Day X Structure
When teaching new skills and activities, it's always good to have the student grounded in something that's comfortable before moving onto the new skill. Different ways to get that grounding are by maintaining their normal work hours, or asking them to talk about a simple problem like navigating transit that morning. For me, that means creating the work-day I'm most comfortable with, which is a focused shift work with occasional productive interruptions. The target workflow for me is: find a target crypto-economic system, look for leaks, test the leaks, move on and come back. An improvement I will target is improving my documentation to restart more effectively.
The ground work for target crypto economic systems (systems) probably can't happen on your first day. Around the world there are plenty of telegram groups, twitter threads, hackathons and seminars of people. That's something that's built up.
In the same way it's good to read the plant operating report on your drive into a refinery, it's also good to catchup on twitter and discord chats for the latest happenings in your corners of the space. There won't be time for VC or parties today, so I line up my walk through a street festival to get 5 minutes of culture. Take a minute to follow-up on consulting opportunities.
Scrolling through the phone, I look through my leads:
- Derive.xyz has released a new front end. Not much will change security or incentive-wise.
- Ventuals (https://testnet.ventuals.com/trade) has now opened their front end to the public. Good opportunity to revisit from the work earlier in the week.
- Supercexy app has been increasing traffic.
- Impermax V3 has been gaining liquidity rapidly. Might be some easy grass to munch on
- Gondor has called for aide in testing the pre-alpha
- I wrote a solidity fork of degens.com to HL with a on-chain fallback for websocket failure this week.
- Succinct, boundless, and aztek have all moved to semi-public, semi-incentivized testnets for their various ZK stacks
- https://ethproofs.org/killers
- Too many based rollups and L2 architectures to list in general
- Monad and Mega-ETH coming down the pipe
Overall goals:
- Active participant in incentivized DeFi
- Increase competency across the stack
- Target AI skills specifically to be useful for collaborations with others
- Transparency: create a website or blog-post to help streamline future growth.
Today we are targeting (2), which means (1) and (3) are just side goals. We'll go ahead and do 4 by writing a blog post.
I'll focus today on trying to break Gondor. Unfortunately I'll redact this portion and send to them privately.
At this point, I'm confident I have a working level understanding of the system, time to break it.
Giving the AI nothing novel of value, these were his thoughts. Good start for an uninformed party!
- Oracle Risk: How does Gondor get Polymarket position values? Price manipulation could be critical here.
- Liquidation Mechanics: Binary outcome markets have unique properties compared to traditional lending markets. How does liquidation work when collateral can go to zero instantly?
- Market Resolution: What happens to loans when Polymarket markets resolve? Is there proper handling of edge cases?
- Cross-protocol Risk: Dependencies on Polymarket's contracts and potential upgrade risks.
- Collateral Valuation: How are unrealized Polymarket positions valued? Is there sufficient liquidity for liquidations?
Write the blog post, turn the phone back on and time to start fishing around the rest of the crypto space. Make sure you get your comments out to the Gondor team.
Rinse and repeat. Finish in time for some sports sports sports. And a workout. And maybe food.
Call it a night when you run out of gas.