Best of paragraph.xyz/@chaskin on Kiwi News
@chaskin on Paragraph · Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
8 stories by @chaskin on Paragraph have been shared on Kiwi News since 9 May 2024, with 28 upvotes and 12 comments in total. The latest was shared on 7 August 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Time to Build a Better Social Network for Ethereum Is Now
The author argues that Ethereum needs a social platform built on consensus rather than outrage, and proposes an Ethereum-focused Farcaster client that uses Polis to surface agreement. The post points to Polis, an open-source tool Taiwan has used for public deliberation, which has no reply button and lets people vote agree, disagree, or pass on statements. It cites a poll in which 60% of Farcaster respondents said the Ethereum community is divided, and it proposes pulling in discussions from Ethereum Magicians and ETH Research as voteable statements.
- On The Verge of Stateless Clients
Stateless clients, enabled by replacing Ethereum's Merkle Patricia Tree with Verkle trees, would let nodes verify blocks without storing the full state, which the article presents as a path to millions of verifying nodes. The article says a full node currently needs 2TB of SSD storage for state and 1.2TB for history, and that stateless clients rely on execution witnesses included with each block. It also states that Verkle trees could allow the gas limit to rise 3-10x, and that Verkle trees or an alternative are more likely to be included in the Osaka-F hardfork, tentatively scheduled for early 2026.
- I Got A Story To Tell
The author argues that Ethereum matters because it can restore openness to the internet and to finance, which they say have become closed and extractive. They contrast the early internet's open protocols like SMTP and HTTP with today's platforms, citing Reddit's raising of API prices that effectively killed the third-party app Apollo. They also say Ethereum can open finance to people excluded by borders, and that most future apps will use Ethereum only for pieces such as value transfer or identity verification.
- Who Even Were the Cypherpunks?
Cypherpunks were hackers and cryptographers who built privacy tools because they believed privacy and freedom were fundamental rights, and their work, the text claims, laid groundwork for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Phil Zimmerman released PGP in 1991, and the U.S. government dropped its investigation of him in 1996. The cypherpunk mailing list peaked at about 2,000 subscribers and produced tools such as Tor (1995) and Hashcash (1997).
- Why Is Everyone in Ethereum Talking About TEEs?
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are becoming a significant part of Ethereum infrastructure across MEV, rollups and bridges, according to the article, which describes their growing role as a way to address security, privacy and decentralization challenges. Flashbots first proposed TEEs for MEV in December 2022 and launched BuilderNet in November 2024, with Beaverbuild, Flashbots and Nethermind as the first participants. Flashbots also built Rollup-Boost, which Uniswap's upcoming L2 Unichain will be the first to use. Taiko and Scroll are integrating TEE-based proofs into their bridge proof systems alongside ZK proofs.
- Behind the Scenes of Ethereum’s Open Coordination
The article argues that Ethereum's open, collaborative process is coordinating a fix for fragmented user experience across rollups, through standards that let wallets abstract away individual chains. Vitalik has advocated ERC-3770, a standard for chain-specific addresses, since mid-June, and Justin Drake created a chain-specific address working group at the end of July that brings together Vitalik, wallet teams and rollup teams. Other proposals come from Sam Wilson, and from Marco Stronati of Matter Labs and Jeff Lau of ENS. Josh Rudolf suggested breakout Zoom sessions, and the first took place on August 10th.
- Was the Rollup-Centric Roadmap a Mistake? Are L2s Truly Ethereum?
The rollup-centric roadmap was a deliberate strategy to scale Ethereum faster while keeping its decentralization and security, and L2s count as Ethereum when they use Ethereum for data availability, derive their state from Ethereum L1, and run critical verification on L1. Data availability progress outpaced execution, so L2s could scale immediately while raising funds that accelerated work on SNARK and STARK execution scaling. ZKsync, Polygon, StarkNet, Optimism, and Arbitrum raised $458M, $451M, $261M, $178M, and $124M, respectively.
- Private Transactions: Where MEV and the Public Mempool go to die
The author argues that the Ethereum public mempool is declining in usage because MEV, the profit sophisticated actors extract from pending transactions, has pushed users toward alternatives. The text says 22% of swaps now use MEV-optimized applications that delay public mempool submission, and about 10% of transactions are sent privately, bypassing the mempool. Flashbots Protect is cited as a private RPC that has protected over 13 million transactions, while OFAs such as MEV-Share and UMA's Oval aim to return most extracted MEV to users.