I’ve been in an engineer in crypto for close to a decade and now I’m building a company in it. Today I watched @donnoh_eth discuss @staycloakedxyz on @ambire's livestream and it reminded me of something I’ve seen time and time again: crypto twitter has a strange tendency to reward cynicism. Someone builds something new and the instinct is to find the impurity, point out why it isn’t sufficiently decentralized/private/permissionless, and dunk on it. I think it’s one of the worst parts of the culture. There is enormous value in adversarial thinking. Crypto needs people who question assumptions, find weaknesses and hold projects accountable. But there’s a difference between adversarial thinking and ideological purity testing. Watching the discussion today, I felt like Cloaked became the latest example of it. We’re two engineers, totally self-funded, trying to solve a problem we’ve personally experienced for years: using crypto and maintaining onchain privacy without destroying UX is still far too complicated. We make deliberate engineering and UX tradeoffs to make that experience dramatically easier. You can disagree with those tradeoffs. You should criticize them. But dismissing pragmatic attempts to move the UX forward because they don’t pass your notion of purity is myopic and counterproductive. Crypto needs more builders talking to users, building for the world as it exists today, and being transparent about the tradeoffs they make. Then let users decide what’s worth using.

purchasing a .gwei domain using the browser extension @livia___22 and I have spent a long time working on. I’ve never liked moving a domain (.eth/.gwei) to my main Ethereum address because it basically means doxxing that address. this is a good example of “Hide My Address” (think Apple’s Hide My Email, but for crypto.) I created a fresh address, funded it privately from my @0xprivacypools balance, and used that instead.

my fiancée and I are also co-founders. a while ago, we did a personality quiz together because we were curious if it could help us understand how we work, both personally and professionally. the interesting part wasn’t our similarities, but our differences. we’re both very high in openness and high in conscientiousness. the major divergence is neuroticism: hers is high, mine is relatively low. high neuroticism has costs, but it also increases vigilance. you detect threats, social tension and weak signals earlier. low neuroticism has costs too. you can underweight risks, but you’re better at remaining stable under uncertainty. I actually think the combination works quite well: she catches things I might miss. I’m less likely to overreact to the things she catches. maybe the better question isn’t “are we similar?” but “do our differences cancel out or compound?”

in the future we’ll look back and think it’s comical that we announced financial plumbing like Apple announces new iPhones. users shouldn’t know or care what chain they’re on. accelerate @etheconomiczone

i can't believe we are this close to synchronous composability on ethereum. meanwhile half the industry wants to go build LLM wrappers. this talk on the @etheconomiczone from @jbaylina and @VitalikButerin at @EthPrague is one of the clearest explanations of what synchronous composability on ethereum could actually look like. also interesting to see vitalik on the other side of the conversation here, he’s asking the right questions.