Warp is a new decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX), built entirely in an Ethereum smart contract, with no external dependencies. Its novel innovation is a new data-structure that enables it to match buyers and sellers completely on-chain without capital-inefficient liquidity pools, and with lower fees than most other exchanges (both centralized and decentralized). More information at this conference presentation:
The project is in final stages of testing, aiming to go live in the next few months. We are looking for a few more generalist, security-minded hackers and engineers to round out our tech team. Blockchain experience not required, we can teach that, but we have a high bar for general computer science and software engineering capability.
Built by an experienced team who previously co-authored Lightning Network (https://lightning.network/), Plasma (https://plasma.io/), and Handshake (https://handshake.org), among others. We work remotely but with regular company-paid on-site/in-person work sessions, both in the US and Asia. Health care and usual benefits included.
TLDR: market conditions not conducive to their business at this time. (Ed: founding team probably wants to quickly pivot to something else, not take the time to for a sale)
> I don't understand how people can possibly think that identity obfuscation at scale is a good thing for a financial system.
There's an important side-effect to an anonymous financial system which doesn't get much attention, but is worth noting.
An anonymous financial system is a debt-less financial system, since without identity you can't do credit ratings or other means of enforcement of repayment. Everything is either a commodity or equity/security, not a debt instrument. And there is no debt-financing, only equity-financing (similar to the VC industry).
No debt means no leverage, or in the case of the Global Financial Crisis, no over-leverage [1]. Without debt and leverage you can't have a systemic credit collapse, the most destructive type of financial crisis (GFC, Great Depression).
I've seen one estimate that if central banks and govts hadn't bailed out the financial system in 2007/2008 GFC, there was so much leverage that the collapse would have lost the banking system more money than it had cumulatively made over its entire ~300yr modern history. That would have been Mad Max time for sure, and why the bailouts were the lesser evil.
By eliminating identity from the financial system you've deterministically eliminated the worst possible outcome that system could incur, and materially changed the expectation value for the system (and society) over time.
In the short-term, a highly leveraged, debt-based financial system will likely outperform an equity/commodity-only financial system. But over the medium to long term, when periodic credit collapses are factored in to the former, probably not.
In blockchain financial systems, any activity that requires collateral must be over-collateralized [2], resulting in significantly increased systemic robustness and reliability. If we care about deterministically eliminating the most destructive type of financial crisis from the table of possible outcomes, then we must acknowledge this is a useful side-effect of an anonymous financial system.
Finally, the comparative damage to society of a GFC-style collapse is greater than things that are enabled by untraceable money, like money laundering and sex-trafficking. The latter can be horrible, but the former is potentially a different order of magnitude, if bailouts are not possible (which may be the case next time).
* Notes & Clarifications:
1. High volatility due to price discovery activities is not the same as systemic collapse. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly volatile, losing and gaining ~80% of their value multiple times over their first decade of existence. But such volatility is not the same as a systemic collapse.
2. Atomic debt like flash loans are still possible, where the loan is atomically made, invested, liquidated, and repaid all in the same smart contract. If any part of that contract fails, or the loan can't be repaid, then the entire thing is rolled back and the loan never even happened. But that can't result in a collapse in the same way the traditional banking system can.
Sure, the two I had in mind in NYC are Kadena (http://kadena.io) and Jane St. (https://www.janestreet.com). Jane St. is more an OCaml shop but they like Haskell people. Kadena builds everything in Haskell.
Would you have any interest in doing Haskell full-time? I know several well-funded companies looking for folks with similar backgrounds to yours, in SF, NYC, and London. Happy to connect you if you’re looking for something more interesting and possibly better pay.
Clearmatics | London & Palo Alto | Theoretical Cryptographer | Onsite or Remote | Fulltime | https://www.clearmatics.com/
Clearmatics is developing a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) system for interbank settlements called the Decentralized Clearing Network (DCN). It uses a federated ledger with central bank-backed digital cash as its settlement asset. The first implementation of the DCN architecture is the Utility Settlement Coin (USC), referenced in the BIS’s Money Flower taxonomy [1].
