Red’s 2023 Theses

Inspired by the Messari 2023 Theses, here are my personal theses for 2023.

Where I’m Focused

The two ecosystems (and architectures) I’m most excited about are Ethereum and Cosmos. I have been and will continue to follow the development of the core protocols, as well as their respective ecosystems.

Ethereum

I’m of the opinion that Ethereum will be the clear cut winner of the L1 wars for one reason: the community. Web3 is largely open-source and nobody is building in silos. No idea is safe from being forked to infinity - how many spin offs have you seen of your favorite L1/DEX/NFT/Ponzi?. DLT is so young that nobody can reasonably expect a project to be perfect on the first implementation; they must all be iterated on - sorry anti-hard-fork Bitcoiners. The fluidity of a community and willingness to hard-fork are survival traits.

There are brilliant technical solutions all over the web3 space and that fact does not hurt Ethereum one bit. In fact, this is to the benefit of Ethereum (and everyone). Teams are building out in the open and the web3 development environment is overwhelmingly collaborative. With newer and more agile projects reaching the market first, their successes and failures are free lessons to everyone else. PoS, danksharding, tokenomics, and many other items on the Eth roadmap (past, present, and future) were/are able to be studied and improved in other projects before being implemented on Ethereum.

Ethereum’s firm grip on the community, both users and developers, make it inevitable in 2023 and beyond that.

Cosmos

I see Cosmos as a thought-leader in the industry. Cosmos and its technologies are providing the foundation for a multi-chain future. I think the only thing that’s keeping Cosmos from the public spotlight is its lack of a public face of the organization to be treated as a god-like figure. For the record, it is a good thing that Cosmos lacks such a figure, and it’s very refreshing.

Cosmos app-chain ecosystem focuses on allowing people to build. Polkadot is a competitor commonly compared to Cosmos, and their main focus is security. I think it’s too early to make any decisions that gatekeep your ecosystem from would-be contributors, such as going all in on security. The most important thing right now is to build and facilitate others to build; Cosmos is the multichain ecosystem allowing that.

Cosmos SDK, IBC, and Tendermint are all technologies with longstanding effects on the entire web3 ecosystem. The way the ATOM token is oriented, it hardly captures any value created by the Cosmos ecosystem. However, even if it did, it wouldn’t capture the value created outside of the ecosystem where these concepts have been implemented. Cosmos SDK is used to build sovereign chains, IBC is being used for light-client bridging unrelated to Cosmos chains, and Tendermint is being used for consensus all over.

I expect Cosmos to continue to inspire other projects. I don't expect the ATOM token to represent that value in the near future, and I'm ok with that. I'm writing this as a technologist, not an investor.

What to Watch in 2023

I’ll be closely watching development in the following areas in 2023:

*Note that there's some overlap here, I'm not too stressed about categorization*

• Privacy 

  • L1 fungibility, ZK-ZK rollups, mixnets

• Middleware/Interoperability 

  • ZK light clients, ZK bridges, oracles

• P2P Infrastructure 

  • Storage, internet, dVPNs

• Modularity 

  • Rollups, data availability layers, L3s, zkEVMS

• Ethereum Staking Ecosystem 

  • Restaking, DVT, liquid staking

Let’s look at specific projects in these areas

Privacy

• Monero

  • Fungibility by default. Monero is the gold standard for privacy and self-sovereignty

• Oxen: Oxen, Lokinet, and Session

  • Private infrastructure

• Aztec, Polygon Nightfall

  • Layer 2 privacy for Ethereum. True zero-knowledge rollups (even though NIghtfall uses fraud proofs over validity proofs to batch to L1 :p)

• ZCash

  • Fungible L1 like Monero. A pioneer of privacy tech and SNARKs

• Haven

  • Fungible stablecoins

Middleware/Interoperability

• ThorChain

  • Native L1 swaps.

• Succinct and zkBridge

  • IBC light clients for Ethereum. Trustless bridging, no more authorities or intermediaries to serve as targets for exploits

• Chainlink

  • Oracles

• Cosmos and Polkadot

  • App-specific chains

P2P Infrastructure

• Filecoin, Arweave

  • Storage

• Helium, Pollen

  • Internet

• Boring Protocol, Orchid, Deeper

  • dVPNs

• Akash, Pocket Network

  • Compute

Modularity

• Celestia, EigenDA, Polygon Avail

  • Data availability

• Fuel

  • Settlement

• zkSync, Starknet

  • ZK-rollups - L3s and fractal scaling

• Scroll, Polygon zkEVM

  • ZK-rollups - zkEVMs

• Optimism and Arbitrum

  • Keeping a close eye on these optimistic rollups

Ethereum Staking Ecosystem

• EigenLayer

  • Restaking. Networks no longer need to compete for security

• RocketPool

  • Simplify staking and break down the economic barrier to entry

• Lido

  • Liquid staking

• Obol Network

  • DVT (Distributed Validator Technology)

Bonus Round🚨

My fav educational resources!

• Messari - it’s a pleasure to work with the big brains on this team. “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” 

• Cryptorado - this is a crypto group in Denver I participate in: coworking, educational events, hiking, crushing brews, you name it. Having a local group of developers, researchers, artists, and overall builders working in my industry is truly invaluable.

Youtube

• Whiteboard Crypto
• Finematics
• a16z
• CoinBureau

Twitter

• @salomoncrypto

• @apolynya

Protocols

• Chainlink - Pat Collins is the absolute boy for his dev tutorials, and the rest of the Chainlink team never fails to impress with their blog.

• Polygon - Great resources coming from this massive team that is executing damn near every Eth scaling angle

Podcasts

• ZK Hack - your one-stop shop for everything ZK; zkWhiteboard, zkPodcast, events, you name it.

• Bankless