Equilibrium Infra Bulletin #28: Deep Reals, MEV on L2s, Blended Execution and more...
Equilibrium Labs builds the state-of-the-art of decentralized infrastructure. We are a global team of ~30 people who tackle challenges around security, privacy, and scaling.
🔍 Deep Reals
⚡️ Topic Summary
Digital forgeries have been around as long as the internet has and plain old forgeries have been around even longer. So far, we’ve mostly trusted institutions or the reputation of third parties, but it’s been practically impossible to tell whether something is real or fake with absolute certainty. Generative AI makes this problem much more acute as the marginal cost of producing content approaches zero (thread with examples of issues, updated over time).
A deep real is an inversion of a deep fake. Rather than assuming that something is real and that we need to prove its fakeness, it assumes everything is fake and that we need to sufficiently demonstrate that something is real. This switch in mindset is related to the attribution problem, i.e. how you know (and verify) that some content is real and hasn’t been tampered with.
The post by USV argues that instead of placing trust in a single authority, trust should be decentralized across a network of digital signatures, cryptographic algorithms, community notes, and immutable blockchain technology (“trustless” rather than “trustworthy”). This has the benefits of avoiding a single point of failure, enhancing transparency, and giving individuals more control over the rules by which they’re judged. In practice, however, there is a spectrum of solutions
🤔 Our Thoughts
The “fake until proven real” mindset is an interesting way to think of the problem. We agree that people should be less trusting towards anything they read or see online and we’ve written about this topic before here. In practice, however, these more decentralized means of providing "trust points" could be implemented in different ways.
One example of distributed trust is Twitter’s community notes, allowing readers to add context and commentary to posts. However, this approach still requires active effort from readers and relies on broad social consensus. We are interested in finding ways to reduce the friction for attestation, make it default, and add additional context/metadata to the post itself.
Blockchains may be part of the solution, but we also need hardware attestation, software integration, and coordination across industry players to integrate attestation technology. There are ongoing efforts, such as the content authenticity initiative, where a wide range of industry participants work on global standards. Other early examples include Leica’s M11-P camera with built-in content credentials, ZK Microphone (sound attestation), and ZK-IMG (image attestation).
💡 Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest
🤓 Analysing the extraction of MEV across L2s: The main question the paper asks is "Are sandwich attacks possible on L2?". Summary thread here.
📚 Introducing the Pessimistic Proof for the AggLayer: Polygon AggLayer chose Succinct’s generic zkVM SP1 to secure cross-chain interaction. Pessimistic in this case means the AggLayer assumes all chains are unreliable and can’t play nice with one another.
📚 Scaling Bitcoin for mass use: A realistic vision: Starknet announced their plans to become a single layer that settles on both Bitcoin and Ethereum (apps can choose where to post data and proofs). Conditional on the passing of OP_CAT.
📚 Unifying VMs with Blended Execution: Fluent announces blended execution, which lets apps on different execution environments call each other seamlessly (WASM, EVM, and SVM to start with).
🎧 Why MEV Looks Different on L2s: An interview with Robert Miller, Product Lead at Flashbots, on what MEV on L2s looks like today.
🔥 News From Our Partners
🏴☠️ UNALIGNED HAUZ at ETH CC (July 5th-12th): A hacker house during ETH CC that is open for both residents (apply here) and visitors. For us, "unaligned" is a play on the tribalism in crypto - to be unaligned is to be open to new ideas. If you are interested in cryptography (ZK, FHE et al), Rust engineering, maths, economics, etc - we'd love to have you. The house is organized by Equilibrium's very own Joakim and a few others from the crypto world.
🤌 Personal Recommendations From Our Team
📚 Reading: The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe: A four-volume sci-fi novel that chronicles the journey of Severian, a journeyman torturer who after helping a client kill themselves is exiled in disgrace to journey to the distant city of Thrax where he is to live out his days as their executioner.
🎧 Listening: Minoru Muraoka - Bamboo: This Japanese jazz and folk fusion album from 1970 is a unique blend of traditional Japanese instrumentation and Western jazz influences.
💡 Other: When privacy expires: An exploration of how you can get access to tons of sensitive citizen data after buying cheap domains that have expired.