Properly architecting and successfully deploying this technology could better facilitate interbank cash settlement and reduce the need for posting margin and holding reserves against unsettled obligations, freeing significant amounts of capital for more productive purposes and mitigating a source of systemic risk in the banking system.
We are hiring theoretical cryptographers to work on hard problems involving zero knowledge and hardware enclaves, among others. You will be able to publish if you desire. The company is a 30 person startup with an academic culture, currently raising a Series A.
Please contact me if interested: byron dot gibson gmail.
Raw materials + innovation + labor + capital + time = waste byproducts + new utility added to the world in the form of convenient personal transportation that is sometimes (hopefully all the time) worth more than the sum of its inputs (profit). But all of those inputs get consumed in the process and one thing of value is the result.
Dual purpose mining consumes the inputs but creates two things of value, such that the miner is able to hedge, and to recoup their losses if the cryptocurrency fails. The fundamental problem is that reduces the cost the of attacking the currency, rewriting the ledger from some past point in history, should the miner decide to attempt that. In order for cryptocurrency to be secure, it requires that the miner be fully committed to the currency and that attacks are maximally costly and risky, unhedge-able (at least within the system, they can always short on third party exchanges and whatnot, but there's nothing the protocol can do about that), such that the miner's highest expected value is follow the protocol honestly.
I have no connection of any sort to Stride (or any chat app for that matter, other than a few I use, which doesn't include Stride yet). This aspect of chat has just been a point for me for years. Looks like Stride and Twistapp are both attempting to solve it, among others. Wouldn't surprise me if there were some Slack plugins to do similar things as well.
>It still expends resources, but does so in a non wasteful manner.
And this is a flaw. There is a law of conservation at work here, whereby to create one source of value, another has to be destroyed. You can't destroy that first source "in a non-wasteful manner". It's not actually destroyed in that case and you've effectively double-spent it and cheated the system in a way that has subtle ramifications on the incentives and security. Even in blockchain, incentives matter and there's no free lunch.
Haven't used Stride yet but as someone who hates always-on chat I could see myself really appreciating its deep work oriented features: mute notifications, allow others in the channel to mark things as "task", "decision", "outcome" so you can go back and find important things you missed while deep working.
It's also interesting that the material is lighter than water. "Tactical" life vests and shark-resistant wetsuits come to mind as possible products too. If you could get the Navy SEALs to trial it, that could be a big win.
Cool project. It might be interesting, to the HN crowd at least, to see blog post or other writeup on the specific mods you made to Gecko and other standard browser components to create this.
Hey mbrock, off-topic question, but I came across an interesting discussion you had here on HN a few months ago on formal verification of Solidity/EVM and some related work you were doing. I run a conference at Stanford in January on this, would you have any interest in giving a talk on your work there? Contact me if interested.
Hi buckie, first I've seen of Kadena but like your approach. Deterministic BFT, built in Haskell, what looks like a Lisp for contract language prioritizing safety. Good work.
I'm helping organize a conference at Stanford in January on blockchain protocol design and security, would you guys have any interest in presenting about your approach and/or things you've learned so far:
Warp is a new decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX), built entirely in an Ethereum smart contract, with no external dependencies. Its novel innovation is a new data-structure that enables it to match buyers and sellers completely on-chain without capital-inefficient liquidity pools, and with lower fees than most other exchanges (both centralized and decentralized). More information at this conference presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUosFwSdVU0&t=51m10s
The project is in final stages of testing, aiming to go live in the next few months. We are looking for a few more generalist, security-minded hackers and engineers to round out our tech team. Blockchain experience not required, we can teach that, but we have a high bar for general computer science and software engineering capability.
Built by an experienced team who previously co-authored Lightning Network (https://lightning.network/), Plasma (https://plasma.io/), and Handshake (https://handshake.org), among others. We work remotely but with regular company-paid on-site/in-person work sessions, both in the US and Asia. Health care and usual benefits included.
Contact [email protected] if interested.