Ethereum

EF should have supported ZK startups with social capital but they never did

all the ZK startups are dying in real time

if Ethereum was as cypherpunk as it wants to be, these projects would not have been abandoned

cto @ bwl.gg (lunchbreak.com), 80M+ users (bdut.ch) 🙏 built @remindme, @mintit, @gpt, @healthbot, farcantasy.xyz

EF has a team called Privacy and Scaling Explorations and there’s tonnes of really good zk work being done there

the fact that we haven't heard of it shows that EF doesn't openly share its social capital with the teams

saying this as a zk startup founder literally witnessing this collapse from the inside as more and more teams disappear

if there is tonnes of work being done, there seem to be no visible results

EF based on my interactions don’t share social capital easily at all (with good reason)

Also as a startup, one is running a business- its part and parcel of it. EF’s efforts have all been open source and nonprofit. 

If EF goes down the path of being such an active industry participant it strays from its core role

but that's the thing

it should have

the fact that it didn't resulted in so many bright minds just pivoting away from zk

this is literally what I'm saying

grants and research support are not enough

zk products need to solve for traction and ef should've helped with it

Btw this is a really fun point to debate and i can draw up many examples why this can lead to problems - but cant really do it publicly
If we meet irl happy to share more!

One thought experiment is to apply this social signalling to other parts of the industry like wallets, L2s etc and see if it holds

i thought we're doing cypherpunk but i still see irl again

btw this part about ef being so closed also boggles me

proximity to ef (e.g., irl meetings) matters more than how beneficial a product is to the ecosystem in predicting if a project would be successful or not

it's a survivorship bias

what i'm talking about is tens of extremely bright zk researchers literally giving up on the tech in the midst of all this "cypherpunk" talk

there is a lot of talk and not enough walk what i'm seeing

i saw *a lot* of good folks pivoting from zk in the last year

this is the state of industry

So i am also worried about the proximity thing but a case here is Arbitrum vs Optimism

Arb does its own thing, not much EF signalling, doing very good too. 

Also cause vs correlation, EF works with good reliability long term folks, naturally in a space with such high turnover you end up with mostly good folks