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Jayant Krishnamurthy

@jayantkrish

CTO @DouroLabs, contributor to @PythNetwork and @fogochain
jayantkrish.com Joined July 2009
420 Following 3.2K Followers 761 Posts

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Jayant Krishnamurthy @jayantkrish
Pyth is designed as a decentralized protocol to avoid single points of failure.

An obvious way to build an oracle is to run a server somewhere that collects data, aggregates it, and sends it to the blockchain. The problem with this approach is that the server is a centralized single point of failure. If that server goes down, the oracle does too. Also, the owner of the server could manipulate the results.

That tradeoff is unacceptable for oracle users who demand security and reliability.
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Jayant Krishnamurthy @jayantkrish
Have you ever wanted to shard a seed phrase?

There hasn't been a good tool to do it ... until now! Check out BIP39-shard:

github.com/jayantk/bip39-…

It splits a 24 word mnemonic into parts using k-of-n threshold signatures. Each part is a mnemonic for easy offline storage.
github.com GitHub - jayantk/bip39-shard: Sharding utility for BIP39 seedphrases Sharding utility for BIP39 seedphrases. Contribute to jayantk/bip39-shard development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Jayant Krishnamurthy @jayantkrish
The election is a referendum on the American ruling class.

The ruling class consists of both Democrats and Republicans. Their interests are the policies that both parties support. Every administration supports foreign wars. Every administration supports key corporate interests, including the pharmaceutical industry and the banks. There’s very little difference between Bush and Obama: they both started a bunch of wars, they both expanded free trade, they both passed healthcare legislation without solving the drug cost problem, etc.

The policies of our ruling class have hurt the people of this country. The people don’t want to fight wars in the Middle East – these have nothing to do with our defense, and they’ve bankrupted the country. Free trade has eliminated industry and people’s livelihoods. The 2008 crisis response further drove wealth inequality. We have the world’s largest healthcare spending and yet worse life expectancy than countries that spend half as much. We’ve lost the chance at building a peaceful world post Soviet Union and instead are at the brink of nuclear war. We’ve gone from being a rich productive country to one whose key export is financial instruments – this is a pending disaster that will impoverish us (regardless of administration) over the next decade as the world dedollarizes.

The vast majority of the American people see that the ruling class doesn’t support their interests, and they’re angry. They’ve been angry since 2008, and we’ve seen this anger manifest in different ways: Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, and of course, Donald Trump. These movements are nominally left vs. right, but this is not the distinction that matters. They’re populist movements with the same underlying cause.

Instead of responding to popular anger by actually helping the people, the ruling class has ruthlessly suppressed these challenges to its power. They rigged the Democratic primary in 2016. They created fake Russian interference theories to impeach Donald Trump, then did it again to suppress the legitimate evidence of corruption against Trump’s opponent in 2020. There are no bounds to their corruption and falsehood: the ruling class will do whatever it takes to hold on to power.

In their quest for power, the ruling class has destroyed the legitimacy of our society’s institutions. Government agencies and the media are no longer trusted because they have consistently lied to the public. They have politicized law enforcement and used it as a weapon against their enemies, destroying rule of law. (Hillary is still claiming the 2016 election was stolen – where’s her court case?) They’ve created a vast censorship complex of government agencies and NGOs for combating “misinformation” on the internet, which is a direct attack on freedom of speech. This loss of legitimacy is extremely dangerous, and demonstrates the extent to which the ruling class will go to hold on to power.

Ironically, as these attacks have escalated, they have actually helped @realDonaldTrump . In their desperation to stop him, the ruling class has escalated to increasingly obvious lies and corruption. The flagrant lies are waking people up – the gap between the lie and reality is simply too large to be ignored. If you listen to the media describe Trump, then listen to Trump himself, you instantly realize that the media has lied to you. The lie is so flagrant that it completely destroys the media’s credibility – you realize they simply do not care about the truth, and never have. It’s like seeing the matrix – it snaps you to a new interpretation of reality, where you see everything in a new light. It’s Wittgenstein’s ruler (“When you use a ruler to measure the table, you are also using the table to measure the ruler”) and you realize the ruler has been wrong the whole time.

