In this episode, we explore Jon’s journey into crypto and our mutual passion for research and the writing process. We then give an overview over the key areas of crypto infrastructure today. Finally, we zoom into rollup decentralization roadmaps, and Jon shares a controversial new thesis about sequencer decentralization.
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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:02:42 - Interview start
00:03:44 - Jon's work week
00:08:04 - ChatGPT & writing
00:10:57 - Jon's start in crypto
00:14:45 - How to pick things to work on
00:17:08- Outsider's perspective on crypto
00:19:05 - Jon's research process
00:22:00 - Jon's proudest moment in crypto
00:23:06 - Crypto Infrastructure overview
00:29:58 - Why crypto infrastructure is interesting
00:35:57 - Rollup decentralization overview
00:42:44 - Challenges decentralizing the sequencer
00:47:46 - Ethereum vs Cosmos approach to governance & decentralization
00:53:35 - User ability to opt out
00:56:37 - Staking vs. governance deciding sequencers
01:08:31 - L3s
01:13:34 - Superchain
01:16:38 - Summary of rollup decentralization
01:21:08 – Outro
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Hasu - https://twitter.com/hasufl
Jon Charbonneau - https://twitter.com/jon_charb
UCC2 - https://twitter.com/UCC2_xyz
Website - https://ucc2.xyz
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Disclaimer: The material and information presented in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and are not the views of any entity or other person with whom the speaker is affiliated, including, without limitation, DBA Crypto, LLC. The “DBA Crypto” name and all forms thereof are the sole property of its owner, and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product,

Whether you are an old or new listener, I want to spend a few minutes on what you can expect from this show going forward, what's going to change

Uncommon Core has always been a passion project of mine.

It was a podcast that was about me taking the position of a student who asks simple questions about the big and timeless ideas in crypto.

Sometimes I did that with expert guests from the industry, but usually with my former co-host Sue Su.

Now, I don't know whether Sue's firm, 3arrows Capital, has misrepresented their solvency in 2022, nor if they have borrowed money while already insolvent.

I was never close with Su personally, nor did I have any insights into 3 Arrows.

I just know that we did some great episodes together for you guys, and that I learned a lot from them.

By late 2021, Sue and I had been drifting apart for a while, as my interests were increasingly moving away from markets and investing towards technology and becoming a builder myself.

I made a big leap by joining Flashbots, an organization formed to mitigate the harmful effects from MEV on public blockchains, as well as becoming an advisor to the Lido DAO.

And now I am completing the circle by bringing Uncommon Core back with a new concept and a new co-host.

The new focus of Uncommon Core will be on exploring the technology and incentives that make public blockchains work under the hood, with a special attention paid to the 3 big fields of MEV, blockchain security and the roll-up ecosystem.

I will be joined by my new co-host John Charbonneau, the co-founder and managing partner of DBA, a research-driven crypto investment firm based in New York.

Like me, John is deeply passionate about understanding and improving the infrastructure that makes crypto work.

Together, we will speak with some of the incredible builders and researchers who are continually pushing the frontier to make the mass adoption of crypto possible.

What won't change is the values that made Uncommon Core successful for 37 episodes and way over 1 million downloads.

Deep curiosity, intellectual honesty, and the desire to break down complex ideas together.

We hope that you will join us on this journey into the heart of the machine.

What is a good way to start a podcast after a 1 and a half year hiatus.

John, it's really good to have you and to be doing this with you.

It is weird to be on here on the other side of this now, considering this was the podcast that I was listening to and I just got into crypto.

I had been thinking about restarting the podcast a few times and you were 1 of the very few people I could imagine doing it with.

I was hinting at it in the intro, but my interests had been kind of shifting gradually more and more away from investing and trading and kind of market psychology and DeFi as well, frankly, much more to the infrastructure side.

And so I'm really glad that we have the opportunity to dive deeper into these topics together.

I was the person who was always liking those tweets of waiting for you to restart the podcast.

What do you spend your time on in crypto in an average week?

So average day, I probably spend way too much time on Twitter.

That is honestly a lot of actually how I found a lot of stuff at first, particularly early on.

You just kind of find that as like you start to filter through and find all your information there.

I'd say a lot of my day is honestly just Going through stuff that I find on there different research and reading probably less than I would like Like during the meet during the week.

You definitely have a lot more busy work than you like to I like generally My weekends are the times that I get to do the work that like I actually like to do Like All of the types of work that I like, all of the longer form writing and stuff like that in particular, you just kind of really need to sit down and just block out time to do that kind of stuff.

You need to have a few days aside to just be able to turn everything off.

