
Oolong maximalist. Bureaucracy minimalist. | Prev: breaking things @eigenlayer, @ConsenSysAudits, @EtherealVC
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Joined July 2018
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I ditched cloud LLMs for self-hosted last year.
24/7 availability. My phone. My laptop. My GPU.
It's faster than ChatGPT. Almost as smart.
It's not being used by the DoD to conduct warrantless surveillance.
No data leaves my server. I own everything. When things break, I can fix them myself.
I can ask anything I want and get an answer back 10-20x faster than I can read.
It costs pennies to run. Why isn't everyone doing this?
Alex retweeted
He was found guilty on the charge that directly contradicts FinCEN's guidance. Unbelievable.
Alex retweeted
OK - now in US v. Roman Storm, closing arguments matthewrussellleeicp.substac… Unsealing bid in storage.courtlistener.com/re… Inner City Press put out book on the case, Crypto Tornado amazon.com/dp/B0FHXTCNCR & will live tweet, thread below
This week in Cursed Solidity Syntax...
Did you know Solidity supports switch-case? No, I'm not talking about inline assembly...
EigenLayer Cantina contest alpha from one of our auditors 👀
Tips, Tricks and Ideas 2.5$M @eigencloud contest.
I've spent quite some time on this exact code-base at @certora last month, so let me give you a list of tricks and ideas to help you 🫵 become a Millionaire.
- Documentation
The EG documentation is extremely extensive and @cantinaxyz has done an excellent job of providing a list on the contest page.
Take a look at SharesAccountingEdgeCases.md to avoid finding known issues. Do not get lost in the docs, the code is what matters!
- Scope
All contracts are in scope, which is a massive amount of code for 3 weeks. If you want to focus on the changes, go to EL github: feat/slashing-diff and the Rewards release.
- Tests
The amount of tests and fuzz tests is just stupendous and can demotivate any auditor.
Yet it could be interesting to focus on the use of mocks and mock functions. If the mock imitates but does not perfectly copy contract functionality, what actually was tested?
- Formal Verification
Every rule that is proven is a mathematical certainty, use it to quickly assess the validity of an attack vector.
Keep in mind that the Prover is limited by the imagination of the engineer. Any situation that was not conceptualized might prove valid.
- Magnitude
Magnitude is the core ruler that governs allocations.
Map out all possible actors and actions that might change this variable. Have they truly all been accounted for?
- Shares
OperatorShares, DepositShares, WithdrawalShares, ScaledShares, Slashed Shares, etc.. They are added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, cooked, braised, fried and minced.
Is there really no loss of precision? Do magnitude and shares always remain in perfect lockstep?
- Strategy != BeaconStrategy
The beaconETHStrategy is fundamentally different from all the others, yet they are supposed to work in a quasi-identical manner in allocation and delegation manager. Was there something overlooked?
- Containerization
An AVS should only be able to affect operators in his Operator Set. An Operator should only be able to affect his own stakers.
Are all variables perfectly separated and/or reset when actors move places?
- Access Control
Many functions are limited by _checkCanCall(AVS or Operator). Which are the actors and delegated actors. Is it possible there is a gap somewhere?
- Slashing
slashOperator and modifyAllocations are the critical functions around which this entire update revolves.
If there is a Crit to be found, it will likely be there.
- The BeaconChain
The beaconChain already slashes operators through a completely different system. Now this complex system is perfectly merged with another completely different complex system?
Complexity gives birth to bugs. Examine the connection between the two!
- Fix Reviews
The fix for a bug can sometimes introduce such complexity that somewhere else a closed door opens for a fraction and a bug comes rolling in.
Review the fixes in extreme detail!
That's all I got folks.
Good Luck to you all, I hope you will find the bugs but I also hope there are ZERO to be found. 👊
Alex retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Court lifts OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash, marking a major win for crypto privacy advocates.
I remember many times being stoked to see my articles/projects featured in @WeekInEthNews.
For a young founder on a shoestring budget, it meant the world. I know many people that originally learned about me and my security work through this newsletter.
I wonder where I'd be without it. Thanks for a good run ❤️
Alex retweeted
🐦I am extremely proud to announce the release of @rotkiapp 1.35.0 containing work of 2+ months.
Among other things it adds support for:
- @eigencloud PEPE upgrade
- @ExtraFi_io
- @gnosispay (including merchant data)
- @odosprotocol
👇 For more details check the thread below
Alex retweeted
Among the many things @eigencloud shipped this quarter, I have not yet gotten a chance to write about PEPE: make native restaking efficient.
Thanks to feedback from the community (including @LefterisJP) we have improved the cost efficiency of native restaking dramatically.
Kudos to @wadeAlexC for leading the charge on this improvement.
Your inputs to improve Eigenlayer are highly valued.
Thanks and please continue to help us build better with your feedback!
People often DM me saying that I am brutal in criticizing projects and that I should tone it down a bit.
Thing is criticism is good. It means I care. It's how you react to criticism that tells a lot about you and your project.
So now I want to speak a bit about @eigencloud.
I heavily criticized their native restaking and how broken and gas heavy it was. Multiple times.
xitter.cf/LefterisJP/status/1780…
xitter.cf/LefterisJP/status/1783…
Instead of telling me off they acknowledged the problem and worked on a solution, looping me in on the technicals as I am both a user and my app @rotkiapp is an integrator of the protocol.
Spoke with people like @dabit3, @0xkydo and more than anyone endless back and forth technical discussions with @wadeAlexC, whom I now can say I love a lot 😍
The result is the Eigenlayer Protocol: EigenPod Enhancement upgrade. Or PEPE for short 🐸.
It's a very big technical upgrade for native restaking which greatly reduces the gas costs of withdrawals from eigenlayer thanks to proper batching.
What's more it allows you to restake ETH that's gathered in the beaconchain before it gets sweeped by a withdrawal! It's pretty cool!
At the same time this upgrade opened up the AVS rewards claim so we can start seeing the APR and financial incentives of restaking take up shape.
It will all be supported in the next @rotkiapp release as the PR is almost ready and green.
I want to thank Eigenlayer for working on this and reacting so nicely to criticism. This is how it should be done! It makes me quite bullish on the team behind the project.
Finally again a huge, huge thanks to @wadeAlexC who must have by now muted me in TG due to the constant spam of questions I send him 😂
Alex retweeted
People often DM me saying that I am brutal in criticizing projects and that I should tone it down a bit.
Thing is criticism is good. It means I care. It's how you react to criticism that tells a lot about you and your project.
So now I want to speak a bit about @eigencloud.
I heavily criticized their native restaking and how broken and gas heavy it was. Multiple times.
xitter.cf/LefterisJP/status/1780…
xitter.cf/LefterisJP/status/1783…
Instead of telling me off they acknowledged the problem and worked on a solution, looping me in on the technicals as I am both a user and my app @rotkiapp is an integrator of the protocol.
Spoke with people like @dabit3, @0xkydo and more than anyone endless back and forth technical discussions with @wadeAlexC, whom I now can say I love a lot 😍
The result is the Eigenlayer Protocol: EigenPod Enhancement upgrade. Or PEPE for short 🐸.
It's a very big technical upgrade for native restaking which greatly reduces the gas costs of withdrawals from eigenlayer thanks to proper batching.
What's more it allows you to restake ETH that's gathered in the beaconchain before it gets sweeped by a withdrawal! It's pretty cool!
At the same time this upgrade opened up the AVS rewards claim so we can start seeing the APR and financial incentives of restaking take up shape.
It will all be supported in the next @rotkiapp release as the PR is almost ready and green.
I want to thank Eigenlayer for working on this and reacting so nicely to criticism. This is how it should be done! It makes me quite bullish on the team behind the project.
Finally again a huge, huge thanks to @wadeAlexC who must have by now muted me in TG due to the constant spam of questions I send him 😂
hey @eigencloud please for the love of god ... prioritize the upgrade to reduce gas costs for native restaking withdrawals.
And in the meantime ... give more "points" to native restakers.
Paying 15-40% per ETH withdrawal per validator in gas is killing us.
How does your project maintain contract deployment and upgrade scripts across multiple environments, features, and versions?
I love foundry for testing/scripting but AFAICT it doesn't have what I'm looking for here.
Alex retweeted
You see me criticize @eigencloud's native restaking often.
That comes from the dev/integrator and user perspective.
They listen though. In Q3 the withdrawals issue goes away and more will come! Such as ability to restake EL and/or CL rewards!
details: hackmd.io/U36dE9lnQha3tbf7D0…
For anyone wondering how we're accomplishing such a massive efficiency boost in the Q3 EigenPod design, take a look through the design document!
hackmd.io/U36dE9lnQha3tbf7D0…
Replying to @eigencloud
The Q3 upgrade will introduce batched withdrawal claiming, making the process up to 100x cheaper! It will also be possible to restake both consensus and execution rewards, and enjoy more flexible proving windows.
Alex retweeted
I just presented this at @nft_bucharest but I want to make it available for everyone because it's so important.
It might make me unpopular, especially with the Ordinal fans, but
𝓑𝓘𝓣𝓒𝓞𝓘𝓝 𝓞𝓡𝓓𝓘𝓝𝓐𝓛𝓢 𝓐𝓡𝓔 𝓐 𝓖𝓘𝓐𝓝𝓣 𝓜𝓔𝓢𝓢
We did an audit competition last year, and ended up hiring one of the participants to audit our M2 code this year (h/t @hexens)
We're not just hoping to find bugs in our code - we use these to look for talent, whether that means hiring for future audits, or something else 👀
Heads up, this solution doesn't work. If you sign a malicious queueWithdrawal transaction, there's no way to recover your funds.
Replying to @realScamSniffer
if you have signed a `queueWithdrawal (0xf123991e)` malicious transaction and less than 15 days,
try to call EigenLayer Strategy Manager's `slashQueuedWithdrawal` to slash an existing queued withdrawal.
etherscan.io/address/0x85864…
Alex retweeted
1/ recently @eigencloud lifted liquid staking caps to hit 2.6m of eth in tvl ($7b)
with operator mainnet set to launch soon and questions of leverage swirling, i spent some time thinking through how eigenlayer’s operators will evolve and where value will accrue





















