Justin

@justinzhang

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276 Followers

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would love to be a member

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☕☕☕ Panel with /blackbird founder Ben Leventhal and Arianna Simpson: - If you have not already, add this sentence to your blurb: We build this product for __________ [describe your customers here]. - Be sure to articulate what success looks like. Clarify the goals that need to be hit for a successful raise. - There is always a harder side for a two-sided market, and that's where you should focus. - Founders need to lean into their superpowers and surround themselves with people who complement their skills. ⤵️

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🤝🤝🤝 Deal-Making: (@pyrs) - Six stages of a deal-making framework: - Relationship: Get to know someone and maintain the trust. - Diligence: Gather information on decision-makers, economic impact, and best alternatives. - Anchoring: Use market intelligence to set an informed negotiation starting point. - Framing: Frame conversations in alignment with the counterparty's goals. - Reciprocity: Codify the mutual benefit from the deal. - Collaboration: Close the deal and start collaborating. - Structure the agreement in a way that allows flexibility. ⤵️

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📣📣📣 Go-To-Market (GTM): (@maggiehsu) - Five GTM strategies: - Product-led: The product is great, and people start to use it. - Sales-led: A sales team guides customers through a potentially complex onboarding process. - Developer-led: Focus on engaging developers by providing SDKs, documentation, and support. - Community-based: Build a strong online and IRL community to engage and retain users. - Integration: Partner with projects that have large distribution networks to gain access to their user base. - Experiment with different strategies. - Early-stage startups should focus on establishing their minimum viable customer category (MVCC) and prioritize high-potential customer segments. ⤵️

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A full day packed with insightful talks at a16z crypto CSX. Here are my notes: ──────────────────────── 📈📈📈 Fundraising: (Arianna Simpson, Guy Wuollet, @mason, @carra, @michaelblau) - "Preparing for the Pitch" by @AriannaSimpson from the last cohort: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wVKcgn2W1uw - Put team slides first. - Business model and GTM strategy are mandatory. - Understand the knowledge graph in your audience's mind and use that to explain your concept. - Relax, as it helps to relax your audience. - Demo day short pitch is like a trailer to a movie. It needs to get the audience curious enough to want a follow-up meeting. It is not meant for in-depth explanation. - Let the market set your valuation. - You can ask the investor about their typical engagement model with their portfolio companies. ⤵️

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Governance * Introduce governance only when absolutely necessary (e.g., for emergency fallbacks). Governance adds complexity and costs, including tax implications. Summary Token design is about aligning incentives with core network metrics and using faucets and sinks to maintain network health. Governance should only be included when absolutely necessary.

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Faucets and Sinks * Faucets expand the network effect; sinks defend it. * Faucets should directly incentivize the core metrics, not proxies. Subsidizing proxies may lead to wasting resources as they’re easily faked. * Never subsidize demand; it creates low-quality growth. Subsidize supply through verified mechanisms, such as staking or using web2 identities. * Sinks should preserve the token’s value and be linked to value creation events. Avoid simplistic sinks like buy-and-burn during the early stages when all resources should be spent on strengthening the network effect. ⤵️

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Fascinating talks by @eddy on Tokenomics Design at @a16zcrypto CSX. Here are my notes: Network Effect * Tokenomics is all about defining and reinforcing network effects. It’s crucial to outline core metrics tied to the network’s primary behaviors—where value is truly created. These metrics guide the incentives. * For example, in Uber’s case, core metrics might include rider wait times and driver utilization. Enhancing these metrics draws more participants, thereby strengthening the network effect. * Network effects differ from reflexive effects (e.g., price increases leading to further price increases), which are self-reinforcing but less sustainable. ⤵️

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We have some toy examples running on https://test.catsvsdogs.xyz/. The website zkspin.xyz links to WIP SDK. We are working on improving developer experience and adding more features. Your feedback is always welcomed!

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Completely agree! We see ZK is a link that integrated web2 and web3, blurring the line between the two, allowing us to ship web3 decentralized trust to web2 systems. Our customers, if they are already in web2, just need to single out the core business logic, rewrite it to be zk-provable, prove it and settle on-chain. That's all they need to do. They can keep the rest of their colossal web2 infrastructure in place.

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These makes fully-on-chain games: - Faster: p2p latency - Cheaper: why should you pay if you are using your own machines? - More scalable: the burden on the parent blockchain is minimal (Here is a post on why the term "fully-on-chain" can be misleading: https://x.com/JustinZhang/status/1796736937849688328) We target real-time multiplayer on-chain games.

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Can you elaborate more on what you mean by "zk safety"?

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That's a great question! One challenge we have already experienced is the bottleneck of zk proving (slow and expensive). We have a solution for that which should come out pretty soon. Another zk-related scaling challenge, in terms of developer experience, is the steep learning curve to develop in a zk-verifiable way. There are some unique challenges in scaling this to run MMO. I also anticipate some challenges around DA. I should be able to give you a clearer answer in 6 months. I have not mentioned any challenges that already exists in web2, like network latency, anti-cheating, and players dropping. Our goal is to create a level playing field between Web3 and Web2. We don't try to solve problems that were not solved in web2. Overall I'm very optimistic about this technology and it will scale.

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Yeah, I agree it's an ambiguous term. Please take a look at our demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bz0fE-mMt4. For gaming, one of the key goals is achieving real-time performance, which means reaching 30 frames per second. Our objective is to match the latency of Web2.

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If you are talking about integrity of data, all important data are stored in the blockchain the same way GameFi handles it. All games have core data --- money, score, rank, etc. --- and non-core data --- movement, fighting, etc. All core data are persisted on-chain. Non-core data lives in DA. zk proves the link between the two. If you are talking about privacy, that's handled by MPC algorithms.

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you can ask me 🙂

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Thanks @eulerlagrange.eth for the repost! I just cross-posted the initial idea of zkSpin here: https://warpcast.com/justinzhang/0x15b76ced Please feel free to ask me questions here or in the /zkspin channel! 🚀

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"This traces back to a course project we did back in 2006 to build a P2P MMOG without a central server. (Rap: Reliable peer to peer network gaming environment using overlapped map tessellation, K Endo, Y Yang, Z Zhang (alphabetical) - MIT Course Project 6.824 Report, 2006) Hope that you are excited about this and please wait for the white paper which should come out in a few days. We welcome any forms of participation — joining our team, backing us, early use case exploration, etc. Let’s together make blockchain games immersive and enjoyable to play! ✨🚀🛸👾" Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bz0fE-mMt4

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Cross-posting our initial idea about zkSpin from over a year ago from https://x.com/JustinZhang/status/1697308401100009530: "Blockchain is too slow for applications like gaming. It is slow because large p2p networks take time to converge and numerous applications jam in the same scarce block space. I’ve been working for 2.5 months on a concept called L4 ZK Session Rollup (nicknamed “zkSpin”) where each application session has its own ephemeral zkRollup. Such zkRollup runs on the players’ own machine and therefore achieves optimal LAN-party grade performnace, consumes zero gas fee during the game because it doesn’t occupy public block space, and is just as secure thanks to zk proofs." ⤵️

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Super pumped to join the cohort! 🚀 Follow our channel at /zkspin for updates and more exciting news!

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