2020

The year is 2020. We are living in the future.

There is the emergence of technologies that give individuals control over their own digital data and their own digital finances. These advancements in security and privacy are emerging from the fringe of technologist and developers around the world. The technologies to self organize and build communities with governance and incentives has become democratized and more readily available for these creators. It is the response to the current modalities of how we communicate and transact with each other. The technology and the power of deep learning based upon massive amounts of data has been used for good and for bad; undoubtedly we are just beginning of the AI era. Everything we do is tracked then re-manufactured; we have opted in to have our clicks, our searches; in order to provide us service optimizations. The connection between online virtual world and offline physical world; we are on the cusp of a new decade that will surely bring about the proliferation of decentralized technologies and cybernetics; man and the machine. The infrastructure we use on a daily basis is still antiquated and stuck in the old world, but it is rapidly evolving. That transition to a world where we own our data, our finances, the processes we use; that will emerge this decade and will uplift the world into one distributed cybernetic. We are as close to 1990 as we are to 2050.

This past year I learned:

How to develop JAMStack & PWA (Progressive Web Applications) Learned React.js and Next.js Learned GraphQL and Apollo Subscriptions Learned Postgres + GraphQL via Hasura How to develop embedded Shopify Applications How to write Kotlin and Spring Boot REST Controllers How to use Intellij, Gradle, Maven Learned about Rust Services and using Cargo build system with Oasis and Substrate Learned about Proxy Re-Encryption Learned about Electronic Rights Transfer Protocol and Eventual Send Learned about Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Learned about Urbit This is going into the 8th year writing on this blog, I am over 97,000 views all time. I did not have as many views on my blog this year compared to the past few years. Possibly SEO or not writing as much but still something to keep a note of.

Here are the past couple years of this same blog posts.

2013: A Year in Review

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Here was my focus in 2019:

Focus for 2019

• Build Dapps
• Learn Rust
• Hack on Substrate
• Run every day and lift every day
• Genomic Health: Eggs, Avocados, Chicken, Steak, Red Inca Quinoa, Black Beans, Vegetables, Steelcut Oatmeal
• Learn Mandarin every day instead of social media
• Get 200k views on the blog
• Deploy all node infra with Terraform and K8s to dapps.network
• Build out engineering team in Bay Area
• Learn more about STARKS / ZKPs (Zero Knowledge Proofs)
• Build more CorDapps and become expert at writing flows
• Travel to Japan for Custom
• Relaunch all websites using Next.js
• Get 8 hours of sleep
• Code every single morning, first thing in the morning
• Drink more water

This year I read and reread some great books:

• The Rust Programming Language
• The Industries of the Future
• The Traction Gap – Cleveland
• What you do is Who You Are
• Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
• The Master Algorithm
• Secrets of Sandhill Road
• On Writing
• The Startup Hero
• Big Debt Crisis Series
• City of Thieves
• Designing Data Intensive Applications build, keep, learn, write, read.

Some of the Highlights from 2019

Won ETHNewYork Hackathon Nucypher Award | Triplecheck Won SFBW DeFi Hackathon Agoric and Cosmos Awards | IndemDeFi Created and Incorporated Stateset Focus for 2020

Build and Launch Stateset Talk to Customers and Better understand the Customer Learn ReasonML Learn Rust and WASM with React Bindings Learn more about Lightning Network Write own Chain using Cosmos SDK Run 200 miles, stretch more after running Lift Heavy Keep Learning Mandarin Eat Healthy (Oatmeal, Eggs, Leaf Greens, Quinoa, Black Beans, Avocado, Chicken and Steak) Drink more water On Crypto and Blockchain Notes from San Francisco Blockchain Week:

This technology is meant for new monetary assets, new markets and ultimately a breakthrough in digitally native finance:

Permissionless Capital Formation Novel Financial Instruments Collateralized Digital Debt Systems New Decentralized Monetary Assets is where value has accrued. New Layer 1 Protocols are emerging Layer 2 solutions are emerging ZKRollUps, State Channels MultiDai Positions are going to be huge this is a massive development for the industry by being able to draw out loans against multiple collateralized assets. This technology is going to disrupt will be traditional financial services. The user experience of using a digitally native cryptocurrency product for financing is driving the next generation of innovation in the industry. The other aspect of the industry is the layer 1 solutions and protocols being developed. Some of these protocols are focused on delivering application specific blockchain platforms that are focused directly on providing modular chains that are interoperable. Examples of this are Cosmos and Substrate projects. Cosmos and Substrate are both building a network of application specific blockchains and modular system for functionality, consensus mechanisms and interoperability. Think Ruby on Rails for Blockchains. Systems for interoperability; Cosmos has the IBC and Substrate has Polkadot. Other layer 1 protocols are emerging such as Near Protocol, Harmony and Solana. Others are taking a different approach and building on some of the advancements of the Bitcoin architecture such as Nervos and the CKB-VM. The UTXO based model of inputs and outputs has faster sync-time and the CKB-VM layer is meant to be low level infrastructure with formal verification methods on top of language specific virtual machines which creates a global cellSet. Most of the protocols mentioned above are moving towards Rust for the protocol layer systems levels development. I wrote an article about Rust and Blockchain if you would like to learn more about these projects.

Another theme is around data privacy, data ownership and identity. New Regulations are coming with CCPA and other data protection laws: how does crypto impact this? There is a difference between data protection and data privacy; there are new methods and programs coming for digital literacy and data rights across many sectors. Most of the development in the space is focused on building a new layer for finance and new systems for finance. It was discussed that these blockchain networks will emerge as specific to different regions like telcos but then will eventually be published to a global state for things like multi-party computation and verification. It may vary regionally, but the the data will be required to be localized and computed; the result of the computation will be verified on a global chain with other parties. This is being led primarily through trusted executable environments advancements like Intel SGX and the open source Keystone projects. Companies developing on this at the moment are Oasis Labs as well as Corda who is working on a new product called Conclave for writing Java programs in SGX enclaves.

This is a new era of finance, new decentralized monetary assets; use case of store of value and sending money in a more cost effective way. New monetary asset and related financial services in the near term; net new now exist in the world for Lending & Borrowing. Early systems such as MakerDAO that seem self referential while everyone is asking what’s blockchain and crypto good for? Pure UX is much better to get a loan for example as opposed to going into the bank. A coin that serves the purpose of store of value and method of exchange could lift a billion people out of poverty and could be as substantial as electrification.

Stateset I have been working on a sales automation and financing platform for the last year. It has finally come together over the past month or two and it is what I am a putting most of my time into.

State is summarized by agreement classes and token holding in psuedonymously-owned addresses.

Stateset is the idea that the entire front-office, middle-office and back-office set of enterprise applications that power commerce will be rebuilt on a blockchain based distributed network with shared services and global state. I have held this idea for many years and it is coming to fruition. I’ll write a follow up post with more details on Stateset and our product roadmap.

Lastly Here were some of my other articles from this past year:

On Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Serverless Containerzation

Web3: Beyond Cloud Computation

On Libra

Rust and Blockchain

Inter-firm Sales Automation

On Debt Cycles

Definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it. I will continue to build the mastermind group and devote my energy to drive combinatorial creativity through technology and people.

Happy New Year.

Live the Dream.

-Dom