Niusha Moshrefi, Peiyao Sheng, Soubhik Deb, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath
Formalizes cryptoeconomic security for PoS light clients, ensuring the cost of corrupting data must outweigh potential profit, economically deterring malicious actors.
Introduces EIGEN, the first universally intersubjectively slashable token, extending EigenLayer's cryptoeconomic security to digital tasks whose faults cannot be objectively verified on-chain.
Introduces EigenLayer, a restaking protocol on Ethereum enabling ETH stakers to extend cryptoeconomic security to third-party decentralized services without new trust networks.
Examines how slashing mechanisms in proof-of-stake protocols economically penalize misbehaving validators, showing it substantially increases the cost of corrupting a protocol compared to relying solely on token depreciation.
Extends order-fairness guarantees to permissionless blockchains, tackling front-running and transaction reordering without additional trust assumptions.
The scope of property rights has never been static. Again and again, law has expanded the range of entities that can hold property—and every expansion looked dangerous at first.
People are often told to “have the courage to dream big,” but I have always found that phrase vague. The real difficulty begins when a dream demands action, uncertainty, and risk.
Market Design and Agentic Commerce: Part 1 — Scott Kominers
How market design principles apply to a world of AI agents that negotiate, transact, and compete on our behalf — covering mechanism design, marketplace dynamics, and what changes when the participants are autonomous agents rather than humans.
March 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
Tempo: The Payment-first Stablecoin-native Blockchain — Mallesh Pai
Tempo’s design as a payment-first, stablecoin-native blockchain — its architecture, consensus approach, and what it means to build a chain optimized for payments from the ground up.
A clean-slate rethink of Ethereum’s consensus, execution, and data availability — covering post-quantum security, fast finality, real-time ZK proving, and L2s.
AlpenGlow redesigns Solana’s consensus and data propagation stack — Rotor for erasure-coded dissemination, Voter for fast/slow path finality, and what it means for validators and MEV.
February 2026 · 52 min
The Anti-Framework: Building Chains from Primitives — Patrick O’Grady & Brendan Chou
Commonware’s anti-framework philosophy: compose optimized primitives instead of inheriting a monolithic stack. Deep dive into their Minimmit consensus protocol and upcoming ExoWare.
February 2026 · 58 min
Consensus from First Principles — Kartik Nayak
How consensus actually works, how it evolved over 50 years, how today’s protocol families fit together, and what the next frontier looks like — with one of the world’s leading consensus researchers.
January 2026 · 1 hr 52 min
This is meant to be only a recommendation — feel free to select the path that best suits you.
Tempo: The Payment-first Stablecoin-native Blockchain — Mallesh Pai
Tempo’s design as a payment-first, stablecoin-native blockchain — its architecture, consensus approach, and what it means to build a chain optimized for payments from the ground up.
A clean-slate rethink of Ethereum’s consensus, execution, and data availability — covering post-quantum security, fast finality, real-time ZK proving, and L2s.
AlpenGlow redesigns Solana’s consensus and data propagation stack — Rotor for erasure-coded dissemination, Voter for fast/slow path finality, and what it means for validators and MEV.
February 2026 · 52 min
The Anti-Framework: Building Chains from Primitives — Patrick O’Grady & Brendan Chou
Commonware’s anti-framework philosophy: compose optimized primitives instead of inheriting a monolithic stack. Deep dive into their Minimmit consensus protocol and upcoming ExoWare.
February 2026 · 58 min
Consensus from First Principles — Kartik Nayak
How consensus actually works, how it evolved over 50 years, how today’s protocol families fit together, and what the next frontier looks like — with one of the world’s leading consensus researchers.
January 2026 · 1 hr 52 min
Market Design and Agentic Commerce: Part 1 — Scott Kominers
How market design principles apply to a world of AI agents that negotiate, transact, and compete on our behalf — covering mechanism design, marketplace dynamics, and what changes when the participants are autonomous agents rather than humans.