Cypherpunk Values 📜

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Throughout my 9 years in crypto, I’ve consistently believed we could improve onboarding by effectively communicating cypherpunk values. My rationale is simple: if we articulate these values clearly, I believe most people would naturally align with them.

If you're unfamiliar with the Cypherpunk Manifesto, I highly recommend reading the original version and the recent Ethereum adaptation by @pcaversaccio.

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The manifesto can be boiled down to:

• Privacy is essential for freedom: Without privacy, speech and actions are controlled by surveillance.
• Code enforces rules better than institutions: Code is transparent, consistent, and unbiased. Humans aren’t.
• Decentralized systems are more resilient: No single point of failure means they can’t be easily shut down.
• Strong encryption protects everyone: It secures data, communication, and transactions from bad actors.
• Control over your own money is common sense: If you don’t control it, someone else does.

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I believe these values are hard to argue with, no matter where you stand politically. While they lean heavily libertarian, they are fundamentally about fairness, security, and individual empowerment. These principles resonate across ideologies.

This week, Solana provided a perfect example of what cypherpunk values stand against. Blockchains are meant to be apolitical. They should maintain credible neutrality and serve as protective containers for these principles.

Solana's now-deleted ad aimed to promote 'innovation acceleration,' but its execution was widely criticized. Many called it tone-deaf, and personally, I agree. I think it completely missed the mark. Was this a glimpse into an echo chamber within the Solana ecosystem? Or just marketing incompetence? Either way, it succeeded, if the goal was to alienate large portions of the community.

Moments like this highlight the strength of Ethereum’s credible neutrality. Solana has repeatedly played the political card, aligning itself with whatever is popular at the time. In 2020, their messaging directly contradicted this latest ad. More and more, Solana is looking like the "current thing coin."

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Anatoly, the founder of Solana, acknowledged that the advertisement was a mistake, and the post was deleted. As blockchain technology becomes more mainstream, staying true to cypherpunk values remains the best strategy for any chain that wants broad appeal.

No More Bridging 🌉

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Every now and then, I get excited to try something new onchain. That is until I remember what it's like to actually navigate this world. One of the biggest UX pain points I hit over and over again is bridging.

Let’s say I want to do something on Base but don’t have Ether there. I need to bridge from another chain where I do have Ether. Now I have to answer a whole new set of questions: How quickly do I need it? Is this bridge ripping me off? Is it secure?

Then, after all that, I hit the bridge button. And that’s when I enter the unknown. If the bridge takes longer than expected, there's that creeping feeling, did I just send my funds into the void? Maybe some North Korean hacker is celebrating right now.

You get the picture. Bridging is a UX smell. Crypto users shouldn’t even have to think about it, just like you don’t care which data center Google is routing your HTTP requests through.

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Optimism’s Superchain is designed to completely abstract away bridging for users. Instead of treating each chain separately, users can interact with the Superchain as if it were a single network.

For example, if you have a balance on Unichain and want to spend it on OP Mainnet, there’s no need to manually bridge, it just works.

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This means wallets can now:
✅ Show unified balances across chains
✅ Support low-latency cross-chain transfers
✅ Eliminate the need for network switching

Here’s an example of a Superchain-enabled wallet from a recent hackathon:

Weekly Foundry Command

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When debugging in Foundry, you'll often encounter endless hex strings. Making sense of them quickly can save a lot of time. Take the following 4-byte sequence as an example. We can use Foundry's 4byte command, which leverages openchain.xyz under the hood, to decode it effortlessly: