Nomatic

A Zcash board member on the two years when the project was one bad quarter away from resizing the team. “I joined the board end of 2023, so it’s almost three years now. We all agreed at the board level that this was the last shot. It was do or die.” “Our treasury is comfortable now, but for most of the two years after that, depending on coin price, we’d have to resize the team and really think about what our future looks like.” “So it’s been a long struggle to survive, but suddenly now you have new talent. You have a greater ability to fund different explorations, and you have a lot of interest from the market.” “When the team left, we’re basically left with kind of a shell of an organization. And we did see it as our responsibility to properly steward… or point the organization towards its next phase.” ft. @sudo_ml, @zmanian, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

His way to take profit on a token without ever selling the position: provide liquidity and sell the fees. “I think the best way for me to sell a token is actually providing liquidity. Let’s say you’re bullish on Derive. If it doubles, the human mind will probably be like, well, it can double again.” “What I prefer to do is provide liquidity, Uniswap v3 or v4, but really wide. Not full range. Normally people will do plus 100, minus 50. I’ll do plus 200, minus 66.” “I will collect Derive and ETH over time, but then I can sell my Derive and I get a fee. I always keep my main position, but I sell the fee as kind of how I take profit.” “If Derive goes 2x or 3x and now I’m fully out of Derive, at least it’s positively that I’m out. Now there’s a risk, again, if it’s going down the other way, you’re holding the bag. But that’s the best way for me to take profit.” ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

The best privacy isn’t private payments. It’s money at rest that nobody can tell apart. “We have these shielded pools. The coins in those shielded pools can’t be distinguished from each other.” “You see a Bitcoin, it’s attached to an address, you see all the addresses that have ever touched that. You have ETH on Ethereum, you see all the different addresses that are connected… just ordinarily holding the coins, everybody can see.” “Everything that’s in the shielded pool is indistinguishable. That’s not a property that things like Monero have… Just hold your money in an encrypted pool is kind of not a system that anyone else has ever been able to pull off.” “If you’re trying to make a payment, trying to use a DeFi protocol, the transfers are always gonna leak information. But if you moved your money into a shielded pool just to hold it there for years, there’s no information to leak.” ft. @zmanian, @sudo_ml, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

The “Bitcoin sweater guy” barely owns any Bitcoin. His store of value is ETH, and his reason is about community, not price. “Even if I’m the Bitcoin sweater guy, I actually don’t own a lot of Bitcoin. The upside of Bitcoin is not as good as the upside of other liquid assets.” “What makes the value of a company is its product and revenue. What makes the value of a token is its community. And I think the Bitcoin community became really toxic and did not really wanna evolve over time.” “We’ve seen quantum stuff happening recently. Is the community that’s now leading Bitcoin ready to work on Bitcoin to make it quantum resistant? Do we need that? I don’t know.” “I have an exposure to Ethereum because I see it as being the Internet, but I don’t see Ethereum at 30k. The Internet is not worth something. What’s built on it is worth a lot of money. So I see my store of value being Ethereum over time, more than Bitcoin.” ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

An AI audit found the worst kind of bug a zero-knowledge protocol can have. Zcash patched it before anyone knew. “I did a bunch of AI-driven audits of different parts of the Zcash code. Basically, every time a new model comes out, run a standard set of queries across the Zcash codebase.” “Opus 4 comes out from Anthropic, and then finds the worst… what is called, in the parlance of zero-knowledge, a soundness vulnerability.” “It’s a very benign-sounding term for basically the worst possible vulnerability you could have in a zero-knowledge proof protocol, which is you can forge a proof, and therefore you can create money from nothing.” “So it got patched fairly quietly, and then after it was patched, Zooko wrote a blog post… this is what this vulnerability meant and how bad it could have been.” ft. @zmanian, @sudo_ml, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

He moved ~$300k into Uniswap pools on Robinhood Chain the week tokenized stocks launched. Two weeks later: ~$75–80k in fees. “I love Uniswap LP. That’s where I make a lot of my money. And I was like, okay, is there any stock on Uniswap right now? And it just launched. I think it was the first week or even the first day.” “We moved a lot of our capital into Uniswap, providing liquidity to NVIDIA and Tesla and S&P 500, all of the tokens that we could see some volume on. We opened pools at, like, 3, 4, 5%, because we’re the first one.” “We knew it was, like, 1, 2 weeks. We moved something close to 300k. We did something about 75 or 80k in, like, 2 weeks.” “When we created the pool at 3%, some people came and said, well, why 3? If I put 1, I’ll be more capital efficient. And slowly over time we saw our return going down really quickly, which was expected. And so we removed all of that from Uniswap.” ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap