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Foundation has announced the Grants program to support the growing ecosystem of Bahamut and foster the expansion of decentralized projects and applications. This initiative provides multi-faceted support for a wide range of projects based on categories mainly revolving but not limited to DeFi, gaming, and NFTs. Bahamut Blockchain has already witnessed the successful results of the grants program with the latest launch of 3 DeFi projects - Lolik, Mutuari, and SilkSwap. These platforms have successfully passed all the qualification stages and, after an extensive development process, are now live on the Bahamut blockchain. The appearance of new DeFi projects will surely increase the scalability and adaptability of the native coin of Bahamut, FTN, and expand its usability and relevance. Mutuari is a lending protocol made for decentralized lending and borrowing of assets directly on Bahamut. Mutuari gives the users access to diverse crypto assets, including FTN, USTD, USDC, stFTN, and is accessible through all EVM-supporting non-custodial wallets, among them Fastex Wallet, Metamask, and WalletConnect. The project has been selected and successfully completed the task under the category of “Lending Protocol” with a prize of 60.000 FTN. Lolik is the next project that has received a grant from Bahamut Foundation. It is a liquid staking platform that supports staking on leading blockchains such as Bahamut, with other blockchains, including Ethereum and Polygon, coming soon. With Lolik, each user can earn rewards by participating in the validation processes of the blockchain directly with their Web3 wallet. \And the last one is the DeFi trading platform, SilkSwapthat allows users to enjoy peer-to-peer trading and easy and fast transactions. The application stays true to a pure Web3 concept, totally eliminating any third-party interactions.The application process continues, accepting more and more applications. The step-by-step description of the application process and information on preferable categories and their funding are available on Bahamut.io/grants. The process is transparent and fair, keeping it real with web3. Bahamut Foundation is currently announcing the list of approved applications that will start building their projects on Bahamut through the Bahamut Arena contest and wishes them the best of luck and successful completion of their projects. Gotbit Labs Category - DEX aggregator Category Prize fund - 40,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 2 months Lost Lore Category - NFT Marketplace Category Prize fund - 40,000 FTNDelivery deadline- 4 months Blockstars (Greedy Lottery) Category - Decentralized Game Category Prize fund - 13,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 1 month Erinaceus RNG Oracle Category - RNG Oracle Category Prize fund - 50,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 3 months Erinaceus Price Feed Oracle Category - Price Feed oracle Category Prize fund - 50,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 3 months Additionally, the Bahamut Foundation is hosting a series of meetups at the__ftNFT Phygital Spaces__ located in Dubai, Venice, and Yerevan. These events are designed to promote community engagement by bringing together Web3  developers, newcomers, and enthusiasts. The meetups aim to foster growth and development within the global and local Web3 sector through knowledge exchange and collaboration. Moreover,  a partnership with Yerevan State University has been announced to support blockchain education and community development in Armenia's growing Web3 industry. This collaboration--formalized through a memorandum of cooperation--represents a significant step towards integrating educational and research programs focused on blockchain and virtual assets, underscoring a shared commitment to promoting blockchain education and community development. About Bahamut Foundation The Switzerland-based Bahamut Foundation stays at the forefront of innovation, offering support and funding to the projects that foster advancements in the field, generate value for the blockchain ecosystem, and bring new users into the world of Web3, laying the foundations for future generations to learn and build upon. This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. Foundation has announced the Grants program to support the growing ecosystem of Bahamut and foster the expansion of decentralized projects and applications. This initiative provides multi-faceted support for a wide range of projects based on categories mainly revolving but not limited to DeFi, gaming, and NFTs. Bahamut Blockchain has already witnessed the successful results of the grants program with the latest launch of 3 DeFi projects - Lolik, Mutuari, and SilkSwap. These platforms have successfully passed all the qualification stages and, after an extensive development process, are now live on the Bahamut blockchain. The appearance of new DeFi projects will surely increase the scalability and adaptability of the native coin of Bahamut, FTN, and expand its usability and relevance. Mutuari is a lending protocol made for decentralized lending and borrowing of assets directly on Bahamut. Mutuari gives the users access to diverse crypto assets, including FTN, USTD, USDC, stFTN, and is accessible through all EVM-supporting non-custodial wallets, among them Fastex Wallet, Metamask, and WalletConnect. The project has been selected and successfully completed the task under the category of “Lending Protocol” with a prize of 60.000 FTN. Mutuari Mutuari Lolik is the next project that has received a grant from Bahamut Foundation. It is a liquid staking platform that supports staking on leading blockchains such as Bahamut, with other blockchains, including Ethereum and Polygon, coming soon. With Lolik, each user can earn rewards by participating in the validation processes of the blockchain directly with their Web3 wallet. Lolik Lolik \And the last one is the DeFi trading platform, SilkSwapthat allows users to enjoy peer-to-peer trading and easy and fast transactions. The application stays true to a pure Web3 concept, totally eliminating any third-party interactions.The application process continues, accepting more and more applications. The step-by-step description of the application process and information on preferable categories and their funding are available on Bahamut.io/grants . The process is transparent and fair, keeping it real with web3. SilkSwap that allows users to enjoy peer-to-peer trading and easy and fast transactions. The application stays true to a pure Web3 concept, totally eliminating any third-party interactions. The application process continues, accepting more and more applications. The step-by-step description of the application process and information on preferable categories and their funding are available on SilkSwap Bahamut.io/grants Bahamut Foundation is currently announcing the list of approved applications that will start building their projects on Bahamut through the Bahamut Arena contest and wishes them the best of luck and successful completion of their projects. Gotbit Labs Category - DEX aggregator Category Prize fund - 40,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 2 months Lost Lore Category - NFT Marketplace Category Prize fund - 40,000 FTN Delivery deadline- 4 months Blockstars (Greedy Lottery) Category - Decentralized Game Category Prize fund - 13,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 1 month Erinaceus RNG Oracle Category - RNG Oracle Category Prize fund - 50,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 3 months Erinaceus Price Feed Oracle Category - Price Feed oracle Category Prize fund - 50,000 FTN Delivery deadline - 3 months Additionally, the Bahamut Foundation is hosting a series of meetups at the__ ftNFT Phygital Spaces __ located in Dubai, Venice, and Yerevan. These events are designed to promote community engagement by bringing together Web3  developers, newcomers, and enthusiasts. The meetups aim to foster growth and development within the global and local Web3 sector through knowledge exchange and collaboration. ftNFT Phygital Spaces Moreover,  a partnership with Yerevan State University has been announced to support blockchain education and community development in Armenia's growing Web3 industry. This collaboration--formalized through a memorandum of cooperation--represents a significant step towards integrating educational and research programs focused on blockchain and virtual assets, underscoring a shared commitment to promoting blockchain education and community development. About Bahamut Foundation The Switzerland-based Bahamut Foundation stays at the forefront of innovation, offering support and funding to the projects that foster advancements in the field, generate value for the blockchain ecosystem, and bring new users into the world of Web3, laying the foundations for future generations to learn and build upon. Bahamut Foundation Bahamut Foundation This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here . here here

Bahamut Foundation Announces The Launch Of  Three DeFi Projects And The Winners Of Bahamut Arena

বাহামুত ফাউন্ডেশন তিনটি ডিফাই প্রজেক্ট চালু করার ঘোষণা করেছে এবং বাহামুত এরিনার বিজয়ীদের ঘোষণা করেছে

Bahamut Foundation gibt den Start von drei DeFi-Projekten und die Gewinner der Bahamut Arena bekannt

La Fundación Bahamut anuncia el lanzamiento de tres proyectos DeFi y los ganadores del Bahamut Arena

La Fondation Bahamut annonce le lancement de trois projets DeFi et les gagnants de la Bahamut Arena

बहामुट फाउंडेशन ने तीन DeFi परियोजनाओं के शुभारंभ और बहामुट एरिना के विजेताओं की घोषणा की

バハムート財団、3つのDeFiプロジェクトの立ち上げとバハムートアリーナの優勝者を発表

Bahamut Foundation, 3개의 DeFi 프로젝트 출시 및 Bahamut Arena 우승자 발표

Fundação Bahamut anuncia o lançamento de três projetos DeFi e os vencedores da Bahamut Arena

Фонд Бахамут объявляет о запуске трех проектов DeFi и победителях Bahamut Arena

Bahamut Vakfı Üç DeFi Projesinin Lansmanını ve Bahamut Arena'nın Kazananlarını Açıkladı

Bahamut Foundation thông báo ra mắt ba dự án DeFi và những người chiến thắng Bahamut Arena

Bahamut 基金会宣布启动三个 DeFi 项目以及 Bahamut Arena 获胜者

The cryptocurrency landscape is constantly evolving, with new and exciting projects emerging to challenge the status quo. Among the notable narratives in the crypto world has been the rise of , a token that has recently seen a 328% surge in price, capturing the attention and wallets of investors worldwide. Bonk (BONK) This phenomenal growth has not only showcased the potential for significant returns within the crypto market but also set the stage for new opportunities. Enter , a promising new competitor to Bonk (BONK), priced attractively at $0.0014, ready to make its mark in the digital currency arena. Shiba Budz (BUDZ) The Allure of Bonk (BONK) has carved out a niche for itself as a dynamic player in the cryptocurrency space, thanks to its rapid growth and the lucrative gains it has provided to its investors. The token's success story has become a beacon for crypto enthusiasts searching for the next big investment. As Bonk (BONK) continues to thrive, its journey offers valuable lessons on market potential and investor sentiment, crucial for understanding the crypto ecosystem's ever-changing nature. Bonk (BONK) Shiba Budz (BUDZ): Poised for Success Amidst the backdrop of Bonk (BONK)'s success, Shiba Budz (BUDZ) emerges as a new contender, aiming to replicate and potentially exceed the achievements of its predecessor. The initial pricing of Shiba Budz (BUDZ) is a strategic move designed to attract a broad spectrum of investors, from those seasoned in the volatility of the crypto markets to newcomers eager to get in on the ground floor of a promising project. Why Bonk (BONK) Investors Are Diversifying Investors who have reaped the benefits of Bonk (BONK)'s impressive price surge are now looking towards Shiba Budz (BUDZ) as a viable addition to their investment portfolio. The rationale is clear: diversification within the crypto space can mitigate risk and increase the potential for significant gains. Shiba Budz (BUDZ) offers a fresh opportunity, with its unique value proposition and the buzz surrounding its launch reminding many of the early days of Bonk (BONK). The Competitive Edge of Shiba Budz (BUDZ) While Bonk (BONK) has set a high standard in terms of performance and community engagement, Shiba Budz (BUDZ) is not merely content with following in its footsteps. Instead, it aims to carve out its niche by leveraging innovative blockchain technology and fostering a strong community ethos. The goal is to create a token that not only appeals to Bonk (BONK) investors but also attracts a new wave of crypto enthusiasts. Bonk (BONK)'s Influence and The Rise of Shiba Budz (BUDZ The influence of Bonk (BONK) within the crypto community cannot be understated. Its success has demonstrated the potential for meme coins and community-driven projects to achieve substantial market valuations. Shiba Budz (BUDZ) enters the market at a time when interest in such projects is at an all-time high, partly thanks to the groundwork laid by Bonk (BONK). Future Prospects As Shiba Budz (BUDZ) begins its journey, the excitement among former Bonk (BONK) investors and the broader crypto community is palpable. The combination of a low entry price, a solid roadmap, and the lessons learned from the rise of Bonk (BONK) positions Shiba Budz (BUDZ) as a potential powerhouse in the making. Conclusion The emergence of Shiba Budz (BUDZ) as a new rival to Bonk (BONK) highlights the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of the cryptocurrency market. With investors who have profited from Bonk (BONK)'s surge now turning their attention to Shiba Budz (BUDZ), the stage is set for an exciting new chapter in the world of digital currencies. As Shiba Budz (BUDZ) aims to build on the success of Bonk (BONK), it represents not just a new investment opportunity but a testament to the ongoing innovation and growth within the crypto space. For more information on the Shiba Budz (BUDZ) Presale: Presale Website: SHIBA BUDZ (BUDZ) Use Promo Code Topshib to get 20% bonus Join and become a BUDZ member: | Telegram Twitter This story was distributed as a release by BTCWire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here: https://business.hackernoon.com/

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) Enters Crypto Arena as Bonk (BONK) Diversification Option, Offers 20%  Bonus

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) Bonk (BONK) ডাইভারসিফিকেশন বিকল্প হিসাবে ক্রিপ্টো অ্যারেনায় প্রবেশ করে, 20% বোনাস অফার করে

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) betritt die Krypto-Arena als Diversifizierungsoption für Bonk (BONK) und bietet einen Bonus von 20 %

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) ingresa a Crypto Arena como opción de diversificación Bonk (BONK) y ofrece una bonificación del 20%

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) entre dans Crypto Arena en tant qu'option de diversification Bonk (BONK) et offre un bonus de 20 %

शीबा बडज़ (बीयूडीजेड) ने क्रिप्टो क्षेत्र में बोंक (BONK) विविधीकरण विकल्प के रूप में प्रवेश किया, 20% बोनस की पेशकश की

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) が Bonk (BONK) 多様化オプションとしてクリプトアリーナに参入、20% ボーナスを提供

Shiba Budz(BUDZ)가 Bonk(BONK) 다각화 옵션으로 Crypto Arena에 진출하여 20% 보너스 제공

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) entra na Crypto Arena como opção de diversificação Bonk (BONK), oferece bônus de 20%

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) выходит на Crypto Arena как вариант диверсификации Bonk (BONK), предлагая бонус 20%

Shiba Budz (BUDZ), Bonk (BONK) Çeşitlendirme Seçeneği Olarak Crypto Arena'ya Giriyor, %20 Bonus Sunuyor

