund managers all over the world. Additionally, ZK-based features can be enabled to satisfy enhanced security needs. A lesser-known but growing use case for AI Agents concerns the gaming industry. Gaming agents are gradually becoming a reality in Web3 gaming: they act as pets or assistants that follow the player’s journey with the final goal of providing a richer and more immersive gaming experience. These agents interact with players and items through on-chain smart contracts and wallets, and can be leveraged to perform trade on behalf of players. Let’s say you need some assets to craft a certain item but you don’t have the time to manually go on-chain and perform the purchase, so you decide to just approve the transaction and let your game assistant handle that for you: UX-wise, that’s a very big improvement. Finally, a very interesting use-case is given by Aperture Finance, who has developed a so-called “Intents-GPT” which basically provides an intuitive chatbox interface inspired by GPT, allowing users to express their goals in natural language. Third-party participants, known as Solvers, handle requests by optimizing processes to ensure efficient and cost-effective execution. 4. Biconomy DAN (Delegated Authorisation Network) We have seen how AA is able to be the fundamental pillar of the ultimate but also an opening standard for a UX solution. However, AI Agents, given their great power of change, also hold a challenge. The key challenge is to build an intent-centric network of solvers that is sufficiently decentralized. Furthermore, agents lack true autonomy, as they can only suggest on-chain actions and prepare transactions for users to sign or approve. This limitation has led to the development of solutions like Biconomy’s Sessions, which we touched on earlier. Not only, in the pursuit of automation, protocols often sacrifice security. They resort to alternative measures, such as approvals, centralized vaults, and shared private key pairs, which ultimately put protocols in control of users’ assets, introducing significant risks. To mitigate these risks, establishing a robust safeguard system for AI agents is needed, empowering users to define explicit permissions that dictate the actions AI agents can and cannot sign. This requires a solution that enables the delegation of transaction authorization to AI agents, but only within the boundaries of predefined rules and permissions. DAN is precisely the solution to these problems. In fact, to overcome these limitations, AI agents need to be granted secure on-chain task delegation capabilities. One approach would be to give AI agents complete control over users’ keys, enabling them to sign multiple transactions on their behalf. However, this approach poses significant security risks. So Biconomy Delegated Authorisation Network has been built to offer a secure solution for on-chain task delegation, enabling AI agents to operate autonomously while ensuring user-defined permissions and robust security. To achieve this, Biconomy has partnered with EigenLayer and Silence Labs which helped build the architecture behind DAN. Let’s see therefore the architecture’s core functions: DAN Core Functions 🔴User-Defined Programmable Authorization Users can define the permissions granted to AI agents, ensuring that transactions occur within set rules. This includes: - Restricting access to specific assets - Setting maximum transaction amounts - Limiting transaction times 🔴Robust Security via EigenLayer AVS Instead of giving AI agents full control over private keys, DAN uses EigenLayer AVS for decentralized key storage and permission management. This ensures that: - User keys are securely stored - Permissions are strictly enforced - Cryptographic security prevents key leakage and permission abuse 🔴Autonomous Operation DAN empowers AI agents to execute transactions on behalf of users without requiring manual signing or approval. By providing agents with access to user-specific ‘Delegated Auth’ keys stored on AVS, they can securely sign transactions within their permissions, improving operational efficiency and user experience. Now, Biconomy plans to introduce additional features to DAN, including human-readable permissions, permissions based on external data sources, and intent-based permissions. These developments will further enhance the flexibility and practicality of DAN and will further position Biconomy as a Web3 UX pioneer. 5. Conclusion With that said, the intelligence layer has surely a disruptive potential, and Biconomy can really contribute to changing blockchain high-level infra dynamics, pushing so the Web3 adoption, and redefining dApps interactions. Notable is then the decision of collaborating with EigenLayer for safeguarding and ensuring a proper system. Leveraging Ethereum’s economic security to store user keys and permissions is in fact an efficient solution. Finally, although DAN has already been applied in multiple projects, including Polywrap and zkAutomate, we remain curious to see it integrated by more projects. To see it being battle-tested, and collect feedback to enhance ever more the standard, and provide tailored experiences thanks to native modularity. Thank you for sticking with us until the end, we’ll see you in the next report. Follow @Chain_Eye for high-quality content about high-quality protocols! Full Report: medium.com/coinmonks/biconom…