(Tangentially, the previous paragraph explains many of the so-called “mysteries” of the election. You periodically see the media wonder “how can all these people support a racist convicted felon who’s literally Hitler?” Well, there’s your answer – every time the media attacks Trump, they’re actually attacking themselves.)

By surviving, Trump has attracted a counter-elite. All the people he’s touring with – @TulsiGabbard , @RobertKennedyJr , @JDVance , @VivekGRamaswamy , @elonmusk – are the counter-elite. It’s an assorted cast of characters, but the common theme amongst them is that they stand against one or more interests of the ruling class. Tulsi is anti-war, Elon is pro-free-speech, etc. This counter-elite is the seed of a new ruling class.

Thus, the election is ultimately a choice between ruling classes. Do you want to stick with Hillary and Cheney? Or do you want to try something new? This is a freak event – few people have Trump’s survival skills – and you’ll never get another opportunity in your lifetime. Choose carefully.
1 replies 1 reposts 18 likes 1.6K views View on X
Jayant Krishnamurthy @jayantkrish
The challenge for building OIS on Solana is to make it crankless. Every user's staking account state becomes stale over time. How do you keep the account states fresh without submitting a transaction on every
single epoch? The staking program tracks an event log for each pool and automatically fast-forwards the account state whenever the user interacts with it. The log is a circular buffer to keep the account size
bounded. It simplifies the ongoing operation.
What if you could get rewarded for protecting DeFi?

Enter Oracle Integrity Staking (OIS)—an upgrade to Pyth bringing enhanced data source accountability for a more secure DeFi ecosystem.

OIS brings on-chain staking rewards and slashing mechanisms to the network.

Learn more ⬇️
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Jayant Krishnamurthy @jayantkrish
learn aggregation theory
Keone Hon Verified account @keoneHD Jul 14, 2024
He who owns the customer captures the value

In mature markets, the participant in the stack that is closest to the end user captures the lion's share of the value.

We see it in finance, where brokers (frontends) like Robinhood or eTrade get the first proverbial "bite of the apple". The power comes from the ability to direct flows to market-makers. (Citadel pays over $2B/year in payment-for-order-flow (PFOF) agreements to retail brokers.)

I saw it personally. As a high-frequency trader, I operated strategies that quoted miniscule spreads on government bonds to banks, who added a markup that was 5x+ of my spread before quoting those to their customers. Because they had the relationship with the customer, it was in their power to capture the majority of the spread the customer was ultimately willing to pay, while as a commodity service provider (just one of many HFTs quoting the bank) I had to quote as tightly as possible.

We see the same pattern in retail, where the last mile seller (the physical store) marks up an item hundreds of percentage points from the cost to produce and transport it. For example clothing is typically marked up 100-500%.

Tradeoffs and the unique opportunity for decentralized apps

It'd be remiss to ignore the tradeoffs. In retail, a high markup on goods is offset by the cost of rent, labor to operate the store, risk of damage or theft, and inventory risk.

And in the government bond world, it has taken banks decades to build up their client base, while building out a massive array of services and staffing their Sales & Trading desks 24/7 (not to mention treating customers to expensive dinners and perks).

But technology makes it sometimes possible to build businesses that reach a global audience and capture a ton of users, while minimizing operational costs. I believe that decentralized apps have this possibility.

I started my first job out of college in 2011 at an HFT firm called Getco. When I left two years later, I remember hearing about a startup called Robinhood that was trying to disrupt the brokerage space by offering a great UX and free brokerage fees.

As a trader, the value prop made sense to me - why nickel-and-dime the customer when the more valuable thing was actually the ability to control where their flows get sent. (The value prop apparently also made sense to the CTO at Getco, who left around the same time and joined Robinhood as an advisor.)

Fast forward to today and Robinhood is a $20B company that dominates the space of retail trading. Today, it is obvious that customer-centric businesses are one of the most valuable portions of the trading space. But at the time the incumbents were stagnant and there was an opportunity ripe for the taking.

Apps in Crypto

There is currently a feeling within crypto that infra gets all of the attention and funding. This situation seems ironic when considering the long-term equilibrium of mature markets, where user-centric apps capture substantial value and wield substantial leverage.

Building a great app isn't easy. You need a killer idea. And then you have to master product, design, user aquisition, maybe even customer support.

Nothing great is easy. But I would say, the opportunity is there.

Keep Building.
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