# Mapping the Labryinth In this article we will briefly reveiw the general types of application deployments to choose from and different types of applications that are interesting to build. Then we will propose a debate game application called ***the referee***, the heart of the article. Finally, we conclude with a succinct analysis. ## General Types of application deployments * **App-chain**- You have an application or an idea for a suite of applications and would like to guarantee sovereignty or a notion of it for your community who can hard-fork via social consensus should conflict arise. The Cosmos SDK is battletested and comes with IBC & Tendermint, some of the most battletested protocols in crypto. This could also be a rational L3 deployment and benefit from Ethereum’s liquidity. * **Smart Contracts** - SC dapps inherent the security and limitations of the chain you deploy on. As an SC dapp you can focus on a specific **PMF** for your product. There are also robust security frameworks for auditing and formal verification for more mature languages like Solidity. Cross-chain communication amongst different instances of your dapp fragments liquidity and introduces new trust assumptions. * **Universal L1** - High DA throughput for specific needs like CLOB, on-chain gaming, Social Media, et al. The death spiral risk is acute early on but persists through the chain’s lifetime. Unknown attack vectors. Difficulty boot-strapping a community. Difficult to bootstrap inital token liquidity without venture funding. * **Rollups** - [Rollups](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KOEKNDGLBiLbaUDnIxCV6L1aBJblGPJs/view) move computation (and state storage) off-chain, but keep some data per transaction on-chain. To date, much of the work here focuses on building EVM equivalent rollups though formidable alternatives exist. A key distinction of [enshrined rollups](https://t.co/ViDqkLb6tJ) aside from on chain da and proof verification is the censorship resistance mechanism. Users have the ability to exit enshrined rollups to L1 via forced inclusion txs, escape hatches, or proposing blocks. [Soveriegn rollups](https://blog.celestia.org/sovereign-rollup-chains/) rely on social consensus or some form of governance to upgrade via a hard-fork. Both types of rollups can use fraud or validity proofs to guarentee/enforce the validity of the rollup, that its execution is compliant with the state transition function, $\sigma'$ $=$ $\gamma$$($ $\sigma$$,$ $T$$)$ * where $\sigma'$ is the new state * $\gamma$ is the state transition function * $\sigma$ is the previous state * $T$ is a transaction ## Specific types ![](https://i.imgur.com/rKgNWET.png) For brevity, I made a non-inclusive list of the different ways a developer could architect their application (there are potentially many more not listed), first partitioning the trade-off space between shared security and sovereignty. Why? This is always a hot topic of discussion whenever the notion of economic security pops up. Its also a fundamental distinction. ## What to Build? * **nftFi**, the marraige of Defi and NFTs, has yet to settle on core primitives with respect to trading, borrow / lend, LP, yield aggregation, or derivitives trading. * **Insurance prediction markets** could enable on-chain `creditDefaultSwaps` which would be helpful for DAOs or even average users to hedge counterparty risk in an open and liquid market. * **Gamified social media**. These types of games could be played on chain or off-chain as well but require strong sybil resistance mechanism eg. attestations from Sismo. ## The Referee The referee is a debate game with an interactive ai bot (the referee) who coordinates, arbitrates, and scores the game between players. Players can initiate a debate by opting into the game. Once the players are confirmed the first tweet pointed at the referee initiates the game. The referee arbitrates or officiates the debate. Ideally the referee can be trained on all tweets by the players and their twitter bubble for context. In addition the referee is trained on all of the relevant subject matter. Latency may not be an issue as debate on bird app are not tit for tat in real time. The players can pre-set a set checkpoints to call the referee to reveal any incorrect statements and assign a probability to each player winning the argument currently and if extended. If all players agree they can send a tweet to the referee ‘end’ to end the match. The referee would produce a summary of checkpoints and a final scoring for win probability and accuracy percentage of factual errors. The referee may have to be trained in advance requiring some custom product spend and probably requires a hefty spend on servers. You could even have the bot produce a ZK proof which proves its checkpoint updates and final score were computed correctly. Maybe you could also prove that the referee was trained on the appropriate set of information and not giving you a *bs* response. Another iteration of the game would allow players to privately enter the game but prove things about their account eg. how many followers, what communities they frequent, etc. This way people who want to keep their opinions separate from their identity can do so credibly. The Privacy feature would most likely enhance richer discourse and maybe eliminate the need for people to spin up anon LARP accounts. Many people may hate this game and not play. But the intuition behind the idea is that AI can be a terrific arbitrator for human discourse if trained correctly. I Will think more about this, but these are the type of applications I'm interested; apps that make learning, writing, debating , etc. fun. ## Conclusion Each of the application constructions listed above have tradeoffs which we briefly touched on. Many of the claims about what is important in making these decisions ring hollow and are not certain to be considered by all application developers. Social status and cultural relevance also play a role. Instead of arbitrarily looking at the above list of complex abstractions and making a biased decision, it is preferable to start from first principles by defining the endgame of the application and then working backwards to select the infrastructure it will be built upon.
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Coordination is Power : cross-domain MEV & decentralized sequencing for rollups

