First I'll say that last week felt like a big one here at XMTP Labs. We experienced our first major change to the team since inception—a further refining of the shape of the team we're looking to build. While team departures are always very hard, I'm appreciative of how adaptable everyone seems to be. Further, it's clear that the group that we've assembled here is a strong one, and we'll be ready to tackle the challenges ahead of us.
XMTP is an ambitious project to bring a new kind of critical infrastructure to web3. It's no small task that we've set out to accomplish, and it will require a truly great team—one that I believe we've begun to assemble here.
By the end of last week it seems like we're honing the machine, and quickly dialing into execution mode.
I'm looking forward to this week as we further define our first deliverables and getting more feedback from the community on our Litepaper.
Fired up 🔥
XMTP Updates
- Jazz has signed his offer letter and will be joining us soon! Thanks again to @nickmolnar for the referral!
- @Saul took initiative last week and got our Greenhouse triaged
- Also started setting up some bots that will help to keep us up to date [link]
- A good bit of discussion on our Hiring Process [link]
- @nickmolnar has posted an RFC on an Engineering Skills Assessment [link]
- Some good questions in from Signet that @Saul published. [link]
- @petermdenton discovered that Echelon (behind Inb0x) was open for nominations to their foundation committee, so I submitted an application which everyone is welcome to read [link]
Crypto industry news
- Etherscan launched Blockscan Chat [link]
- Twitter adds support for NFT pfps [link]
- Zora launches v3 which introduces non-custodial NFT listings [link]
- They're adding "community audits" which come with vulnerability bounties of up to 25 ETH [link]
- JP Morgan closes Hayden Adams' (Uniswap founder) bank account [link]
- One of the core contributors of the Wonderland project called 0xSifu has been revealed to be convicted felon Michael Patryn, who was behind QuadrigaCX. I'm including this because it shows some of the risks of pseudonymity in crypto [Link]
- Cathie Wood and Ark Invest release their investment report and are apparently ETH bulls [link]
What we are reading/listening to
- Zora founder Jacob Horne published a paper called Hyperstructures which he defines as protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries. Note: XMTP is not a Hyperstructure, but I find it intriguing reading
- Unstoppable: the protocol cannot be stopped by anyone. It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.
- Free: there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.
- Valuable: accrues value which is accessible and exitable by the owners.
- Expansive: there are built-in incentives for participants in the protocol.
- Permissionless: universally accessible and censorship resistant. Builders and users cannot be deplatformed.
- Positive sum: it creates a win-win environment for participants to utilize the same infrastrastructure.
- Credibly neutral: the protocol is user-agnostic.