For the past few years, developing an entirely new protocol has been brutal for developers. Forking the Uniswap codebase, either V2 or V3, make your customizations, spend another 50k getting said codebase re-audited, attracting new liquidity to your protocol, etc. This was a feat most teams could not push through, with most forks either not making it to prod, and the ones that did make it to proud reach nowhere near the levels volume of Uniswap. Below you can see that Uniswap V2 has been forked over half a thousand times and V3 over 70 times, and that’s just what actually made it mainnet.

As the NFT space has risen in value as an asset class in the crypto world, there have been more protocols and products built to attempt to make these assets more liquid, through borrow/lending, providing fractional ownership, etc. Bringing the rise of something called "NFTFi". We've seen several of these apps be successful across different chains, from Tensor & Magic Eden on Solana, Blur on Ethereum, Sudoswap etc. From borrowing and lending, but most interesting, NFT AMMs.

The Ethereum ecosystem has witnessed a growing interest in enhancing the functionality of Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to enable more complex operations and interactions. While EOAs can initiate transactions, they currently lack the ability to perform stateful computations and maintain persistent storage, capabilities that are inherent to Contract Accounts.

In the evolving landscape of decentralized technology, Solana emerges as a cornerstone for projects dedicated to decentralized physical infrastructure (DePin), championing a vision where decentralized networks harness collective computational resources for tomorrow’s groundbreaking applications. Most recently, the team at Nosana stands out with a new approach leveraging the Solana blockchain to orchestrate a distributed network of GPUs. Nosana's mission is to democratize access to high-performance computing, specifically addressing the urgent needs of AI and machine learning developers who face the dual challenges of computational resource scarcity and the high costs associated with centralized cloud services. By providing a decentralized, extremely cost-effective alternative, Nosana not only aims to solve these issues but also posits a long-term transformation in the development and deployment of AI models. As open-source models continue to match and even surpass the capabilities of proprietary systems, the demand for an open, scalable, and efficient computational platform grows. Nosana, with its permissionless, non-vendor lock-in infrastructure, is perfectly positioned to be a beacon of light for the Open Source AI community and helping developers across the globe have equitable access to the computational power necessary to drive AI forward.

If you're like me, with a mild addiction to crypto Twitter, you've probably noticed the ongoing intellectual tug-of-war between the Ethereum and Solana camps in the most recent months. These debates have been heating up for a while, focusing on transaction speeds, costs, and the monolith versus modular frameworks. It's undeniably a hot topic. Personally, I'm not in the business of picking winners; I view the blockchain industry as a collection of billion-dollar experiments running simultaneously, with room for multiple successes. Yet, I firmly believe that no matter your allegiance, a fundamental understanding of the differences between these Virtual Machines (VMs) is crucial, especially for those in technical roles within the web3 sphere.

In the dynamic archipelago of blockchains, each island (or blockchain network) is self-sufficient, boasting its own protocols and tokens. These islands are formidable in isolation, but their true potential is untapped due to a glaring absence: sturdy & safe bridges to connect them.

Long gone are the days of us sitting in tech talks at crypto conferences imagining all of the cool things zero knowledge proofs will be able to do in the blockchain space. The tools are here. From zk co-proccessors like Axiom, to fully blown zkVMs by RISC ZERO, Polygon’s coming Miden VM, etc. we have the tools to create the next generation of apps that will not only scale ethereum, but also increase privacy and enable an entirely new set of defi apps that are uniquely enabled by with these tools. Last time I wrote about how Axiom enables interesting use cases of Uniswap Hooks on the coming Uniswap V4 with their zk co-processor. Lately I’ve been deep diving into the new Polygon zkEVM & their coming Miden VM, two of Polygon’s new zk rollup solutions. This research has inspired me to write this piece on how these tools that will further extend of DeFi protocols with the capabilities of the coming Uniswap V4.

Uniswap V4 represents the latest iteration of the leading decentralized exchange protocol. It introduces an innovative hooks architecture that enables developers augment pool functionality at different stages in a pools lifecycle.