This note is a work in progress and should not be mistaken for a finished project

1/2/2024
High Latency Governance

Ethereum governance is a delicate process that relies on rough social consensus of the community, core developers and EF researchers. Improvement proposals (EIPs) are the primary mechanism for proposing new features and communicating these proposed features with the Ethereum Community. EIP standardization process The EIP standardization process is a mechanism for proposing new features, for collecting community technical input on an issue, and for documenting the design decisions that have gone into Ethereum. ~EIP-5069 An EIP can be crafted following the EIP format (EIP-1). There are three types of EIPs, A Standard Track (core, networking, Interface & ERC), a Meta-EIP (process changes), and Informational EIPs (provides information or general guidelines). An EIP must meet certain minimum criteria. It must be a clear and complete description of the proposed enhancement. The enhancement must represent a net improvement. The proposed implementation, if applicable, must be solid and must not complicate the protocol unduly. ~ EIP-1 EIP Life-cycle

3/28/2023
Notes on Arbitrum: reviewing the sequencer

Arbitrum is a classic rollup on Etheruem that uses a Sequencer to collect user txs, order them and then submit batches of transactions to L1. Today, the Sequencers for Nitro and Nova operate as centralized entities maintained by the Arbitrum foundation. Despite this centralization, Arbitrum maintains a trust-minimized security model and censorship resistance. In the common case, the Arbitrum Sequencer receives user transactions and orders them in a sequence with a FCFS (first-come, first-serve) algorithm serving as an input to the execution stage of Arbitrum. Upon receiving the transaction the Sequencer will execute it and deliver the user a receipt or soft-confirmation. Shortly thereafter the Sequencer will collect enough transactions into a batch and post them to L1 by calling the Inbox method addSequencerL2Batch. Only the Sequencer has the authority to call this method. As a result this allows the Sequencer to provide instant soft-confirmations. The transactions have L1 finality once the batch is finalized. In the cases where Sequencer acts malicious, users would need to submit an L2 message via L1 to the delayed inbox. After 24 hours,forceInclusion is called moving the L2 message from the delayed inbox to the core SequencerInbox and is then finalized. Current Drawbacks Latency races Centralized Sequencer

3/21/2023
based MEV-Share

If you have "smart searchers" they could read the different Mempools and match orders. Then match the orders, bundle them and send them to a builder. So basically MEV-Share for all rollup mempools. In this way you would not need a sequencer for ordering, though a local fallback is always helpful. This idea on the surface appears similar to the idea put forth by a couple of Jedis here. Perhaps this lends some credence to the technical feasibality of the following discussion. Disc-V5 supports topics and is used on both CL and EL, so we could create separate p2p channels at any granularity we want (e.g. shared_sequenced_chain1_chain2_slot5, see e.g. how EIP-4844 blobs are each on separate topics. ~ @gakonst I would caution the reader that the following proposal is reductionist and may be technically infeasible and/or too left curve. Feel free to correct any misconceptions or comment. 4337, Private Mempools & Match-Making MEV-Share inserts an intermediate role between searchers and Builders. The Match maker plays a similar role to that of a solver in the Anoma framework. Can you match make userOperations for all rollups?

3/21/2023
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