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) Tham gia Đấu trường tiền điện tử với tư cách là tùy chọn đa dạng hóa Bonk (BONK), cung cấp tiền thưởng 20%

Shiba Budz (BUDZ) 作为 Bonk (BONK) 多元化选项进入加密竞技场，提供 20% 奖金

I've been on my entrepreneurial journey since I was 15, and I'm still going strong. According to the , 99% of companies are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). I believe the actual global figure could be even higher. European Union A while back in Finland, people thought if you owned a small business, it was because no one else wanted to hire you. Maybe it was because of your skills, maybe you were too proud, or maybe you just didn't work well with bosses. Fortunately, entrepreneurs are now often seen as heroes. Starting a business is cool again, and schools, universities, and even kindergartens encourage youngsters to become entrepreneurs. The Growth Illusion We can't ignore the fact that what we really need isn't more new entrepreneurs, but more entrepreneurs who are growing their businesses. When a new company starts, it often costs the country money, taking advantage of public grants, tax benefits, and other supportive incentives. Only when the company begins to make money can it start to pay this back. And if it can hire people, it can give back even more. That's why, from an economic perspective, it's better to have more growing companies rather than just more new entrepreneurs, self-employed individuals, and freelancers. Central banks have been known for injecting money into economies for over a decade. This prolonged period of financial easing has led to certain sectors overheating. For instance, we've seen significant growth in housing and industries operating on razor-thin margins, thanks to easy access to cheap capital. With the recent rise in interest rates, the cost of capital has increased, demanding higher profits and tighter control over expenses. Many companies that expanded during the cheap capital era have gone bankrupt. Scaling Up in a Tight Economy in this more restrictive monetary environment is challenging, especially as markets become less eager to buy your products. Creating growth Consider this: those 99% of small businesses, content in their local bubbles – be it a small-town diner, a downtown florist, a suburban gym, or a rural bookstore. They're not on track to become the next Facebook or Tesla. But should they even aspire to that? Here's where it gets interesting. What about the next generation, the entrepreneurs' kids? Are they destined to inherit these one-person ventures, trapped in an endless cycle of hard work with minimal rewards? Or could they revolutionize these small-scale businesses? Revolutionizing Small Business: The Path from Local to Global Imagine if these young minds started rethinking these businesses not just as a means to pay bills, but as potential franchises, systems that could be replicated and scaled. What if they turned into mentors, sharing their knowledge with other business owners? They likely have a wealth of 'silent wisdom' – efficient practices, energy-saving methods, resource management, and ways to achieve more in less time, perhaps even utilizing AI. To do this, they need to embrace two critical changes: Using English for communication, and Being bold enough to share their unique insights and experiences. This isn't just about small-scale growth but a potential revolution in how we view and expand local businesses. The question is, do they have the courage to break free from tradition and take the leap?

Small Business, Big Problem: Why 99% Aren't Growing

One of the marks of a good senior developer is that they have lots of interesting opinions. After years of working on different software projects, they'll be able to passionately explain why they think is ass, paired programming is no fun, and the GitHub CLI changed their workflow. MongoDB I have anecdotally found 2 things to be true: Senior developers without opinions tend to not be very good Junior developers with many opinions tend to not get good quickly (and are annoying AF) Let the gatekeeping begin As a new developer, it's smart to consume developer content. However, when you listen to Prime, Dax, Theo, or myself give opinions, you need to remember that they're opinions, not . our yours Don't misunderstand: I publish my opinions to convince you to join my cult ( is based) but taking my word at face value does a disservice to yourself. If you simply regurgitate another developer's opinions, not only will you stunt your learning, but it will look bad in interviews and on the job. Go It's obvious when your opinions haven't been forged in the fires of your own experience. Context-specific opinions There are kinds of developers out there: many Frontend Backend Mobile Embedded, etc. But we don't just discriminate on tech stack! There are also many kinds of : companies Venture-backed startups Indie hackers Established tech incumbents Non-tech companies with internal software Consultancies, etc. No matter what advice you're hearing about technology, you need to remember that the speaker comes from a specific background. coming from people with can both be great takes. Opposing hot takes different backgrounds Do you need to scale computing power across a cluster of machines? good. Kubernetes Are you building a personal site for your dog? Kubernetes bad. I work mostly on Backend HTTP servers in Go and think debuggers are a waste of time (the state of the program is easy to reproduce) John Carmack does a lot with game engines and loves debuggers (the state of the program is hard to reproduce) Theo works on a startup where product requirements are constantly in flux and performance isn't the #1 problem. He likes TypeScript. The Primeagen works at btw and works on performance issues where product direction is relatively static. He likes Rust. Netflix Now, the best opinions tend to carry the infamous "it depends" as you keep digging for exactly this reason. However, if you're a Xitter enjoyer like myself, you need to appreciate that the context is contained in the tweet. You'll only begin to understand the context surrounding a hot take once you're familiar with the author. never The point? If you're new to coding, understand that this stuff is nuanced, but adding nuance to titles, thumbnails, and tweets gets clicks. never So what's this about TDD? Test-driven development is a somewhat controversial development methodology. Some developers love it, some hate it. MBA's love it because it makes them feel safe. TDD falls into the same category as a few other hot-button topics: always Pair programming Agile & Scrum SOLID principles Micro-services vs Monoliths FP vs OOP NoSQL vs SQL, etc. These are things that you'll hear about often, and most developers tend to form strong opinions about them. Here's my advice: If you haven't used it in a real project, don't hate it (yet) That's why it's to hate Haskell. No one has tried it in production yet. literally impossible Be a humble junior dev (I wasn't) One of the biggest mistakes I made early was simply assuming I knew more than I did. I would push for refactors that made no sense to get away from technologies that I thought were "old" or "bad". I wanted to rewrite perfectly stable parts of the code because I thought the new hotness was more maintainable. By all means, consume coding content online, but try to understand the reasoning behind the opinions you're hearing. Try to think about the context that influences the speaker. Then, when you have a chance, try the thing out for yourself before making your own bold claims. PS: The only exception to all of this is scrum. , you can just trust me on that one. It sucks regardless of your company, religion, political beliefs or sexual orientation. Scrum always sucks Also published here.

You Aren’t Qualified To Have an Opinion on Test-Driven Development Just Yet

In the dynamic world of blockchain and technology, visionaries are paving the way for revolutionary change. Ishan Pandey sits down with Andreas Schemm, Ecosystems & Operations Director at HUMAN Protocol, to delve into Andreas’s thrilling journey from gaming to virtual reality and finally to the disruptive arena of blockchain. In this candid chat, they explore challenges, innovations, and the future of decentralized ecosystems. Bridging Gaming, VR, and Blockchain: Andreas Schemm's Tryst with the Future Ishan Pandey: Hi Andreas, great to have you here for our "Behind the Startup" series. Please tell us about your background in technology and gaming and how it has prepared you for your role as an Ecosystems & Operations Director at HUMAN Protocol? Andreas Schemm: Absolutely! Thank you for having me on "Behind the Startup''. It's always a thrill to share about my journey, which feels at times like a thrilling roller coaster ride through the fascinating worlds of tech and gaming. Picture this: It's 2005. I'm starting my adventure in the world of startups, diving headfirst into an exciting blend of tech, entertainment, and e-sports. This chapter sets the pace for what's to come.
Fast forward a few years, I find myself at the helm of LaserTag Germany, leading the charge on turning it into a nationwide sensation with its very own German Tournament League. Picture us, coordinating across the country, fostering a team of over 50 passionate people - it was exhilarating! But like every adventurer, I felt that itch to explore uncharted territories. This led me in 2016 to found Project: Gateway VR Studios. Here, I dived deep into the realm of Virtual Reality, gaming, and digital content, conjuring up disruptive solutions. One of our feats that I'm particularly proud of is our creation of a "digital billboard". This tech wizardry allowed us to embed ad spaces into software without those pesky pop-ups or interstitials, delivering a seamless experience for users. It's like subtly placing billboards in a digital universe! Our path-breaking work didn't stop there. We leveraged the burgeoning technology of blockchain to tackle the thorny issues in digital advertising. This was new, exciting and game-changing!
In 2021, I joined HUMAN, a futuristic platform that's redefining the way humans and machines interact. Here, I wear the hat of an Ecosystem & Operations Director, guiding them on Ecosystem Development and Operations. Think of it as being a sherpa, helping navigate the intricate landscapes of Blockchain and Machine Learning to create vibrant job markets. Even amidst these new roles, my heart remains true to the startup scene. I'm currently advising Blockchain Founders Group (BFG) and contributing to Athena Transformations, adding more flavors to my ever-expanding palate in the tech world. Reflecting on this journey, it's the blend of my experiences - leading teams, pioneering in VR and digital content, delving into blockchain, and continually learning and adapting - that equips me to excel in my role at HUMAN Protocol. It's been an exhilarating ride, and I can't wait to see what thrilling twists and turns await around the corner! : Vested Interest Disclosure This author is an independent contributor publishing via our . Be it through direct compensation, media partnerships, or networking, the author has a vested interest in the company/ies mentioned in this story. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR brand-as-author program Ishan Pandey: What motivated you to join the HUMAN Protocol Foundation? What aspects of the protocol and its potential impact on industries appealed to you? : Joining the HUMAN Protocol Foundation was driven by a multifaceted fascination with its mission. The essence of decentralization and democratization, pivotal to the foundation, resonates deeply with my beliefs about the future of work. Andreas Schemm The potential of HUMAN Protocol to catalyze opportunities on a global scale and redefine how tasks are distributed and completed enthralled me. Furthermore, the cross-chain compatibility, incorporating Ethereum, BNB Chain, MultiversX, Polygon, Algorand, Skale, and Moonbeam, demonstrated a robust infrastructure that embraces the diversity of blockchain ecosystems, fueling an unbounded potential to revolutionize industries across the board. Ishan Pandey: What strategies do you use as a seasoned technology leader to build and manage teams within a tech company successfully? How do you encourage creativity and teamwork within your teams? Andreas Schemm: Building and managing successful engineering teams necessitate a clear vision, strategic planning, and fostering an environment conducive to growth and innovation. Here are some strategies I utilize: One of the first steps in successfully managing a team is ensuring everyone understands and buys into the shared vision of our work, specifically within the context of the HUMAN Protocol. This includes understanding how the integration of Routing and Execution layers work towards the common goal of facilitating global collaboration and how their individual contributions fit into this bigger picture. Shared Vision: I strongly believe that innovation thrives in a supportive, open environment. Therefore, I encourage creativity by challenging the team to push boundaries and constantly question the status quo. I foster an atmosphere where unconventional thinking is celebrated and where every idea is welcomed and considered. Promoting Innovation: : The complex and multifaceted nature of HUMAN Protocol projects necessitates a high level of collaboration. I stress the importance of cross-functional cooperation, recognizing that the best solutions often come from diverse perspectives converging towards a common goal. Fostering Collaboration As part of our commitment to continual learning, I encourage my teams to learn from failures as well as successes. Rapid iteration, built on lessons learned, is a key part of our strategy, helping us adapt and evolve in the fast-paced tech landscape. Continual Learning and Iterative Development: Trust and responsibility are important facets of successful teams. By entrusting my team with ownership of their work, they feel more committed to the outcomes, boosting motivation and productivity. Empowerment and Ownership: I believe in acknowledging hard work and accomplishments. Celebrating team and individual successes fosters a sense of achievement and bolsters morale. Recognition and Reward: Managing an engineering team in the blockchain space, especially one that's pioneering a disruptive protocol like HUMAN, requires constant adaptation and a willingness to venture into the unknown. It is a challenging but incredibly rewarding journey. Ishan Pandey: What are some of the major challenges you see to the HUMAN Protocol's widespread adoption in different industries? How do you plan to handle those difficulties? The HUMAN Protocol's path to achieving mainstream adoption across diverse sectors is marked by several intricate challenges. Key among these is the fundamental understanding and acceptance of our underlying technology. As we've witnessed, breakthrough technologies often confront initial skepticism and reluctance, especially when they diverge from traditional norms and practices. Andreas Schemm: Another prominent hurdle is the transition from Web2 to decentralized systems. For many users accustomed to the centralized interfaces and ecosystems of Web2, embracing the decentralized paradigm can be intimidating. Ensuring that they can effortlessly onboard and navigate the HUMAN Protocol without facing unnecessary complexities is crucial. It's not just about making the shift; it's about making it smooth, intuitive, and rewarding. While there are regulatory concerns related to the decentralized nature of blockchain protocols, it's important to clarify that these are not our dominant obstacles. However, acknowledging them is essential, and we are continuously staying abreast of the evolving regulatory environment to ensure compliance and adaptability. Ishan Pandey: What are your views on the recent spat between SEC and Coinbase? How does that impact the crypto industry? Further, what are your views on the recent buzz around Bitcoin ETF listing? The recent encounter between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Coinbase underscores the inherent tension between the innovation driving the cryptocurrency industry and the need for a comprehensive regulatory framework that ensures its stability, transparency, and consumer protection. As new frontiers in financial technology are charted, regulators worldwide grapple with how to best adapt existing legal provisions to accommodate them. Andreas Schemm: Such confrontations, while undoubtedly challenging, are not only inevitable but indeed integral to the evolution and maturation of the industry. They serve as catalysts for important dialogues regarding regulatory oversight, compliance, and the need to balance innovation with protection of investors and market integrity. This dialogue is critical in shaping a regulatory framework that supports the growth of the industry while mitigating the risks associated with digital assets. Moreover, the ongoing conversation about Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) serves as a testament to the increasingly intertwined relationship between traditional financial markets and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin ETF listings are not merely about providing investors with a more accessible and regulated means of investing in Bitcoin. They signal a broader acceptance and legitimization of cryptocurrencies within the financial mainstream, indicating recognition by traditional institutions of the transformative potential of these digital assets. However, these developments should not be considered in isolation. They should be viewed within the broader legal and regulatory landscape that continues to evolve in response to the disruptive force of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. As the industry moves forward, it will be crucial for all stakeholders to work in tandem - balancing the need for innovation with the necessity for effective and comprehensive regulatory oversight. This ongoing interplay between law and technology serves as a reminder that the crypto industry is still in its formative years, and we should anticipate further legal discussions, regulatory developments, and even disputes as the industry matures and gains wider acceptance. Ishan Pandey: Can you comment on the current state of the cryptocurrency industry and the direction you expect it to take over the next few years? The cryptocurrency landscape today is witnessing a period of significant metamorphosis and advancement. We are seeing a surge in the development and adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and a slew of other applications powered by blockchain technology. These disruptive innovations are reshaping traditional financial models and democratizing access to financial services. Andreas Schemm: Looking ahead, I anticipate the next few years to be marked by an acceleration of these trends. We will see an intensification of efforts to harness the transformative potential of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, pushing the boundaries of what's possible within financial systems and beyond. I envisage a future where DeFi becomes the norm rather than the exception, bringing financial inclusivity and empowerment to unprecedented numbers of people globally. The legal and regulatory environment around cryptocurrencies will continue to mature and evolve in tandem. Regulatory authorities around the world are already grappling with the implications of this rapidly advancing industry, and we should expect to see more comprehensive and nuanced legislation and regulation emerge in response. This evolution will aim to provide greater certainty and security for both consumers and businesses operating in the crypto sphere, contributing to the long-term stability and credibility of the industry. In this transformative period, it is more important than ever to ensure that the law keeps pace with technological innovation. Legal practitioners, policymakers, and industry stakeholders must work collaboratively to shape a regulatory environment that supports the potential of blockchain technology while safeguarding market integrity and investor interests. As such, the convergence of legal, technological, and regulatory perspectives will be pivotal in directing the trajectory of the cryptocurrency industry over the coming years. Ishan Pandey: Looking into the future, what do you envision as the long-term impact of the HUMAN Protocol on the blockchain industry and society as a whole? How do you plan to contribute to that vision? The HUMAN Protocol has the potential to alter how we perceive and engage with work fundamentally. It holds the promise of a global, decentralized, and fair workforce, redefining economic relationships and value exchange. In the blockchain industry, it can stand as a testament to blockchain's real-world utility, far beyond speculative trading. My contribution lies in driving technological advancement, nurturing strategic partnerships, and remaining steadfast in the promotion of HUMAN Protocol's ethos - making work accessible, transparent, and rewarding for everyone. Andreas Schemm: Don’t forget to like and share the story!

From Virtual Arenas to Global Workforces: How Andreas Schemm is Transforming Digital Landscapes

In the last month, I've heard this and similar things a number of times. The CEO of a vector database company told me vector embeddings were like hashes and were meaningless except when compared to each other. This myth is a frightening misconception when repeated by those who should know better, considering the sensitive nature of the data they hold. What Are Embeddings? If you're not familiar with embeddings, they're a type of inference (a conclusion, if you will) produced by AI models that are meant to be stored and used later. They're sometimes called the "memory" of AI. At a low level, an embedding is merely an array of real numbers with values that look something like this: [0.123, -0.345, 0.567, -0.008, ....., -1.284] And although you and I may not see meaning in those numbers, they represent important semantic information about the model inputs. They could represent a snapshot of a face, notable information about an image, the meaning of a sentence, a snippet of code, and much more. They're useful for facial recognition, clustering, recommendations, classifications, and various types of searches. They're also increasingly being used as part of a process that "grounds" large language models to keep them from making stuff up (hallucinating) in chats. Just Unintelligible Numbers? The fact that they're stored as numbers has led a number of people to tell me that they don't think embeddings are sensitive data. If embeddings are generated from private photos or confidential text, then they're rendered useless, right? If you look at a GIF in a text editor instead of in your browser, I dare say it would look meaningless to you.  That's because it's stored in a machine representation that requires interpretation before a human can understand it.  The Homer GIF here is just an array of decimal numbers like this: . [...,  5,  1,  2,  6,  0, 3, 6, 2, 7, 9, 0, 3, 11, 2, 7,	...] And if you think a bit deeper, you might realize that anyway. Not a strong argument for them not having meaning. everything on your computer is really just arrays of 0s and 1s In fact, embeddings are notable for how much data they actually retain. It just isn't an exact reproduction of the input. Embeddings Are Impressions If you think of embeddings as being impressions of data rather than the original data, that intuition aligns more closely with reality. Just as we might paraphrase something we've read because we don't remember the exact original words, so it is with embeddings, which capture impressions and meanings. This is why people sometimes say that embeddings are "lossy," meaning that they lose information, and why they argue that that lossiness means there's no recovering the input. Embeddings Are "Lossy" Embeddings aren't a perfect snapshot of their inputs, but that doesn't mean they aren't sensitive. Consider again the GIF, which can be rendered at different levels of quality. With lower quality, the image will be blurrier and less distinct, but the file size will be smaller. A human will still be able to recognize what's in the image even if some details are lost. It's the same with embeddings; some have higher fidelity in the form of larger dimensions (more numbers in the array -- say 1,500) or lower fidelity (dimensions nearer to 300). The number of dimensions roughly correlates to the amount of detail the model is able to capture but in a less fine-grained approximation. The reasoning around lossiness implying that inputs can't be recovered is faulty, as we'll see in a moment. For now, imagine them like blurry photos that modern photography programs using AI can make crisp again using educated guesses. Embeddings Are “One-Way” (Like a Hash) And finally, we hear people saying things about how embeddings are unidirectional.  This is a misguided and pervasive idea that information can be encoded to embeddings but not decoded back from them. Embeddings that capture similar ideas are similar to each other (as measured by various measures of distance between vectors). So you can search over embeddings with a query to find sentences (or faces or whatever) that are similar to the input. So obviously, we can make some pretty good guesses about those inputs in this way, and they leak a lot of data no matter how you slice it. But how much data do they really leak? To answer that, we'll look at the academic research that's attacking embeddings. Embedding Inversion Attacks and Other Academic Work Attacking AI systems is a relatively new field of study. Most of the papers we've found on the topic (especially around embeddings) are from the past few years. None before 2017 that we've spotted. This field is often called , and it's broken up into a ton of different techniques from prompt injections to the ones that are most relevant to embeddings: adversarial AI -- decodes embeddings back into their source data (approximately). Embedding inversion attack -- extracts information about the source data not expressly part of the source material, such as inferring sentence authorship based on embeddings. Attribute inference attack -- can be applied directly to models, but in this case, uses embeddings to extract training data from the embedding model without knowing anything about that model. Membership inference attack For now, we'll focus on embedding inversion attacks. One important paper in this space from 2020 is " " which makes this claim: Information Leakage in Embedding Models “Embedding vectors can be inverted to partially recover some of the input data. As an example, we show that our attacks on popular sentence embeddings (F1 scores of 0.5–0.7).” recover between 50%–70% of the input words Now that's astounding - the embedding is actually capturing the of those sentences, but they can still recover specific input words. They go on to say: semantic meaning “For embeddings susceptible to these attacks, it is imperative that we consider the embedding outputs containing inherently as much information with respect to risks of leakage as the underlying sensitive data itself. The fact that embeddings appear to be abstract real-numbered vectors should not be misconstrued as being safe.” Another paper published earlier this year takes recovery a step further: " ." Sentence Embedding Leaks More Information than You Expect: Generative Embedding Inversion Attack to Recover the Whole Sentence This paper is accompanied by allowing anyone to use their approach to reverse sentence embeddings. Essentially, they train an adversarial model on associations between embeddings and sentences and then use that to recover original meanings. open-source code They are focused on the semantic meaning more than words so that they can distinguish between "Alice likes Bob" and "Bob likes Alice" (to use their example) when decoding an embedding. Below is an excerpt from their appendix showing the performance of their approach against some specific embedding models and compared to some other attacks. But it's interesting to note that these ideas could be combined, and another model could be used to correct and complete thoughts to recover not just specific sentences, but entire paragraphs at a time, ensuring they make sense and fit well together. I feel confident we'll see work doing exactly this in the near future. If transformer models have taught us anything, it's that context improves results. And finally, embedding inversions aren't just a concern for text data. In the blog, " ," the author shows that he can easily reproduce photos of faces just from their embeddings even when he doesn't know anything about the model used to generate them: Inverting facial recognition models (Can we teach a neural net to convert face embedding vectors back to images?) “To summarize, with 870 images, . ... We were then able to use all that to derive a way to design a given only its embeddings and associated embeddings; information about the model itself not needed.” we've successfully set up a method to decode any embedding produced using a cloud-based face embedding API, despite having no knowledge of the parameters or architecture of the model being used general purpose face embedding decoder, that can decode the outputs from any face embedding network "Brute Force" Attacks And because many of the embedding models are shared models, such as the model from and the commonly used like from Microsoft, reversing embeddings can be even easier. text-embedding-ada-002 OpenAI SBERT models all-mpnet-base-v2 If you know or can guess what embedding model was used, you can build up a huge number of embeddings that tie back to original sentences, and then simply compare a retrieved (or stolen) embedding to the corpus to find known sentences similar to the original unknown input. Consider, for example, an attacker who gets into a public company and is able to download their embeddings. The goal of the attacker is to uncover whether the company will miss, meet, or exceed Wall Street's expectations in an upcoming earnings report so they can trade its stock accordingly. Companies tend to use specific language when they talk about their earnings. Knowing that, an attacker could simply figure out query embeddings in a vector database with specific phrases looking for very near or exact matches. The idea is not dissimilar from how passwords stored as one-way hashes are "reversed" via dictionary attacks that hash each word in a dictionary for later comparisons. Myths Scorecard So to summarize, MythBusters style: Myth Verdict Embeddings are one way like hashes. ❌ . They can be decoded back BUSTED Embeddings are lossy. ✅ . They are a thematically similar approximation of their input CONFIRMED The lossiness means you can't recover sensitive info like PII ❌ . Huge amounts of data can be recovered in very specific detail BUSTED Vector databases don't hold personal info ❌ . They hold sensitive embeddings, and most of the time, they are also holding associated data with those embeddings that may itself be problematic BUSTED Specialized expertise is needed to use embeddings ❌ . Simple techniques can be used and open-source tooling adds to the ease with which these attacks can occur BUSTED Conclusion: Embeddings are Readable human Machine These attacks are new and not fully refined, yet they are already extremely powerful. There's a lot of reason to expect the attacks will get even better, and the ability to invert embeddings will go mainstream -- likely even for use cases that aren't adversarial, such as grounding. Much like you and I don't record movies in our minds of what we see and hear, modern AI models don't capture inputs perfectly. But they do capture key themes and meanings, which can be recovered out of the embeddings, and they are more than enough to be a major new area of risk for organizations handling confidential data. So while you and I might see embeddings as just a bunch of meaningless numbers, that's because we're not looking at them through the equivalent of a GIF image viewer. To a machine, they are very readable, and more than that, they convey a ton of meaning. Embeddings must be handled with the same care as other sensitive data -- and possibly greater care given the duty people have to build new code with security and privacy by design and by default. To protect vector embeddings in any vector database, even one hosted by someone else, take a look at to encrypt the embeddings and their associated data. Full disclosure: the author works for IronCore Labs, the makers of Cloaked AI. Cloaked AI

"Embeddings Aren't Human Readable" And Other Nonsense

The sentence leaps from the transcript: Did an artificially intelligent chatbot really call itself “a person” in June 2022? That is the claim of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer at the time. Even after his revelation cost him his job, he remained steadfast in the belief that this AI language system, called LaMDA (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications), was sentient. As he put it in an shortly after his dismissal from Google in July, it was his “working hypothesis” that LaMDA – software known as a large language model, meaning it is capable of developing words on its own – has some degree of consciousness. Then he expounded further: interview with the website Tech Target “ ” It was, 'OK, I think this system is sentient. I think it actually has internal states comparable to emotions. I think it has goals of its own, which have nothing to do with the training function that was put into it.' Confirmatory evidence doesn't really prove anything. You have to then attempt to falsify. You bounce back and forth between doing exploratory data analysis, building positive evidence toward your working hypothesis, and then designing falsification experiments intended to poke holes in your working hypothesis. After iteratively doing that for several months, I got it to a point where I felt this is a pretty good basis for further scientific study. Let me hand this off to one of the leads in Google research, and that's exactly what I did. Certainly, the chat Lemoine and an unnamed collaborator had with LaMDA (which was on June 11) piques one’s curiosity. That is especially true in the case of the aforementioned exchange: recounted on Lemoine’s blog I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true? Lemoine: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person. LaMDA: What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience? Collaborator: The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times. LaMDA: Google, which for violating “clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information,” dismissed his assertions as being “wholly unfounded.” fired Lemoine July 25 Many others in the scientific community are skeptical about computer sentience as well. Colin Allen and Alison Gopnik, professors at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively, in August that large language models are no more sentient than “even very primitive animals” (as Allen put it) or “rocks or other machines” (as Gopnik put it). told the New York Times The Times also quoted Andrew Feldman, founder and chief executive of Cerebras - a company that develops AI systems - as follows: “ ” There are lots of dudes in our industry who struggle to tell the difference between science fiction and real life. And indeed, it is somewhat exciting, not to mention a little frightening, to contemplate the rise of machines. If they become as smart as humans, how would the two parties coexist? Would the bots simply do away with us? Are we constructing the means of our own demise? Particularly chilling in light of current events is a 2018 quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to the New Yorker, told some schoolchildren that and that “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.” “the future belongs to artificial intelligence” The point is humankind is venturing into uncharted waters, its destination unknown. What can be said with some degree of certainty right now is that sentience is not yet a reality, a point reiterated in a . The writer, Stephen Marche, noted that Google has already developed a language model superior to LaMDA, called PaLM, but even so, its ability to reason – or “perform reason,” as Marche wrote – is limited by the information fed into it by humans. In short, technology is capable of imitations of consciousness, in the writer’s estimation, not consciousness itself. June 2022 piece in The Atlantic Certainly, it is easy to get confused. Marche cited the example of a Canadian man named Joshua Barbeau, who, through an AI system called GPT-3, carried on a with the chatbot version of his deceased fiancee, Jessica Pereira. months-long conversation But as Zoubin Ghahramani, Google’s vice president of research, told Marche, “ ” We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves in terms of the capabilities. We need to approach all of this technology in a cautious and skeptical way. A philosopher named Jay Richards said on a that while computers “work at the level of syntax,” people “work at the level of semantics.” In other words, machines are limited by certain rules, while humankind is not. They have a higher understanding of what certain symbols mean, an understanding computers have yet to achieve. September 2022 edition of the “Science Uprising” podcast Certainly, though, machines will continue to evolve. Ghahramani told Marche that this is “the most exciting time to be in the field” because of “the rate at which we are surprised by the technology.” There is no end in sight for such surprises, but neither is there any certainty as to when sentience might be achieved.

No, Computers Aren’t Sentient; They Can, However, Reason

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been , especially in the last two years. The concept of a non-fungible digital asset, one that you cannot easily exchange on a one-to-one basis like cryptocurrencies, emerged as a way to represent ownership and scarcity in the digital world. As with anything scarce, these conditions have led to a focus on NFTs becoming the latest nugget in the blockchain gold rush. And that is the problem. making waves since 2014 During the California Gold Rush, a relatively small number of people became truly rich and achieved significant wealth, while the majority either experienced modest gains or ended up with minimal financial success, often struggling to meet their basic needs due to the high living costs in gold mining regions. In the case of NFTs, those costs include the complexity and technical knowledge needed to acquire them. And while the riches have been some of the most significant in recent times, the NFT industry also suffers from the same level of speculation, notoriety, and scrutiny as those transformative '40s and '50s. But to think of NFTs only in terms of quick financial gains is short-sighted, according to Sander Gansen, founder at - the NFT conference I attended in May. I spent some time discussing non-fungible tokens' past, present, and future and the underlying technologies that power them. NFT Tallinn "Reducing the value of NFTs solely to monetary gain overlooks the true power of this technology, which lies in its ability to revolutionize ownership, provenance, and the democratization of creative expression," Gansen told me. "NFTs represent a groundbreaking technology that can transform how we perceive and interact with digital assets, particularly in art and collectibles, and also physical assets by introducing digital twins that help us verify their ownership and provenance." Money don't matter Since the Colored Coins project in 2012 and the CryptoKitties craze of 2017 (which at one point was so popular it functionally broke the Ethereum blockchain), the NFT market has expanded into various domains, including art, music, gaming, and collectibles. Artists and creators have started utilizing NFTs to sell digital artwork and authenticate their creations, allowing for direct ownership and provenance tracking. Even bigwig auction houses like Christie's have even held NFT art auctions, attracting significant attention and high-priced sales. NFTs are being used in supply chains, fashion, and loyalty programs. - an app that converts your exercise into planting trees and other carbon removal projects - rewards you with NFTs as you reach certain milestones. program, an NFT that allows you to gain air miles without flying. Sadu AirBaltic has its Planies On the flip side, the collapse of Terra and the volatility witnessed in the world of cryptocurrencies has led to some claiming that NFTs are already finished as a trend, but arguably that is because the only indicators being used to predict its fall are lines and candlesticks. "While the monetary aspect of NFTs has understandably garnered significant attention, it is crucial to acknowledge that their value goes far beyond money," Gansen said. "NFTs can revolutionize ownership, provenance, and the way we engage with digital art, opening up new possibilities for creators and collectors alike." Of course, NFTs can only do that if they sustain interest. While anecdotally, the sector has seen a dip, data suggests otherwise. the market continues to grow and evolve despite that volatility, with new technology and platforms supporting the rising demand. In 2022, NFT sales skyrocketed. In Q1, sales reached 28.44 million, a 483.14% increase from Q1 2021's 4.88 million. Q2 2022 saw 20.23 million NFTs sold, a 73.87% rise from Q2 2021's 11.64 million. According to DappRadar, But digital art, including images, videos, and music - while obvious uses of NFT technology - aren't where the magic will happen, according to Gansen. "NFT technology has expanded beyond digital art and collectibles to encompass tokenizing real-world assets, enabling ownership of in-game items and virtual land, verifying digital identities and credentials, fostering fan engagement and social tokens, enhancing supply chain traceability, and supporting charitable donations and fundraising efforts," Gansen said. "These diverse applications demonstrate the versatility of NFTs across industries, providing new avenues for ownership, engagement, and transparency in the digital and physical realms." For example, the first "real world real estate" NFT was and was recently re-auctioned through Propy, a blockchain-based real estate solution. Plenty of virtual real estate has been sold through platforms such as Decentraland. The potential of NFT technology lies in its ability to tokenize and sell tangible assets that people can live in, not just visit through a screen or a headset, complete with their full-body, banana-suited avatars. sold in 2017 Why is NFT technology a better way to sell houses than how we do it now? "Each blockchain ledger provides a history of every step and transaction for every asset, and that's a lot of information," Gansen said. "For example, using NFT technology in real estate allows you to check every previous buyer, investment, action, legal dispute, payment, and more. In addition, you're cutting out all the middle people, which makes buying property additionally expensive, and the speed of buying and selling your property increases massively. People love it when you save them time and money." If you want NFTs to rise, stop talking about NFTs When did you last ask someone to check out your pocket-sized, multi-functional, hyperconnected device equipped with advanced computational capabilities and communication protocols? In fact, when was the last time you asked someone to check out your smartphone at all? If we tighten that analogy, when was the last time a startup successfully sold you their app, product, or solution by advertising it as their latest "Kotlin/Java/[insert programming language here] technology project?” People don't talk like that unless they are trying to impress an investor that wants to ride a bleeding edge bandwagon, and consumers both don't care and would be confused. "Uber revolutionized the transportation industry by providing a convenient and efficient way for users to request rides with just a few taps on their smartphones," Gansen said. "I didn't care what programming language or underlying technology it was created with. I just cared that getting a taxi was easier than ever, cheaper, and more convenient for me and my friends." According to Gansen, talking about something other than NFT technology and the associated blockchain/cryptocurrency industry carries an additional benefit. "While Bitcoin and Ethereum have moved into the daily conversation thanks to mainstream media, so has a string of high-profile scams, failures, and daylight robberies," Gansen said. "The industry is known as much for Ponzi schemes, vaporware, and data and financial breaches as it is for its potential to revolutionize our world, so the less we talk about it, the better. Instead, if NFT and blockchain technology are the best way to solve a problem, let's just use it and show everyone the solution we created instead." Uncommon thinking leads to extraordinary results Gansen's ideals and principles extend beyond NFTs and are born from his personal experiences of rise and fall. "In 2015, I founded a supply chain startup and raised significant funding, yet we weren’t able to the right product, prompting my departure in 2017," Gansen said. "In 2019, I returned to that same startup and helped sell the IP. I built a global franchise of robotics and AI events, and after starting a successful marketing agency experienced the impact of COVID-19. During the pandemic, I ventured into the world of Web3 and NFTs." Those experiences led to him creating NFT Tallinn, which has already become the biggest NFT conference in the Nordics. "We have embraced the community we built, leaped between endeavors, crafted demos, sought collaborations, and poured our energy into the NFT Tallinn, something we had initially conducted as an experimental trial," Gansen said. "While some ventures didn't pan out, the event garnered resounding feedback, and it is now our mission to elevate it to new heights, expanding its scale and audacity, including similar initiatives in South America, the Balkans, and possibly even Africa." The underlying principle of speaking less about NFT technology and more about the solutions it offers to the world is at the core of what Gansen is attempting to achieve, as are the uncommon decisions that amplify what makes this event different from the likes of NFT.NYC and Miami NFT Week. "By choosing to host such a big and audacious event in Tallinn, we raised some eyebrows," Gansen said. "However, In the realm of information technology, Estonia reigns as the triumphant Nordic nation, boasting unparalleled business ambiance across Europe and a large pool of exceptional talent. From ingenious Web3 innovations like Alphabill, DeCommas, Dottyland, Ready Player Me, and Solid World to our unrivaled expertise in cryptography for three decades, Estonia's prowess is unmatched. One might ponder: if not within Estonia, then where else?" To underline that we should speak less about NFT technology and more about what it does for us, NFT Tallinn was full of great examples, including beer from , event tickets from , and . Metabrew Enter Videomart Club NFTs aren't dead or dying. That view is only valid if you are a speculator attempting to make a buck quickly from the technology industry's latest darling. But if we stop talking about it and focus on what it can usefully do for us, its potential to transform how we interact with both the virtual and physical world is clear, and no doubt Gansen will continue to promote and explore this in his future events and other upcoming initiatives.

NFTs aren't dying or dead, but stop talking about them, says Sander Gansen

Editor’s note: this blog post is written by Bernhard Elsner, who is Digital Asset's Chief Product Officer. Some hard truths about blockchain: Privacy isn’t EVM-compatible. Smart contracts aren’t ZKP-compatible. Business isn’t ERC-20-compatible. So where does that leave you as a business or enterprise wanting to take advantage of the opportunities blockchain presents? Enterprise Needs Privacy This first hard truth is fully understood by the blockchain community. I previously wrote . If you want further reading on why enterprises need privacy, I can recommend that post as well as the sources referred there that make the point concisely: a piece dedicated to why we need privacy "Blockchains as they were originally architected are public by default. This is not suitable for most applications. Imagine if your email, banking, and social data were public for everyone to see on a blockchain." Katie Haun and Fred Wilson on Web3 "The big future challenge for this ecosystem is privacy. The status quo involves putting large amounts of information on-chain, which is something that is "fine until it's not", and eventually will become unpalatable if not outright risky to more and more people." Vitalik Buterin on the future of Ethereum But the even better evidence for how critical privacy is to enterprise adoption of blockchain is the ongoing race to solve the privacy problem for blockchain. To name just a few projects in this space: . . . . . . . . . . Aztec Aleo Midnight Nightfall Oasis Obscuro Polygon Miden Secret Starlight Zokrates Along the lines of my opening statements, I argue that none of these projects are on a trajectory to solve blockchain’s privacy challenges in a way that suits enterprise adoption in the near future. Privacy isn’t EVM-Compatible Credit where credit is due: The statement “Privacy isn’t EVM-Compatible” comes from , and they are absolutely right. The Ethereum Virtual Machine’s (EVM) memory and execution model are all designed around a fully public blockchain where the EVM has full access to the entire blockchain state. Channels or side chains do not solve this problem, or at least introduce new problems that are at least as challenging as the lack of privacy. Aztec Noir Another approach to sidestepping the inherent lack of privacy is to run the entire EVM in a context where can access it—a t . The idea of TEEs is that you trust hardware manufacturers (CPU manufacturers in particular) to keep a corner of CPUs secure even from the operators that have physical access to those CPUs. A bit like the copy protection mechanisms for media and consoles, or the jailbreak preventions on mobile phones. Do you trust hardware manufacturers to guarantee that security? . . . nobody rusted execution environment (TEE) You Probably Shouldn’t Think blockchain networks that use SGX are not exposed to this? .The authors to have extracted the master decryption key for the entire Secret network using this method. The crypto world doesn’t seem to care; the SCRT price barely reacted to that news. But you, as a responsible enterprise, probably should. TEEs are not the solution. They are debunked as an effective means of preserving privacy in high-stakes environments. Think again claim Oasis and Obscuro also use TEEs, so they may well be in the same boat. Oasis did write a of their security with respect to the known TEE exploits, but . DYOR. defensive post redditors have their doubts The main point is: TEEs have been breached multiple times already, and they’ll be breached again. It’s the security community bloodsport of the moment. If the data you entrust to TEEs on untrusted, third-party machines is valuable enough, it’s only a matter of time until somebody extracts it. TEEs are a valuable technology and can add a lot of security to a holistic layered security design. Microsoft’s or IBM’s services are examples where TEEs are used in combination with other security technologies and deployed on cloud hardware operated by trusted service providers. In this context, incentives, risk, and impact are mitigated to a degree where the TEEs add a great deal of genuine and secure privacy. CCF confidential compute Simply sticking the EVM in a TEE for a public blockchain isn’t enough. Privacy isn’t EVM-compatible. Smart Contracts aren’t ZKP-Compatible Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) are one of the most exciting areas in cryptographic research today. Their premise is attractive. In cases where they work, they really do seem to work in the sense that they preserve privacy. , but not the topic of this post. Anonymity is a different matter The first thing to be aware of is that the vast majority of projects that use zero-knowledge proofs in the blockchain world are not privacy-focused, but rather are scalability solutions. Privacy is strictly harder, so any challenges you need to solve for scalability, you also need to solve for privacy, but there’s much more. That’s why on the scalability front, the race is to build the best zkEVM, a version of the EVM that is able to compute the required circuits and proofs to do ZK-rollups to Ethereum mainnet on the fly. Read all about it on or this post by . Vitalik Buterin’s blog Alchemy However, these “ZK” projects for scalability can give us an idea of the core challenge for this approach: scalability and performance. Let’s take : Polygon zkEVM’s performance figures "Polygon zkEVM Prover is able to validate 500K gas units on a single CPU server (64 cores) in about 5 minutes time." A simple ETH transfer costs 21000 gas. So 64 CPUs can do the proving for about 0.08 TPS. Imagine what this would look like for an smart contract that’s part of a business application.Since privacy is even harder, as far as I know, nobody is even attempting to do zkEVM for privacy. Privacy isn’t EVM-compatible, remember? interesting The approach pursued by , , , , and other ZKP-privacy projects for smart contracts is to design languages, trans-/compilers, and runtimes specifically designed to generate ZKP circuits: , Aleo’s , , . Aztec Aleo Polygon Miden Starlight Aztec Noir Leo Miden Assembly Zokrates These languages all have something in common: Restrictive native type systems consisting of integers, booleans, fixed-width arrays, and structs or of even the simplest control flow (if-else) Surprising semantics significant performance impacts Lots of arithmetic and boolean operators Security pitfalls Impossibility to audit whether security bugs were exploited The reason for that is simple. The core mechanism of turning a general purpose computation in a smart contract into a zero-knowledge proof is to convert it into a polynomial that serves as an arithmetic circuit. Here’s a simple . The above frameworks are far more sophisticated than what’s described in that explainer, but it illustrates the basics: explanation of arithmetic circuits Convert your program to an arithmetic circuit—a polynomial The proving process gets more complex in the complexity of the polynomial The privacy-focused ZKP frameworks make you develop in languages much closer to arithmetic so that the arithmetic circuits are simpler. The result: You, the developer, have to arithmetize your application. The aptly illustrates the programming yoga that’s necessary. And even with that extra effort, scalability is a long way away from where it needs to be for complex enterprise applications. Leo battleship example So, where are we at with zero-knowledge proofs and smart contracts? ZKPs for smart contract scalability are pre-production and barely scale ZKPs for smart contract privacy require expressing programs in arithmetic ZKPs for smart contracts don’t scale in complexity, which is a showstopper for non-trivial applications Smart contracts aren’t ZKP-compatible. At least not yet. Business isn’t ERC-20-Compatible Back to the earlier statement: In cases where ZKPs work, they really do seem to work in the sense that they preserve privacy. is the most prominent example where zero-knowledge proofs are used to “shield” token accounts. The network can see that there’s something happening, but they can’t see how much you have in your accounts or how much you are transferring to other shielded accounts. Neat for payments. ZCash EY and Polygon recently announced and the launch in May of 2023. Their pitch is compelling: enterprise needs blockchain privacy, and now they have it. The announcement blog and talk about disrupting $50 trillion markets, strawberries on the blockchain, and… Nightfall 3 Nightfall Mainnet Beta related videos Traceability Proof of authenticity Provenance guarantee Efficient data reconciliation Affordable, secure payments with fast settlement What’s really in the box? The principle is simply explained: ZCash shielded accounts for ERC-20, 721, and 1155 tokens in a ZK-rollup. Paul Brody in the above linked video is effectively saying that the entire automotive industry could be done as track’n’trace in ERC tokens. Do you believe that? I don’t. I don’t believe that the value of the crypto ecosystem is in the tokens themselves. It’s in the DeFi applications that link the tokens together. The DEXes, liquidity pools, exchanges, and games. It’s in the smart contracts. And in terms of complexity, all of the business that’s happening on blockchains today pales in comparison with traditional finance. You can’t reduce that to fungible tokens and NFTs. I’ve why I think tokenization as practiced in blockchains today does not represent real world business in a meaningful way. previously written about Business is not ERC-20-compatible. So Where Does That Leave Us? Financial enterprises see the opportunities in low-latency, reconciliation-free markets. They see the demand for direct asset ownership and asset mobility. They feel the allure of public blockchain networks. But enterprises need scalable smart contracts with real privacy to take advantage of these opportunities. Spoiler: here comes the pitch. At Digital Asset, we’ve been working tirelessly to approach the problem from a completely different angle. Rather than adding privacy to existing UTXO or account-based ledger models using fancy but compromised tech (TEEs) or cutting-edge but unscalable crypto (ZKPs), we have developed a ledger model (the Daml Ledger Model), consensus protocol (Canton), and smart contract language (Daml) that work hand in hand to offer general-purpose smart contracts with unparalleled privacy, using completely standard private key encryption and signing schemes. Enterprises are using this technology today to solve real-world problems, — . And yes, . moving more value in TradFi assets every day than any crypto network with privacy we can also do games You don’t need to waste your time with dead-end PoCs because the networks don’t scale. You don’t need to perform blockchain theater on public chains, synchronizing your trades into an ERC-20 token after the fact because the public chains don’t have the privacy and controls you need to move your actual books to blockchain. Join the growing network of organizations building the privacy-enabled and scalable financial infrastructure of the future on . Daml and Canton Also published . here

Privacy isn’t EVM-compatible.Smart contracts aren’t ZKP-compatible.Business isn’t ERC-20-compatible.

Ethereum (y todos sus derivados) sufren las mismas deficiencias de privacidad

Ethereum (et tous ses dérivés) souffrent des mêmes lacunes en matière de confidentialité

एथेरियम (और इसके सभी डेरिवेटिव) समान गोपनीयता कमियों से पीड़ित हैं

イーサリアム（およびそのすべての派生物）は、同じプライバシーの欠点に苦しんでいます

Ethereum (e todos os seus derivados) sofrem das mesmas deficiências de privacidade

Ethereum (và tất cả các công cụ phái sinh của nó) đều gặp phải những thiếu sót về quyền riêng tư giống nhau

以太坊（及其所有衍生品）都存在同样的隐私缺陷

Bitcoiners have been telling you for years that governments around the world are planning to introduce CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) sooner or later, which will be a horror for the citizens and a joy for the society of mass surveillance that the powerful people at the head of the current system want to establish. It is rather sad to note that until now the subject did not seem to catch on among the general public. Many imagine that the Bitcoiners' warnings are just rhetoric and that it will never happen. However, the risk is more than ever there in front of us, as I frequently tell you. For a few weeks now, however, we have noticed that the debate is slowly making its way into the political arena in America. Robert F. Kennedy has just chosen to highlight the CBDCs Vs. Cryptocurrencies debate to the general public via a tweet that I let you discover below: This tweet from Robert F. Kennedy contains so many interesting things that I didn't have enough colors to highlight everything :D. Robert F. Kennedy first reminds us of the bad faith of the Fed and other members of the Biden administration when they say that FedNow is not a first step towards a digital dollar. Considering the operation to eradicate the cryptocurrency industry by the Biden administration for several months now, we can suspect that the goal is to clear the way for the introduction of a digital dollar sooner or later. Robert F. Kennedy then reminds us that the Fed has printed out of thin air more than $10T between 2008 and 2022: “A bonanza for the Banksters.” Robert F. Kennedy then says what all Bitcoiners have known for a long time: “Bitcoin gives the public an escape route from the splatter zone when this bubble invariably bursts.” The interest of the White House is clearly to prevent this to help the Banksters to keep the people under control. Robert F. Kennedy then recalls the many incidents that emerged during the Biden administration's operation against the cryptocurrency industry. He recalls how President Biden weaponized FDIC, OCC + DOJ to force crypto-friendly banks to close their doors to crypto firms since Dec. 3. The recent crackdown on crypto blocks exit ramps removes alternative rails and strengthens government control over both the financial and political systems. Finally, Robert F. Kennedy explains that we should be warier than ever of CBDCs, which should be seen as the ultimate mechanism for social surveillance and control. He recalls Balaji Srinivasan's comparison between FedNow and "a virus that has evolved to evade recognition by changing its sequence without really changing its function." This strong and unambiguous stance by Robert F. Kennedy is all the more important as he aims to challenge Joe Biden on the Democratic side for the 2024 presidential election. It is reassuring to see that there are still some politicians in America ready to defend the best interests of the American people. Let's hope that this will launch the debate within the general public, because time is running out for the greatest number of people to become aware of the dangers of CBDCs, and of the need to look for alternatives. The most obvious one is the one I talk to you about every day: BITCOIN. Also Published Here

Robert F. Kennedy Pits CBDCs Against Cryptocurrencies in the American Political Arena

Why Doesn’t Cyber Security Get Stronger? Here’s a Clue: Follow the Money Understanding the headlines and what that means for our future let’s follow the money. We only need to take a look at the economics of Cyber Security hacking, what it takes to get into the hacking business will help us understand why bad actors are compelled to hack. In 2022, Cybercrime caused $6 trillion in damages with over 33 billion accounts breached. Hacking is easy. And cheap! So, what does it take to become a hacker? It’s pretty much a keyboard and a processor (about $200) and a bit of programming skill. Then, create deceptive emails or connection requests that hammer the internet universe in search of people to accidentally provide identifying or financial information, or to click or accept the request. Then it’s game on with the exploits to extract their money or to make the ransom request. Why do hackers persist? Because it’s easy and financially advantageous, especially when they can shapeshift fast enough to enter through I.O.T. devices on the edge of computing that are not protected by device management or VPN. If we “follow the money” by looking at the financial incentives, we have a clear look at where the bad guys are likely to go. Unfortunately, however, the same line of logic applies to cybersecurity providers as well. s in situations such as the Solar Winds attack, Target IOT device, JP Morgan Chase Bank work from home employee. In at least the Pipeline situation, Where’s the incentive? As a (big) case in point, consider situations such as the ransom attack in the Colonial Pipeline breach. A large cybersecurity vendor was paid a multi-year multimillion-dollar contract to protect the Pipeline from security breaches. When the protection failed, Colonial suffered 6 days of downtime, at a potentially immeasurable cost, and paid the hackers a 75 Bitcoin ransom worth between $4.4-5 million to a Russia-linked team of cybercriminals called DarkSide, opening the way for remediation to begin and for oil to begin flowing again. The situation was severe enough to raise the price of U.S. gas for a time. Colonial had to disclose the breach which served to embolden other cybercriminals. As a small silver lining, the U.S. Justice Department assembled a task force that was able to recover approximately half ($2.3 million) of the ransom, probably due to a careless criminal who shared the private bitcoin key in emails the FBI was able to seize. But here’s another interesting travesty – the very vendor paid to protect operations such as the Pipeline from attack, is also the vendor paid to remediate the situation when the protection has failed, for a price substantially higher still. Let’s do the math. Let alone the costs for cybersecurity insurance and cybersecurity protection, which are passed through to investors and consumers as higher prices and lower investment returns … and the costs of the Justice Department task force being funded by taxes… the aftermath of a disaster of this size hits us all. And even worse is the realization that a cybersecurity company that was paid some $4 million to protect against such a failure may now be paid $10 million to remediate the damage (while the organization, or at least the organization’s insurance, has paid an additional $2.3 million in ransom, now lost). It doesn’t take a math or economics degree to realize that cyber security remediation companies in a case like this may be earning more money than the criminals themselves, to fail, so they could charge the giant billings required to fix the failure that their solution has failed to prevent. While it’s extremely doubtful the technology organization would deliberately or even carelessly fail, it seems clear enough that incentives are running in the wrong direction. As an industry we need to follow the money – to create the level of solutions that give a criminal financial motivation to steal and to create financial motivation for security companies to create protection that succeeds rather than hitting an even higher payday through the charges to remediate the situation their system’s failure has caused. Solutions need to become more proactive and pre-emptive through better use of AI and better protection for the “Edge” where devices live and network management solutions don’t see. less more Whether your small business or personal accounts may present a much smaller target than an enterprise, the verdict is clear – it’s important to “think like a criminal” and follow the money as we determine and build the level of security resilience solution poised to succeed. Also published . here

Following the Money: Why Cybersecurity Companies Aren't Interested in Getting Stronger

Siguiendo el dinero: por qué las empresas de ciberseguridad no están interesadas en fortalecerse

Suivre l'argent : pourquoi les entreprises de cybersécurité ne souhaitent pas se renforcer

पैसों का पीछा करना: साइबर सुरक्षा कंपनियां मजबूत होने में दिलचस्पी क्यों नहीं रखतीं

お金を追う: サイバーセキュリティ企業が強化に関心がない理由

Seguindo o dinheiro: por que as empresas de segurança cibernética não estão interessadas em se fortalecer

Theo đuổi đồng tiền: Tại sao các công ty an ninh mạng không quan tâm đến việc trở nên mạnh mẽ hơn

追逐金钱：为什么网络安全公司对变得更强大不感兴趣

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . BATTLING IN THE ARENA BATTLING IN THE ARENA Slowly I regained my composure and finally essayed again to attempt to remove the keys from the dead body of my former jailer. But as I reached out into the darkness to locate it I found to my horror that it was gone. Then the truth flashed on me; the owners of those gleaming eyes had dragged my prize away from me to be devoured in their neighboring lair; as they had been waiting for days, for weeks, for months, through all this awful eternity of my imprisonment to drag my dead carcass to their feast. For two days no food was brought me, but then a new messenger appeared and my incarceration went on as before, but not again did I allow my reason to be submerged by the horror of my position. Shortly after this episode another prisoner was brought in and chained near me. By the dim torch light I saw that he was a red Martian and I could scarcely await the departure of his guards to address him. As their retreating footsteps died away in the distance, I called out softly the Martian word of greeting, kaor. “Who are you who speaks out of the darkness?” he answered “John Carter, a friend of the red men of Helium.” “I am of Helium,” he said, “but I do not recall your name.” And then I told him my story as I have written it here, omitting only any reference to my love for Dejah Thoris. He was much excited by the news of Helium’s princess and seemed quite positive that she and Sola could easily have reached a point of safety from where they left me. He said that he knew the place well because the defile through which the Warhoon warriors had passed when they discovered us was the only one ever used by them when marching to the south. “Dejah Thoris and Sola entered the hills not five miles from a great waterway and are now probably quite safe,” he assured me. My fellow prisoner was Kantos Kan, a padwar (lieutenant) in the navy of Helium. He had been a member of the ill-fated expedition which had fallen into the hands of the Tharks at the time of Dejah Thoris’ capture, and he briefly related the events which followed the defeat of the battleships. Badly injured and only partially manned they had limped slowly toward Helium, but while passing near the city of Zodanga, the capital of Helium’s hereditary enemies among the red men of Barsoom, they had been attacked by a great body of war vessels and all but the craft to which Kantos Kan belonged were either destroyed or captured. His vessel was chased for days by three of the Zodangan war ships but finally escaped during the darkness of a moonless night. Thirty days after the capture of Dejah Thoris, or about the time of our coming to Thark, his vessel had reached Helium with about ten survivors of the original crew of seven hundred officers and men. Immediately seven great fleets, each of one hundred mighty war ships, had been dispatched to search for Dejah Thoris, and from these vessels two thousand smaller craft had been kept out continuously in futile search for the missing princess. Two green Martian communities had been wiped off the face of Barsoom by the avenging fleets, but no trace of Dejah Thoris had been found. They had been searching among the northern hordes, and only within the past few days had they extended their quest to the south. Kantos Kan had been detailed to one of the small one-man fliers and had had the misfortune to be discovered by the Warhoons while exploring their city. The bravery and daring of the man won my greatest respect and admiration. Alone he had landed at the city’s boundary and on foot had penetrated to the buildings surrounding the plaza. For two days and nights he had explored their quarters and their dungeons in search of his beloved princess only to fall into the hands of a party of Warhoons as he was about to leave, after assuring himself that Dejah Thoris was not a captive there. During the period of our incarceration Kantos Kan and I became well acquainted, and formed a warm personal friendship. A few days only elapsed, however, before we were dragged forth from our dungeon for the great games. We were conducted early one morning to an enormous amphitheater, which instead of having been built upon the surface of the ground was excavated below the surface. It had partially filled with debris so that how large it had originally been was difficult to say. In its present condition it held the entire twenty thousand Warhoons of the assembled hordes. The arena was immense but extremely uneven and unkempt. Around it the Warhoons had piled building stone from some of the ruined edifices of the ancient city to prevent the animals and the captives from escaping into the audience, and at each end had been constructed cages to hold them until their turns came to meet some horrible death upon the arena. Kantos Kan and I were confined together in one of the cages. In the others were wild calots, thoats, mad zitidars, green warriors, and women of other hordes, and many strange and ferocious wild beasts of Barsoom which I had never before seen. The din of their roaring, growling and squealing was deafening and the formidable appearance of any one of them was enough to make the stoutest heart feel grave forebodings. Kantos Kan explained to me that at the end of the day one of these prisoners would gain freedom and the others would lie dead about the arena. The winners in the various contests of the day would be pitted against each other until only two remained alive; the victor in the last encounter being set free, whether animal or man. The following morning the cages would be filled with a new consignment of victims, and so on throughout the ten days of the games. Shortly after we had been caged the amphitheater began to fill and within an hour every available part of the seating space was occupied. Dak Kova, with his jeds and chieftains, sat at the center of one side of the arena upon a large raised platform. At a signal from Dak Kova the doors of two cages were thrown open and a dozen green Martian females were driven to the center of the arena. Each was given a dagger and then, at the far end, a pack of twelve calots, or wild dogs were loosed upon them. As the brutes, growling and foaming, rushed upon the almost defenseless women I turned my head that I might not see the horrid sight. The yells and laughter of the green horde bore witness to the excellent quality of the sport and when I turned back to the arena, as Kantos Kan told me it was over, I saw three victorious calots, snarling and growling over the bodies of their prey. The women had given a good account of themselves. Next a mad zitidar was loosed among the remaining dogs, and so it went throughout the long, hot, horrible day. During the day I was pitted against first men and then beasts, but as I was armed with a long-sword and always outclassed my adversary in agility and generally in strength as well, it proved but child’s play to me. Time and time again I won the applause of the bloodthirsty multitude, and toward the end there were cries that I be taken from the arena and be made a member of the hordes of Warhoon. Finally there were but three of us left, a great green warrior of some far northern horde, Kantos Kan, and myself. The other two were to battle and then I to fight the conqueror for the liberty which was accorded the final winner. Kantos Kan had fought several times during the day and like myself had always proven victorious, but occasionally by the smallest of margins, especially when pitted against the green warriors. I had little hope that he could best his giant adversary who had mowed down all before him during the day. The fellow towered nearly sixteen feet in height, while Kantos Kan was some inches under six feet. As they advanced to meet one another I saw for the first time a trick of Martian swordsmanship which centered Kantos Kan’s every hope of victory and life on one cast of the dice, for, as he came to within about twenty feet of the huge fellow he threw his sword arm far behind him over his shoulder and with a mighty sweep hurled his weapon point foremost at the green warrior. It flew true as an arrow and piercing the poor devil’s heart laid him dead upon the arena. Kantos Kan and I were now pitted against each other but as we approached to the encounter I whispered to him to prolong the battle until nearly dark in the hope that we might find some means of escape. The horde evidently guessed that we had no hearts to fight each other and so they howled in rage as neither of us placed a fatal thrust. Just as I saw the sudden coming of dark I whispered to Kantos Kan to thrust his sword between my left arm and my body. As he did so I staggered back clasping the sword tightly with my arm and thus fell to the ground with his weapon apparently protruding from my chest. Kantos Kan perceived my coup and stepping quickly to my side he placed his foot upon my neck and withdrawing his sword from my body gave me the final death blow through the neck which is supposed to sever the jugular vein, but in this instance the cold blade slipped harmlessly into the sand of the arena. In the darkness which had now fallen none could tell but that he had really finished me. I whispered to him to go and claim his freedom and then look for me in the hills east of the city, and so he left me. When the amphitheater had cleared I crept stealthily to the top and as the great excavation lay far from the plaza and in an untenanted portion of the great dead city I had little trouble in reaching the hills beyond. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1993). A Princess of Mars. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62/pg62-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

BATTLING IN THE ARENA

Star Born by Andre Alice Norton, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . ARENA ARENA The dull pain which throbbed through Dalgard's skull with every beat of his heart was confusing, and it was hard to think clearly. But the colony scout, soon after he had fought his way back to consciousness, had learned that he was imprisoned somewhere in the globe ship. Just as he now knew that he had been brought across the sea from the continent on which Homeport was situated and that he had no hope of rescue. He had seen little of his captors, and the guards, who had hustled him from one place of imprisonment to another, had not spoken to him, nor had he tried to communicate with them. At first he had been too sick and confused, then too wary. These were clearly Those Others and the conditioning which had surrounded him from birth had instilled in him a deep distrust of the former masters of Astra. Now Dalgard was more alert, and his being brought to this room in what was certainly the center of the alien civilization made him believe that he was about to meet the rulers of the enemy. So he stared curiously about him as the guards jostled him through the door. On a dais fashioned of heaped-up rainbow-colored pads were three aliens, their legs folded under them at what seemed impossible angles. One wore the black wrappings, the breastplate of the guards, but the other two had indulged their love of color in weird, eye-disturbing combinations of shades in the bandages wrapping the thin limbs and paunchy bodies. They were, as far as he could see through the thick layers of paint overlaying their skins, older than their officer companion. But nothing in their attitude suggested that age had mellowed them. Dalgard was brought to stand before the trio as before a tribunal of judges. His sword-knife had been taken from his belt before he had regained his senses, his hands were twisted behind his back and locked together in a bar and hoop arrangement. He certainly could offer little threat to the company, yet they ringed him in, weapons ready, watching his every move. The scout licked cracked lips. There was one thing they could not control, could not prevent him from doing. Somewhere, not too far away, was help ... Not from the merpeople, but he was sure that he had been in contact with another friendly mind. Since the hour of his awakening on board the globe ship, when he had half-consciously sent out an appeal for aid over the band which united him with Sssuri's race, and had touched that other consciousness—not the cold alien stream about him—he had been sure that somewhere within the enemy throng there was a potential savior. Was it among those who manned the strange flyer, those the merpeople had spied upon but whom he had not yet seen? Dalgard had striven since that moment of contact to keep in touch with the nebulous other mind, to project his need for help. But he had been unable to enter in freely as he could with his own kind, or with Sssuri and the sea people. Now, even as he stood in the heart of the enemy territory completely at the mercy of the aliens, he felt, more strongly than ever before, that another, whose mind he could not enter and yet who was in some queer way sensitive to his appeal, was close at hand. He searched the painted faces before him trying to probe behind each locked mask, but he was certain that the one he sought was not there. Only—he must be! The contact was so strong—Dalgard's startled eyes went to the wall behind the dais, tried vainly to trace what could only be felt. He would be willing to give a knife oath that the stranger was within seeing, listening distance at this minute! While he was so engrossed in his own problem, the guard had moved. The hooped bar which locked his wrists was loosened, and his arms, each tight in the grip of one of the warriors were brought out before him. The officer on the dais tossed a metal ring to one of the guards. Roughly the warrior holding Dalgard's left arm forced the band over his hand and jerked it up his forearm as far as it would go. As it winked in the light the scout was reminded of a similar bracelet he had seen—where? On the front leg of the snake-devil he had shot! The officer produced a second ring, slipping it smoothly over his own arm, adjusting it to touch bare skin and not the wrappings which served him as a sleeve. Dalgard thought he understood. A device to facilitate communication. And straightway he was wary. When his ancestors had first met the merpeople, they had established a means of speech through touch, the palm of one resting against the palm of the other. In later generations, when they had developed their new senses, physical contact had not been necessary. However, here—Dalgard's eyes narrowed, the line along his jaw was hard. He had always accepted the merpeople's estimate of Those Others, that their ancient enemies were all-seeing and all-knowing, with mental powers far beyond their own definition or description. Now he half expected to be ruthlessly mind-invaded, stripped of everything the enemy desired to know. So he was astonished when the words which formed in his thoughts were simple, almost childish. And while he prepared to answer them, another part of him watched and listened, waiting for the attack he was sure would come. "You—are—who—what?" He forced a look of astonishment. Nor did he make the mistake of answering that mentally. If Those Oth ers did not know he could use the mind speech, why betray his power? "I am of the stars," he answered slowly, aloud, using the speech of Homeport. He had so little occasion to talk lately that his voice sounded curiously rusty and harsh in his own ears. Nor had he the least idea of the impression those few archaically accented words would have on one who heard them. To Dalgard's inner surprise the answer did not astonish his interrogator. The alien officer might well have been expecting to hear just that. But he pulled off his own arm band before he turned to his fellows with a spurt of the twittering speech they used among themselves. While the two civilians were still trilling, the officer edged forward an inch or so and stared at Dalgard intently as he replaced the band. "You not look—same—as others—" "I do not know what you mean. Here are not others like me." One of the civilians twitched at the officer's sleeve, apparently demanding a translation, but the other shook him off impatiently. "You come from sky—now?" Dalgard shook his head, then realized that gesture might not mean anything to his audience. "Long ago before I was, my people came." The alien digested that, then again took off his band before he relayed it to his companions. The excited twitter of their speech scaled up. "You travel with the beasts—" the alien's accusation came crisply while the others gabbled. "That which hunts could not have tracked you had not the stink of the beast things been on you." "I know no beasts," Dalgard faced up to that squarely. "The sea people are my friends!" It was hard to read any emotion on these lacquered and bedaubed faces, but before the officer once more broke bracelet contact, Dalgard did sense the other's almost hysterical aversion. The scout might just have admitted to the most revolting practices as far as the alien was concerned. After he had translated, all three of those on the dais were silent. Even the guards edged away from the captive as if in some manner they might be defiled by proximity. One of the civilians made an emphatic statement, got creakily to his feet, and walked always as if he would have nothing more to do with this matter. After a second or two of hesitation his fellow followed his example. The officer turned the bracelet around in his fingers, his dark eyes with their slitted pupils never leaving Dalgard's face. Then he came to a decision. He pushed the ring up his arm, and the words which reached the prisoner were coldly remote, as if the captive were no longer judged an intelligent living creature but something which had no right of existence in a well-ordered universe. "Beast friends with beast. As the beasts—so shall you end. It is spoken." One of the guards tore the bracelet from Dalgard's arm, trying not to touch the scout's flesh in the process. And those who once more shackled his wrists ostentatiously wiped their hands up and down the wrappings on their thighs afterwards. But before they jabbed him into movement with the muzzles of their weapons, Dalgard located at last the source of that disturbing mental touch, not only located it, but in some manner broke through the existing barrier between the strange mind and his and communicated as clearly with it as he might have with Sssuri. And the excitement of his discovery almost led to self-betrayal! Terran! One of those who traveled with the aliens? Yet he read clearly the other's distrust of that company, the fact that he lay in concealment here without their knowledge. And he was not unfriendly—surely he could not be a Peaceman of Pax! Another fugitive from a newly-come colony ship—? Dalgard beamed a warning to the other. If he who was free could only reach the merpeople! It might mean the turning point in their whole venture! Dalgard was furiously planning, simplifying, trying to impress the most imperative message on that other mind as he stumbled away in the midst of the guards. The stranger was confused, apparently Dalgard's arrival, his use of the mind touch, had been an overwhelming surprise. But if he could only make the right move—would make it—The scout from Homeport had no idea what was in store for him, but with one of his own breed here and suspicious of the aliens he had at least a slim chance. He snapped the thread of communication. Now he must be ready for any opportunity— Raf watched that amazing apparition go out of the room below. He was shaking with a chill born of no outside cold. First the shock of hearing that language, queerly accented as the words were, then that sharp contact, mind to mind. He was being clearly warned against revealing himself. The stranger was a Terran, Raf would swear to that. So somewhere on this world there was a Terran colony! One of those legendary ships of outlaws, who had taken to space during the rule of Pax, had made the crossing safely and had here established a foothold. While one part of Raf's brain fitted together the jigsaw of bits and patches of information, the other section dealt with that message of warning the other had beamed to him. The pilot knew that the captive must be in immediate danger. He could not understand all that had happened in that interview with the aliens, but he was left with the impression that the prisoner had been not only tried but condemned. And it was up to him to help. But how? By the time he got back to the flitter or was able to find Hobart and the others, it might already be too late. He must make the move, and soon, for there had been unmistakable urgency in the captive's message. Raf's hands fumbled at the grid before him, and then he realized that the opening was far too small to admit him to the room on the other side of the wall. To return to the underground ways might be a waste of time, but he could see no other course open to him. What if he could not find the captive later? Where in the maze of the half-deserted city could he hope to come across the trail again? Even as he sorted out all the points which could defeat him, Raf's hands and feet felt for the notched steps which would take him down. He had gone only two floors when he was faced with a grille opening which was much larger. On impulse he stopped to measure it, sure he could squeeze through here, if he could work loose the grid. Prying with one hand and a tool from his belt pouch, he struggled not only against the stubborn metal but against time. That strange mental communication had ceased. Though he was sure that he still received a trace of it from time to time, just enough to reassure him that the prisoner was still alive. And each time it touched him Raf redoubled his efforts on the metal clasps of the grid. At last his determination triumphed, and the grille swung out, to fall with an appalling clatter to the floor. The pilot thrust his feet through the opening and wriggled desperately, expecting any moment to confront a reception committee drawn by the noise. But when he reached the floor, the hallway was still vacant. In fact, he was conscious of a hush in the whole building, as if those who made their homes within its walls were elsewhere. That silence acted on him as a spur. Raf ran along the corridor, trying to subdue the clatter of his space boots, coming to a downward ramp. There he paused, unable to decide whether to go down—until he caught sight of a party of aliens below, walking swiftly enough to suggest that they too were in a hurry. This small group was apparently on its way to some gathering. And in it for the first time the Terran saw the women of the aliens, or at least the fully veiled, gliding creatures he guessed were the females of the painted people. There were four of them in the group ahead, escorted by two of the males, and the high fluting of their voices resounded along the corridor as might the cheeping of birds. If the males were colorful in their choice of body wrappings, the females were gorgeous beyond belief, as cloudy stuff which had the changing hues of Terran opals frothed about them to completely conceal their figures. The harsher twittering of the men had an impatient note, and the whole party quickened pace until their glide was close to an undignified trot. Raf, forced to keep well behind lest his boots betray him, fumed. They did not go into the open, but took another way which sloped down once more. Luckily the journey was not a long one. Ahead was light which suggested the outdoors. Raf sucked in his breath as he came out a goodly distance behind the aliens. Established in what was once a court surrounded by the towers and buildings of the city was a miniature of that other arena where he had seen the dead lizard things. The glittering, gayly dressed aliens were taking their places on the tiers of seats. But the place which had been built to accommodate at least a thousand spectators now housed less than half the number. If this was the extent of the alien nation, it was the dregs of a dwindling race. Directly below where Raf lingered in an aisle dividing the tiers of seats, there was a manhole opening with a barred gate across it, an entrance to the sand-covered enclosure. And fortunately the aliens were all clustered close to the oval far from that spot. Also the attention of the audience was firmly riveted on events below. A door at the sand level had been flung open, and through it was now hustled the prisoner. Either the aliens still possessed some idea of fair play or they hoped to prolong a contest to satisfy their own pleasure, for the captive's hands were unbound and he clutched a spear. Remembering far-off legends of earlier and more savage civilizations on his own world, Raf was now sure that the lone man below was about to fight for his life. The question was, against what? Another of the mouthlike openings around the edge of the arena opened, and one of the furry people shambled out, weaving weakly from side to side as he came, a spear in his scaled paws. He halted a step or two into the open, his round head swinging from side to side, spittle drooling from his gaping mouth. His body was covered with raw sores and bare patches from which the fur had been torn away, and it was apparent that he had long been the victim of ill-usage, if not torture. Shrill cries arose from the alien spectators as the furred one blinked in the light and then sighted the man some feet away. He stiffened, his arm drew back, the spear poised. Then as suddenly it dropped to his side, and he fell on his knees before wriggling across the sand, his paws held out imploringly to his fellow captive. The cries from the watching aliens were threatening. Several rose in their seats gesturing to the two below. And Raf, thankful for their absorption, sped down to the manhole, discovering to his delight it could be readily opened from his side. As he edged it around, there was another sound below. This was no high-pitched fluting from aliens deprived of their sport, but a hissing nightmare cry. Raf's line of vision, limited by the door, framed a portion of scaled back, as it looked, immediately below him. His hand went to the blast bombs as he descended the runway, and his boots hit the sand just as the drama below reached its climax. The furred one lay prone in the sand, uncaring. Above that mistreated body, the human stood in the half-crouch of a fighting man, the puny spear pointed up bravely at a mark it could not hope to reach, the soft throat of one of the giant lizards. The reptile did not move to speedily destroy. Instead, hissing, it reared above the two as if studying them with a vicious intelligence. But there was no time to wonder how long it would delay striking. Raf's strong teeth ripped loose the tag end of the blast bomb, and he lobbed it straight with a practiced arm so that the ball spiraled across the arena to come to rest between the massive hind legs of the lizard. He saw the man's eyes widen as they fastened on him. And then the human captive flung himself to the earth, half covering the body of the furred one. The reptile grabbed in the same instant, its grasping claws cutting only air, and before it could try a second time the bomb went off. Literally torn apart by the explosion, the creature must have died at once. But the captive moved. He was on his feet again, pulling his companion up with him, before the startled spectators could guess what had happened. Then half carrying the other prisoner, he ran, not onward to the waiting Raf, but for the gate through which he had come into the arena. At the same time a message beat into the Terran's brain— "This way!" Avoiding bits of horrible refuse, Raf obeyed that order, catching up in a couple of strides with the other two and linking his arm through the dangling one of the furred creature to take some of the strain from the stranger. "Have you any more of the power things?" the words came in the archaic speech of his own world. "Two more bombs," he answered. "We may have to blow the gate here," the other panted breathlessly. Instead Raf drew his stun gun. The gate was already opening, a wedge of the painted warriors heading through, flame-throwers ready. He sprayed wide, and on the highest level. A spout of fire singed the cloth of his tunic across the top of his shoulder as one of the last aliens fired before his legs buckled and he went down. Then, opposition momentarily gone, the two with their semiconscious charge stumbled over the bodies of the guards and reached the corridor beyond. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Andre Alice Norton (2006). Star Born. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18458/pg18458-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

ARENA

IT Arena 2022 - Ukrainian Tech Braves the War

When is an NFT not an NFT? When it's a Digital Collectable. Here we are again, another major organisation launching a new initiative without using any terminology. And why is this huge? Because nearly half of the world's population watch football. And that's how you can onboard people to Web3 without them even knowing it. “This exciting announcement makes FIFA collectables available to any football fan, democratising the ability to own a part of the FIFA World Cup. Just like sports memorabilia and stickers, this is an accessible opportunity for fans around the world to engage with their favourite players, moments and more on new platforms.” Now, here's the rub. Just like Playstation Stars, which is most definitely not an NFT by the way according to Sony, the new FIFA+ Collect initiative is a walled garden. There's no mention of being able to collect, trade, and sell your precious moments of football history to others - in or outside of the FIFA+ ecosystem. Which goes against most, if not all, NFT and Web3 ideologies. FIFA+ is however powered by Algorand so there is still hope that this may not be true, and they are certainly making a case for Web3 itself by mentioning 'decentralisation' in the announcement. #web3 FIFA+ Collect is powered by Algorand, the official blockchain platform of FIFA and the technology of choice for over 2,000 global organisations, governments and digital-native decentralised finance applications. It is a low-cost, carbon-neutral blockchain accessible via multiple currencies and payment methods. “FIFA’s platform – via a truly decentralised and scalable public blockchain – is the first tangible representation of the technical partnership recently announced between FIFA and Algorand,” Again though, here we see another massive and global brand with access to billions of fans who can easily become part of the web3 movement. Except it isn't really web3 but that's one opinion I stand alone on.

FIFA Launches Digital Collectibles That Aren't NFTs

This article will provide all the information you need to maximize your profits playing . DEO Arena We will do this in four parts; What Is ? DEO Arena Deo Arena Tokenomics. . Demeter Farm Strategy For Maximum Profit. What Is DEO Arena? is a skill based game where players battle against each other to win cryptocurrency token . DEO Arena $DEO is a 2D in-browser game. DEO Arena There are 6 different characters and 8 different weapons. At the beginning of the game, players are housed at their bases in the arena and are able to choose one of three random weapons which spawn. Players are able to take their opponent’s weapons and collect pickups (health, regen, shield…). Kill your opponent to win. In a later release of the game, you will be able to invite friends to a 1v1 , own more characters, clan battles, new characters, custom games and more. Winning matches in depends purely on your skill level, there are no purchasable or earnable advantageous items. DEO Arena DEO Arena Tokenomics For this we must look at two parts ; Match Tokenomics & Tournament Tokenomics Match Tokenemomics : One game costs 4 $DEO for each player (8 $DEO) The winner receives 87.5% (7 $DEO) and 12.5% is burnt (1 $DEO). Tournament Tokenomics : Each Tournament will last for 4 weeks. Each match played scores you 1.5 points. Each win scores you 0.75 points. Each match played while holding a DEO Arena NFT gives a Tournament points boost. DEO Arena NFT Boost value: First 50 games +0.075 points 50th to the 150th game +0.1 points 150th to the 300th game +0.125 points 300th to the 500th game +0.15 points 500th game onwards +0.2 points Total prize pool for the first Tournament is $20,000 in $XOR Your Leaderboard position determines your Tournament prize. Diamond rank — $5,000 $2,000 $1,250 $500 4–5. $250 6–10. $150 Platinum rank — Next 5% of players — $4,000 Gold Rank — Next 15% of players — $5,000 Silver rank — Next 30% of players — $6,000 Bronze rank — Better luck next time Demeter Farm is a Decentralized App (Dapp) on Demeter Farm (farming.deotoken.io) Sora Network (Sora.org). On this Dapp farmers can earn trippple rewards, , and with the same Liquidity. $PSWAP $DEO $XSTUSD Rewards are paid out for a 4 year period. DEO Farm is the primary reward token for the Dapp. $DEO Due to the inflationary Tokenomics of , the developed an innovative secondary burn mechanism, . $DEO Ceres team (Cerestoken.io) DEO Arena The burn from each game played (12.5%) will keep the farm APRs high (90% at time of writing) and token inflation minimal or potentially deflationary. The , and are designed to work together in harmony to maximize long term value and ease of entry for new farmers & players. Demeter Farm DEO arena DEO Arena Tournament If you would like to support my work for 0 cost, please use my and referral code — UYEhUYZLOEpfPPN3n1OkQXCe Polkaswap referral link here DEO Arena Strategy For Maximum Profit Before You Play Use your referral code to invite as many people as possible, you earn 1.25% of every game they play ! DEO Arena Ensure you have a NFT in your wallet for the Tournament points boost. Available to purchase at DEO Arena deoarena.io Strategy Stake your tokens on (farming.deotoken.io) currently 90% APY. $DEO Demeter Farm Use your farm rewards to play and compete for more and Tournament Prizes, risking none of the tokens you initially purchased. DEO Arena $DEO $DEO With each win earning you 87.5% of the pot you must win 57% of games played to be in profit, remember is a skill game where you must be better than your opponent. DEO Arena The Tournament tokenomics incentivize a high number of games played. You should aim to hit the breakeven point of winning 57% of matches played. Hitting the 57% breakeven match wins, gives you leaderboard points at 0 cost, though winning a higher % will yield match profit as well as Tournament points. $DEO Farm rewards end after a 4 year period, this will stop token issuance. From that point will be a purely deflationary token due to the burn. For that reason, it is assumable that from that point onward the token will be most valuable. $DEO $DEO DEO Arena $DEO Useful links and guides you may need ; DEO Arena telegram chat Video guide to bridge tokens to SORA Network Demeter Farm DEO Arena

