🔥 3 Thoughts Thursday - 20th March 2025


High to Low

  1. Cypherpunk Values 📜
  2. No More Bridging 🌉
  3. Weekly Foundry Command 🔨

High 🌎

Cypherpunk Values 📜

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.

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.

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."

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.

Mid 🤝

No More Bridging 🌉

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.

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.

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:

Low 🔎

Weekly Foundry Command

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:

See you next Thursday!

Got thoughts on this week’s newsletter? Reply to this email or DM me. I’d love to hear from you!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or any affiliated organizations. Nothing in this publication constitutes financial, legal, or investment advice.

Blaine Malone

Read more from Blaine Malone

⛽ 7702 Gas Sponsorship Over the weekend I explored EIP-7702 by writing a minimal implementation that stripped transaction creation back to its fundamentals. While Viem does a great job abstracting the low-level details, I wanted to understand exactly what was happening under the hood. You can check out the code here. What did I learn? Once delegated, the code is fixed at the EOA unless it's explicitly re-delegated (requires re-signing auth list entry). Type 4 transactions include an...

Live Streaming This week I tried out a different format: I went live. Finding the time to record well-scripted videos is tough when you have a full-time job, so I wanted to dip my toes into the streaming ecosystem. To start, I went live on Twitter. The first stream was simple. I wasn’t on camera myself. I streamed a video of my Pectra countdown timer, which I had vibe-coded earlier in the week. malone @blainemalone the wait is nearly over... https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1PlKQMZwlnNKE x.com...

Pectra Mainnet Accouncement Episode 2 of the Craic Overflow podcast is out now. I kept this week’s check-in short and sweet, covering the latest Ethereum blog post on the eagerly awaited Pectra upgrade You can watch it on X or Youtube. malone @blainemalone Slightly different format this week: in the 2nd @craicoverflow pod, I break down what to look forward to in the upcoming @ethereum Pectra Mainnet release, scheduled for May 7. 00:00 - Intro 00:09 - The Pectra Network Upgrade 00:39 - From...