Report | @MarlinProtocol: Off-Chain Scaling Made Simple Introduction ZK seems to have become the latest buzzword to capitalize on for DeFi projects looking to build clout or raise money, but if you take a look at those ZK-powered dApps, one can easily notice how from proof generation to frontends, most of the infrastructure components still remain heavily centralized. Apart from being incoherent marketing, this led to several frauds, as shown below. This is just a small portion of all the protocols that got exploited due to centralized infra units utilized as attack vectors, and we’re talking well-established, blue-chip DeFi projects that have been around for years and have billions of dollars in TVL. Now imagine what can happen to newly born DeFi dApps who boast cutting-edge ZK-derived security features while ignoring that each single element of their protocol architecture can act as a single point of failure, if kept centralized. Furthermore, implementing ZK-Proofs generation doesn’t guarantee complete decentralization or trust-minimization by default: even then, there are underlying risks that must be taken into account. Let’s take ZK-Proofs generation: being a high-level computational process, it requires resource-intensive expenditure to achieve optimal response times for final users. Due to the demanding hardware and computing requirements, most first-generation zkdApps have opted for centralizing their proof generation processes, at the expense of security and distribution. Estimates by Aligned talk about ZK-Proofs to account for 90% of Ethereum blocks by 2030. Since they’ll play a key role in strengthening Ethereum privacy-focused features and scalability, ensuring decentralization and censorship-resistance at infra level will soon become an industry priority. Luckily, a solution may already exist. Estimates regarding ZK-Proofs usage in Ethereum block by 2030 — Source: @alignedlayer Proof Marketplaces: a new trend for ZKP generation As brilliantly explained by Figment Capital in this article, the ZK-Proof-as-a-Service model is a progeny of the modularity thesis, which states that the blockchain core functionalities (e.g. consensus, settlement, DA) should be separated and distributed among different layers, in order to boost the efficiency of each single function at its peak. Proof Marketplaces allow for dApps to outsource the ZKPs generation to a network of provers that will carry out the computation on their behalf and prove its completion successfully, allowing the team to focus on more value-adding development (additional stack components, consumer products). Unlike proof networks, which usually only generate proof for one client, proof marketplaces act as open markets that can service multiple applications at the same time, reducing the inefficiency of the winner-takes-all dynamic used by proof networks and even allowing for resource pooling within provers, overall drastically reducing waste of computing resources. Proof Networks vs Proof Markets — Source: @Figment_io Outsourcing ZKPs generation has several benefits decentralization-wise, since having an entire network of provers at a protocol or dApp’s disposal empowers protocols not to rely solely on a single set of provers. In fact, in cases where a small set of provers experience downtime or refuse to produce proofs for certain types of transactions, the protocol could avoid censorship problems and still be able to provide its service to end users by using a larger market. On the other hand, leveraging one’s own set of proprietary provers may enhance token utility (provers may be required to stake a predetermined token amount to be able to offer their services) while also maintaining tighter control over the dynamics at the infra level, but with remarkable costs. In the end, dApps and protocols are left with a tradeoff: build and run proprietary tech at high costs, or outsource and scale with proof marketplaces. As in many similar cases, there’s no such thing as a right answer to this kind of question, but it usually depends on which parameters the clients are optimizing for: cost, efficiency, sovereignty and many others. Based on their goals, some will build their own tech, some will outsource: what is sure, however, is that proof marketplaces are gaining traction and will capture more and more market share in the upcoming years, given the inability for many clients to bear the substantial costs involved in performing ZKPs generation autonomously. Now that we understand how proof marketplaces work and why they’ll play a crucial role in ZKPs scaling and adoption, we can finally introduce the main character of this report: Marlin. In the following section, we’ll dive deep into its unique value proposition, the nature of their provided services and the several applications they can find across many areas within Web3. Marlin: democratizing access to reliable off-chain computation As mentioned earlier, Marlin provides its clients with a secure way to delegate complex workloads to its decentralized cloud of nodes distributed globally, which will carry out the computation off-chain and send an attestation back on-chain, guaranteeing that the tasks were carried out correctly. By critically boosting the throughput of blockchain by moving computations off-chain in dedicated nodes, Marlin can be seen as the perfect ally to achieve performance scaling, while also ensuring chain-abstraction (as long as relay and verification contracts are deployed on a chain, Marlin is compatible with it regardless of the chosen programming language) and interoperability with web2 services through APIs. Marlin is composed of a set of sub-networks, which comes with different technical specifications and guarantees, each of which is designated to fulfill specific use cases, in such a way that allows Marlin to meet the needs of several kinds of customers, even very different from each other. Marlin’s two main sub-networks are respectively called Oyster and Kalypso: while the first focuses on providing TEE-based coprocessors, the second is a ZK Prover Marketplace, like the one we’ve analyzed in the first section of this article. Let’s now analyze the strengths and tradeoffs that come with each one of them! Marlin’s Oyster sub-protocol leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to enhance Web3 infrastructure security, with way less computational expenditure when compared to ZKPs generation. TEEs create protected areas within processors, ensuring data confidentiality and computational integrity at a hardware level, differently from ZK proofs where the security derives only from the cryptographic computations itself. Oyster offers these secure enclaves through a specialized sub-network, providing fast, secure, and cost-effective computation available at scale. Users can access Oyster’s services via renting instances or by delegating the task to a pool of nodes in a serverless model (like AWS Lambda), therefore paying only for task execution time. This flexibility in the use of the service is one of Oyster’s strengths, able to adapt to the needs of customers with different spending capacities. The protocol’s architecture comprises a smart contract-powered marketplace, an operator network requiring $POND staking (so if any nodes act maliciously, they can be susceptible of slashing), and a control plane for automation and network state queries. The protocol strives to provide response time and liveness guarantees. It allows requests to be placed both using relay smart contracts on-chain as well as through HTTPS endpoints like a traditional web service bridging the gap between web2 and web3. P.S. Remember at the start of the article, when we were talking about the risk related to utilizing centralized interfaces for final users? Oyster excelles at decentralizing critical infrastructure components like frontends, addressing the risks associated to a class of exploits that has been underestimated too often in the past, and for which we have already paid a high enough price. To address the challenges of centralized ZK-Proofs generation, Marlin introduced Kalypso, a permissionless prover marketplace. This (truly) decentralized network allows anyone to outsource ZK-Proofs generation to dedicated hardware providers: for clients, this results in improved UX, faster and cheaper execution and enhanced censorship-resistance, while the provers can achieve higher resource utilization and increased revenue, fostering a win-win relationship for all the parties involved. In addition, Kalypso’s architecture promotes modularity and composability, enabling integration with various ZK-centric dApps and existing proof networks, be it a rollup that has to secure hundreds of millions of TVL or a small dApp just coming out of stealth mode and launching their product for the first time. Again, Kalypso sub-network employs a stake-and-slash mechanism using $POND tokens to incentivize honest behavior among hardware providers. Also, since Kalypso’s matching engine utilizes a two-dimensional algorithm considering both time and price, provers may be slashed if they fail to generate the proof within the maximum time requested by the client, so that all actors are aligned in guaranteeing the best outcome possible for the end users. Optimizing the matching approach for two different dimensions creates a win-win scenario: provers can diversify their resources across markets for increased revenue, while users benefit from tailoring the services based on their needs (they can optimize for cost or for time, depending on what they value the most) while enjoying competitive pricing. As demand for ZK-Proofs in DeFi continues to grow, Kalypso positions Marlin to become a leader in this niche, offering a more accessible, cost-efficient, and reliable solution for ZK-Proofs generation. Although they may seem like two mutually exclusive choices, there is actually a considerable degree of complementarity: as proof, Kalypso actually leverages Oyster to deploy its matching engine. Moreover, use of TEEs allows Kalypso to generate ZK proofs even when private inputs, that shouldn’t be revealed to third-parties to ensure security, are involved. While TEEs are optimized for general execution and large private data computation and can ensure better performance at scale if compared to ZKPs, on the other hand, their reliability comes mainly from hardware design to create a tamper-proof execution environment, and it’s limited to it. Therefore, these two powerful tools can be combined to achieve ultimate privacy and flexibility for dApps across all Web3 niches: as example, ZKPs can be used to increase the soundness of a TEE-based environment, meeting even the strictest safety needs and thereby establishing a new data-preserving privacy standard for the whole industry. Dulcis in fundo, to increase its network security and capital efficiency for node operators, Marlin recently forged a partnership with one of the most anticipated protocols in recent months: Symbiotic. Marlin x @symbioticfi: restaked security for decentralized provers networks In just 1 year, the Ethereum Restaking Market collected $17B+ worth of and other LSTs. Since EigenLayer launched, the idea of leveraging Ethereum’s economic security to power a new wave of applications and infrastructure providers has gained increasing traction, becoming one of the leading narratives of this cycle. Actively Validated Services (AVSs), have raised tens of millions of dollars to capitalize on this new paradigm, and major staking providers like P2P, Figment, Kiln, and Coinbase have gotten into the restaking game by launching Operators to run AVS nodes in return for rewards. So, the concept of restaking has quickly evolved from a novel primitive to a fully-fledged competitive sector within Web3 and DeFi. Among the most recent market entrants, Symbiotic emerged in early June 2024, shedding its stealth and quickly surpassing $200M worth of deposit in a remarkably short span of time: a few days. As of now, Symbiotic Total Value Locked (TVL) has soared to a staggering $1 billion, as reported by DeFiLlama, gaining share against EigenLayer. Symbiotic proposes to enable any ERC-20 token to be restaked (via the minting of “collateral tokens” that are then deposited into vaults). This differentiates it from EigenLayer, which enables the restaking of native ETH and a curated list of LSTs. Symbiotic’s approach of enabling users to mint tokens to represent the positions they wish to restake is reminiscent of Liquid Staking, which makes sense given Symbiotic is backed by the founders of Lido Finance (and Paradigm, one of the most influential VC in the space), which dominates the liquid staking space via $stETH, representing more than 70% of the TVL of all LSTs. The majority of Symbiotic’s current TVL is composed of $wstETH, the wrapped version of Lido’s $stETH. As a permissionless protocol, Symbiotic allows the formation of shared security agreements between ecosystem stakeholders in a trust-minimized environment. By efficiently coordinating all the parties involved (operators, restakers, networks) under a predetermined set of incentives/penalties conditions, the protocol boost prover hardware onboarding and capital efficiency, enabling protocols to grow and scale their infrastructure’s capability. Like two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Symbiotic design and Marlin prover’s need for enhanced capital efficiency fit seamlessly. Thanks to this partnership, hardware providers will be able to accept stake coming from $ETH and $POND Vault on Symbiotic, effectively enabling restaking across Oyster and Kalypso. This way, Marlin provers will enjoy improved capital efficiency, allowing them to accept high-stake jobs that require slashing collateral for potential malicious acts (i.e. not meeting deadlines set by clients for ZKPs generation). As a permissionless protocol, Symbiotic allows the formation of shared security agreements between ecosystem stakeholders in a trust-minimized environment. By efficiently coordinating all the parties involved (operators, restakers, networks) under a predetermined set of incentives/penalties conditions, the protocol boost prover hardware onboarding and capital efficiency, enabling protocols to grow and scale their infrastructure’s capability. Like two matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Symbiotic design and Marlin prover’s need for enhanced capital efficiency fit seamlessly. Thanks to this partnership, hardware providers will be able to accept stake coming from $ETH and $POND Vault on Symbiotic, effectively enabling restaking across Oyster and Kalypso. This way, Marlin provers will enjoy improved capital efficiency, allowing them to accept high-stake jobs that require slashing collateral for potential malicious acts (i.e. not meeting deadlines set by clients for ZKPs generation). This ambitious cross-chain staking architecture (Kalypso’s contracts are deployed on Arbitrum Nova, while Symbiotic will deploy directly on Ethereum at first) will replicate the Symbiotic epoch-base model (deposits, withdrawals, slashing) in Kalypso too, so that data can seamlessly flow between the two protocols safely and with minimum delay. On the slashing side, it’s important to note that Kalypso’s native mechanism will be extended to the Vaults too. Conclusion After analyzing data, risks and trends related to the use of off-chain scaling solutions, it’s safe to say that Marlin is uniquely positioned to satisfy the growing demand associated with TEE-based computations, ZK proof generation and hence, capture market share. Through their flagship products, Kalypso and Oyster, Marlin already offers a wide suite of solutions that can be tailored and optimized to address each clients’ needs, based on which parameters they value the most. The Symbiotic partnership also showcases Marlin’s commitment to create the best possible conditions for all participants in its network, starting with the customers and ending with the hardware providers, knowing that in an environment where each actor can provide its services in the best possible way, positive outcomes are assured. We look forward to other innovations coming from the Marlin team, knowing that their technology stack can and will be used to pioneer other disruptive sectors within Web3, such as the usage of reliable autonomous AI agents. Thank you for sticking with us until the end, we’ll see you in the next report. Follow @Chain_Eye for high-quality content about high-quality protocols! Resources: - omnida.substack.com/p/trustl… - gauntlet.xyz/resources/insid… - blog.marlin.org/securing-dec… - figmentcapital.medium.com/de… - oasisprotocol.org/blog/compa…

A previously invisible Layer 1, which earned the appellation of “Ghost Chain” while alts were in bear market. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. @Algorand revealed its strategic moves during their flagship event in Barcelona: #Decipher2024 Let’s analyze them ⬇️