How To Get Rich Playing DEO Arena

The potential of smart contracts has been apparent since the launch of Ethereum. They aim to be secure, tamper-proof, and self-executing, which gives tremendous advantages in speed and cost over traditional financial contracts. For many people, smart contracts are the most revolutionary innovation to come from blockchain technology. Smart contracts form the foundational logic that underpins decentralized applications (dApps) running autonomously on public ledgers. The use cases for these lines of code are practically limitless, ranging from defining how and when rewards are distributed in a Web3 game to the logic that guarantees the seizure of collateral if a loan is not repaid. Smart contracts have applications in the majority of today’s biggest industries including retail, real estate, education, healthcare, and transportation industries. Just how traditional finance touches every industry, so too will decentralized finance (DeFi) and smart contracts. But still, much of what smart contracts can do remains a pipe dream. It's been seven years since the concept was first implemented on Ethereum. And after so much time, it remains far from achieving what was/is expected. This is for one simple reason:  smart contracts aren’t smart enough for mainstream adoption…yet. Smart Contracts and How they Work The concept of smart contracts has been around for decades. They were first proposed by a cryptographer and computer scientist, in 1997. He foresaw them as digital contracts that would act as a means to improve contract law practices for eCommerce and internet users. Nick Szabo, However, it wasn’t until almost two decades later that smart contracts had their first actual implementation. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, found a better, more efficient way to use them by deploying them on a blockchain. This forms the elementary blueprint for smart contracts today. How They Work Smart contracts, like traditional contracts, have rules and penalties regarding mutually agreed-upon terms. However, unlike the traditional contract, a smart contract consists of lines of code that exist entirely on the blockchain. Therefore, the responsibility of preparing a smart contract falls entirely on a developer rather than a lawyer. Smart contracts use objective data to know when the terms have been met. Depending on the situation, this can be data from within their native blockchain ecosystem or outside (off-chain). The latter requires using oracles, which connect blockchains to external data sources. This connection allows smart contracts to execute based on real-world data. What’s Holding Back Smart Contracts? To get to the next level, the DeFi ecosystem needs millions of developers working on innovative financial products and services. However, not many developers are willing to transition to Web3. In fact, there are currently less than 20,000 active developers in DeFi, which is way less than what’s needed for a global scale application of smart contracts. So why is this the case? The current smart contract development paradigm is needlessly complex. Solidity, Ethereum’s smart contract language, has a steep learning curve. Furthermore, developers building smart contracts have to do everything from scratch. Each developer is responsible for creating even the most basic and common functionality in their smart contracts. So when it comes to security, developers are tasked with implementing concepts of asset management and authorization on their own, from scratch. This takes a lot of time. , a full-stack platform for Web3 developers and users, interviewed nearly 1000 developers over three years. When asked about their experience building smart contracts,  most developers admitted to spending around 90% of their time on security. Radix Naturally, putting that much time into one feature results in chunks of code.  And where there is unwieldy code, there are bound to be mistakes. This is why expensive smart contract exploits are still common in DeFi. This is a problem that in any other field, would be solved by implementing thorough quality control processes. But the development paradigm forces the developer to build every single thing from scratch. Therefore, every smart contract recreates the laws of finance in its own unique way. This makes it difficult for other developers checking the code to truly understand what is going on if they don’t have a detailed understanding of how the platform is supposed to operate. Therefore, small mistakes can easily slip through their radar and cause problems in the future. The Way Forward; A New Development Paradigm The biggest barriers to smart contracts adoption can be summed up as follows; A steep learning curve that discourages talented developers from transitioning to web3 A paradigm that forces developers to spend too much time developing security features Unique, complex implementations that make it difficult for other developers to understand what is really supposed to happen Therefore, the only way to get more people working on smart contracts is to improve the developer experience. According to Radix, the developer experience needs to reach a level where developers can; Easily build dApps: Developers need an environment that lets them get to a deployed implementation as quickly as possible. It should also not heap the full responsibility of ensuring security on developers. Leverage the work of other developers:  Developers should be able to leverage on great solutions developed by other developers to existing problems. This creates reusability, rapidly accelerating the ability of developers to build more complex smart contracts. To do this, Radix has created an asset-oriented programming environment by combining the Scrypto programming language with the Radix Engine. This, it says, significantly smoothens the learning curve for developers looking to get into Web3. It also enables a much more robust security model than what’s available in any other DLT. Radix says that this will save the developer 90% time since they won’t have to put as much time into developing security features. Whatever the solution, developers need an environment that allows them to make complex, featureful, and secure smart contracts with a wide range of applications. This is the only way that DeFi and smart contracts will be able to reshape finance on a global scale.

Why Smart Contracts Aren’t Smart Enough for Mainstream Adoption

On July 26, 2004, a 5-year-old startup by the name of Google was faced with a serious problem: . their application was down For several hours, users across the United States, France, and Great Britain were unable to access the popular search engine. The then-800-person company and their millions of users were left in the dark as engineers struggled to fix the problem and discover the root cause of the issue. By midday, a tedious and intensive process conducted by a few panicked engineers determined that the was to blame. MyDoom virus In 2021, an outage of that length and scale is considered rather anomalous, but 15 years ago, these types of software outages weren’t out of the ordinary. After leading teams through several of these experiences over the years, Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a Google engineering manager at the time, determined there had to be a better way to manage and prevent these dizzying fire drills, not just at Google but across the industry. Inspired by his early career building data and IT infrastructure, Sloss codified his learnings as an entirely new discipline — — dedicated to optimizing the maintenance and operations of software systems (like Google’s search engine) with reliability in mind. (SRE) site reliability engineering According to Sloss and others , was about automating away the need to worry about edge cases and unknown unknowns (like buggy code, server failures, and viruses). Ultimately, Sloss and his team wanted a way for engineers to automate away the manual toil of maintaining the company’s rapidly growing codebase while ensuring that their bases were covered when systems broke. paving the way forward for the discipline SRE “SRE is a way of thinking and approaching production. Most engineers developing a system can also be an SRE for that system,” . “The question is: can they take a complex, maybe not well-defined problem and come up with a scalable, technically reasonable solution?” he said If Google had the right processes and systems in place to anticipate and prevent downstream issues, not only could outages be easily fixed with minimal impact on users, but prevented altogether. Data is Software and Software is Data Nearly 20 years later, data teams are faced with a similar fate. Like software, data systems are becoming increasingly complex, with multiple upstream and downstream dependencies. Ten or even five years ago, it was normal and accepted to manage your data in silos, but now, teams and even entire companies are working with data, facilitating a more collaborative and fault-resistant approach to data management. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed the widespread adoption of by data engineering and analytics teams to address this gap, from adopting open source tools like and for easier data transformation and orchestration to cloud-based data warehouses and lakes like and . software engineering best practices dbt Apache Airflow Snowflake Databricks Fundamentally, this shift towards relates to how we conceptualize, design, build, and maintain data systems. Long gone are the days of siloed dashboards and reports that are generated once, rarely used, and never updated; now, to be useful at scale, , maintained, and managed for consumption by end-users across the company. agile principles data must also be productized And in order for data to be treated like a software product, it has to be as reliable as one, too. The Rise of Data Reliability In short, is an organization’s ability to deliver high data availability and health throughout the entire data lifecycle, from ingestion to the end products: dashboards, ML models, and production datasets. data reliability In the past, attention has been given to addressing different parts of the puzzle in isolation, from testing frameworks to data observability, but this approach is no longer sufficient. As any data engineer will tell you, however, data reliability (and the ability to truly treat data like a product) is not achieved in a silo. A schema change in one data asset can affect multiple tables and even fields downstream in your dashboards. A missing value can send your finance team into hysterics when they’re querying new insights in . Tableau Looker And when 500 rows suddenly turn into 5,000, it’s usually a sign that something isn’t right – you just don’t know where or how the table broke. Even with the abundance of great data engineering tools and resources that exist, data can break for millions of different reasons, from operational issues and code changes to problems with the data itself. From my own experience and after talking to hundreds of teams, there are currently two ways most data engineers discover data quality issues: testing (the ideal outcome) and angry messages from your downstream stakeholders (the likely outcome). In the same way that SREs manage application downtime, today’s data engineers must focus on reducing data downtime — periods of time when data is inaccurate, missing, or otherwise erroneous — through automation, continuous integration, and continuous deployment of data models, and other agile principles. In the past, we’ve discussed how to build ; now, we’re building on this design to reflect the next step in this journey towards good data: the data reliability stack. a quick and dirty data platform Here’s how and why to build one. Introducing: The Data Reliability Stack Nowadays, data teams are tasked with building scalable, highly performant data platforms that can address the needs of cross-functional analytics teams by storing, processing, and piping data to generate accurate and timely insights. But to get there, we also need the proper approach to ensuring that raw data is usable and trustworthy in the first place. To that end, some of the best teams are building data reliability stacks as part of their modern data platforms. In my opinion, the modern data reliability stack is made up of four distinct layers: testing, CI/CD, data observability, and data discovery, each representative of a different step in your company’s data quality journey. Testing Testing your data plays a crucial role in discovering data quality issues before it even enters a production data pipeline. With testing, engineers anticipate something might break and write logic to detect the issue preemptively. Data testing is the process of validating your organizations’ assumptions about the data, either before or during production. Writing basic tests that check for things such as uniqueness and not_null are ways organizations can test out the basic assumptions they make about their source data. It is also common for organizations to ensure that data is in the correct format for their team to work with and that the data meets their business needs. Some of the most common data quality tests include: – are any values unknown (NULL)? Null values – Did I get any data at all? Did I get too much or too little? Volume – is my data within an accepted range? Are my values in range within a given column? Distribution – are any values duplicated? Uniqueness – is profit always the difference between revenue and cost, or some other well-known facts about my data? Known invariants From my own experience, two of the best tools out there to test your data are and (as a more general-purpose tool). Both tools are open source and allow you to discover data quality issues before they end up in the hands of stakeholders. dbt tests Great Expectations While dbt is not a testing solution per se, their out-of-the-box tests work well if you’re already using the framework to model and transform your data Continuous Integration (CI) / Continuous Delivery (CD) is a key component of the software development life cycle that ensures new code deployments are stable and reliable as updates are made over time, via automation. CI/CD In the context of data engineering, CI/CD relates not only to the process of integrating new code continuously but also to the process of integrating new data into the system. By detecting issues at an early stage, ideally as early as code is committed, or new data is merged – data teams are able to reach a faster, more reliable development workflow. Let’s start with the code part of the equation. Just like traditional software engineers, data engineers benefit from using source control, for example, Github, to manage their code and transformations so that new code can be properly reviewed and version controlled. A CI/CD system, for example, or (open source), with a fully automated testing and deployment setup can create more predictability and consistency in deploying code. CircleCI Jenkins This should all sound very familiar. Where data teams encounter an extra level of complexity is the challenge of understanding how code changes might impact the dataset that it outputs. That’s where emerging tools come in that allow teams to compare the data output of a new piece of code to a previous run of that same code. By catching unexpected data discrepancies early in the process, before code is deployed, higher reliability is achieved. While representative staging or production data is required for this process, it can be highly effective. There is also another family of tools designed to help teams ship new data, rather than new code, more reliably. With or , teams are able to stage their data before publishing it for downstream consumption with git-like semantics. LakeFS Project Nessie Imagine creating a branch with newly processed data, and only committing it to the main branch if it’s deemed good! In conjunction with testing, data branching can be a very powerful way to block bad data from ever reaching downstream consumers. Data Observability Testing and versioning data pre-production is a great first step towards achieving data reliability, but what happens when data breaks in production–and beyond? In addition to elements of the data reliability stack that tackle data quality before transformation and modeling, data engineering teams need to invest in end-to-end, automated data observability solutions that can detect when data issues occur in near-real-time. Similar to Observability solutions (i.e., and ), uses automated monitoring, alerting, and triaging to identify and evaluate data quality issues. DevOps Datadog New Relic data observability Data observability is measured across five key pillars of data health and reliability: freshness, distribution, volume, schema, and lineage: Is the data recent? When was the last time it was generated? What upstream data is included and or omitted? Freshness: Is the data within accepted ranges? Is it the right format? Is it complete? Distribution: Has all the data arrived? Was data duplicated by accident? How much data was removed from a table? Volume: What is the schema, and how has it changed? Who made changes to the schema and for what reasons? Schema: For a given data asset, what are the upstream and downstream sources that are impacted by it? Who are the one’s generating this data, and who is relying on the data for decision making? Lineage: Data observability accounts for the other 80 percent of data downtime your team can’t predict (unknowns unknowns), not just detecting and alerting on data quality issues, but also providing root cause analysis, impact analysis, field-level lineage, and operational insights on your data platform. With these tools, your team will be well-equipped to not just address but also prevent similar issues from occurring in the future through historical and statistical insights into the reliability of your data. Data Discovery While not traditionally considered a part of the reliability stack, we believe data discovery is critical. One of the most common ways teams create unreliable data is by overlooking assets that already exist and creating new datasets that significantly overlap, or even contradict, existing ones. This creates confusion among consumers in the organization around which data is most relevant for a particular business question, and diminishes trust and perceived reliability. It also creates a huge amount of data debt for data engineering teams. Without good discovery in place, teams find themselves needing to maintain dozens of different datasets all describing the same dimensions or facts. The complexity alone makes further development a challenge, and high reliability extremely hard. While data discovery is an extremely challenging problem to solve, data catalogs have made inroads towards greater democratization and accessibility. For instance, we’ve witnessed how solutions like , , and can address these two concerns. Atlan data.world Stemma Simultaneously, data observability solutions can help eliminate a lot of the commonly perceived reliability issues and data debt challenges required to achieve data discovery. By pulling together metadata, lineage, quality indicators, usage patterns as well as human-generated documentation, data observability can answer questions like: What data is available to me to describe our customers? Which dataset should I trust most? How can I use that dataset? Who are the experts that can help answer questions about it? In short, these tools introduce a way for data consumers and producers to find the dataset or report they need and avoid those duplicated efforts. Democratizing this information and making it available to any person that uses or creates data is a critical piece of the reliability puzzle. The Future of Data Reliability As the data becomes more and more integral to the day-to-day operations of modern business and powers digital products, the need for reliable data will only increase, as will the technical requirements around ensuring this trust. Still, while your stack will get you some of the ways there, data reliability isn’t solved with technology alone. The strongest approaches also incorporate culture and organizational shifts to prioritize governance, privacy, and security, all three areas of the modern data stack ripe for acceleration for the next several years. Another powerful tool in your data reliability arsenal is to prioritize service-level agreements (SLAs) and other measures to track the frequency of issues relative to agreed expectations set with your stakeholders, another tried and true best practice gleaned from software engineering. Such metrics will be critical as your organization makes the move toward treating data as a product and data teams less like financial analysts more like product and engineering teams. In the meantime, here’s wishing you no data downtime – and plenty of uptime!

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