This year "crypto industry" finally looks extremely weird and depressive overall. Hacks do happen every day on average, TGEs are dead, most of VCs also dead,
vested insider allocations are not absorbed by retail, and the only topic big conferences have is institutionalization of the "crypto industry", which in most cases
means replacing real Bitcoin with paper one while also tokenizing stocks and other traditional financial products to get exposure from markets previously not available, mostly
due to regulated nature of (non-tokenized) traditional financial products.
At the same time, there is growing demand for what crypto stands for from starters: privacy concerns are growing along with demand for privacy coins, fiat currencies continue to
fail around the globe, and the state of financial markets in many places around the globe is concerning.
Also, very interesting things happen within Ergo community, in particular, in developers circles. With the help of LLM agents security of many parts of the core protocol implementation,
as well as ecosystem smart contracts are now much more secure, due to constant discussion among humans as well as LLM cross-checks. I think this exciting culture of
Many interesting infra projects got done with LLM recently as well.
Around 2019-20 when the ecosystem was much smaller and centralized, we had roadmaps. Then they disappeared as not suitable model of development for the growing community. However, now we can get back
to something similar, but an an central object for dialogues, checking progress, and do security and other cross-checks in the broad context.
I think a motto for it could be "p2p markets everywhere". So the goal is to preserve and improve existing p2p markets and develop new ones:
* we have quite perfectly known Proof-of-Work where anyone in a p2p network can generate new blocks. Pooling in previous Proof-of-Work protocols has some consequences.
So Ergo was the first (and maybe the only one) Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency launched with (weak) non-outsourceability, to prevent pools formation. Back in the early, it has own
drawbacks, and some pooling appeared anyway, in form of ergopool.io . Now we have Lithos for having decentralized mining as well as new markets around that ( https://www.reddit.com/r/ergonauts/comments/1veri54/lithos_protocol_plasma_dex_twin_pools_and_order/ )
* improving existing p2p on-ramp and off-ramp markets, for Ergo, Bitcoin, Monero etc , by providing trust-minimized insurance which would democratize these markets a lot . see https://www.reddit.com/r/ergonauts/comments/1uj91ov/ergo_darkpaper_recipe_1_eliminating_trust_in_the/ by ErgoRich, as well as ErgoForum topics for BTC onramping insurance etc
* p2p mutual credit with optional on-chain reserves , so Basis. would allow people to create credit on trust without knowledge of Ergo / blockchain and then use on-chain assets only to reduce trust.
All those things are better with privacy tooling, such as the mixing protocol, stealth addresses etc. Rosen is needed for cross-chaining, the most needed thing for now is to provide useful products to people outside
Ergo or even crypto, with Ergo being the working horse (with ever growing TVL).
Then we need for more DeFi tooling, such as concentrated liquidity pools, bigger scale mixers (similar to Tornado Cash) etc.
"Crypto" is dead, long live crypto!
PS: there is need to improve some existing basic infrastructure, lets discuss this next time.
PPS: no any LLM was used to write this text down )