Usually during the week is when I'm doing a lot of just talking to people about different ideas that I'm working on.

And then the weekends slash end of the week are the times where I'm just gonna go into a rabbit hole for 3 days and not talk to anyone and have 100 tabs open in my computer and just start writing and reading through everything.

Is writing for you an important part of processing whatever you're reading, connecting the dots?

I like it's that it's 1 of the things that I actually figured out pretty early in crypto.

It's not something that I actually used to do.

When I was in school or my previous jobs, I wish I kind of knew this in hindsight, but writing works just incredibly well for me.

So much of what I would do starting out when I was like crypto was like a hobby kind of thing.

It was just, you just read stuff, you listen to podcasts and you listen to it.

You think you understand stuff really, really well.

Um, and then the second you try to go explain this to someone else, like right after the fact you realize, Oh, I understood probably 1% of that.

It makes sense as the person is saying it, and when you try to say it back, none of it's stuck in there.

Writing is the only way, in particular, really long-form stuff.

I really need to just build an idea and force myself to go through everything to learn it.

It just forces you to turn over just every leaf possible in whatever this idea is.

When you just, you are looking at everything possible on this topic and then you send that out to a bunch of people before I finish it.

Most of the stuff that I write, I'd say I do 95% of it like by myself.

And then the last 5% that changes when I send out the report to like, a couple dozen different people, that last few percent probably 10x is my understanding of the topic.

It makes the and makes the reports significantly better at that 0,

Yeah, it just like makes a huge difference

Yeah, for those who don't know John, John is 1 of the most prolific technical writers in crypto, you know, you've written about Ethereum's roadmap and rollups and sequencer decentralization and MEV and so many different topics.

And so you're saying when we read 1 of your reports then we are basically going through the, we're basically replaying your thought process while you were exploring these topics on your own?

Like I think it's actually helped me a lot as far as being able to write decently that I've come into crypto pretty recently and just don't have a lot of background.

I think it is just inherently really hard to write about a complex topic and explain it simply.

If you just know this thing too well and have a really dense understanding in 1 area.

And then what you write comes off as very academic and for experts and in a specific way.

It's much easier to write, explain it like I'm 5 type stuff on complicated stuff if you have to, When I'm writing it, I'm just learning it from beginning to end.

That is 90% of the reason that I write stuff is it is entirely selfish and personal.

It is because that's just like how I learn the thing.

I think it's just so helpful for people to try to do more of that.

Like For me personally, that has been the majority of how I've learned everything in crypto.

Are you using ChetCPT or any other models yet in your writing?

I hear a lot now that actually the rise of AI and the kind of the democratization of the availability of it is making writing a less important skill.

I feel like that may not be something that you would agree with, right?

So it might lessen the impact of putting it out there, particularly if, like, if chat GPT can start to write, you know, something like I'm writing, then yeah, less people will read what I'm writing because there'll be better stuff out there.

So that certainly seems plausible in the longer term.

That being said, if I had to, at the end of all of my reports, just click Delete, light them on fire, and throw them away, I'd still write every single report and do them the exact same way.

The getting to put it out there and have people read it and meet people is the extra bonus.

of it is just do the work to learn it yourself.

That is the only way to force yourself to make sure that I have looked at everything on this topic that I possibly want to look at and processed it and looked through all the holes and put it together.

Yeah, ChatGPT will probably be better than me at writing 1 day, but just reading what it writes is not going to help you learn the thing in the same way as just like actually just going through the motions yourself.

Like you've got to go through the motions at least personally.

Like if I have to think through some topic in a structure, it doesn't matter at all what it is.

It's whether it's personal or it's professional.

to 30 documents per day, and they can be very short, right?

But it's just like putting different ideas on paper and connecting them together.

There's this idea, of course, I mean, now, by now, it's almost like a part of pop culture, this idea of like the second brain having this, you know, archive where you put all of your notes and you can connect them to each other.

You kind of write these small atomic nodes that are self-sustaining, and then you link them to each other.

And by the process of actually linking 2 nodes together, you also start linking them in your head.

And it's crazy how that can form kind of new neural connections and kind of increase the neuroplasticity of your brain.

So I would say writing is the number 1 important part of learning.

I mean, there is a reason why I want to talk about this topic.

I mean, you actually joined crypto relatively recently, right?

So I started in crypto is like right at the end of March, just over a year ago.

I basically started reading about it over the year prior.

Like I was part of the COVID generation of crypto.

Prior to COVID, I just never looked at crypto seriously.

It was just my only experience with it was friends who were really bad at day trading on it and managing to lose money and like bull markets on it.

Then like early COVID was when I started to pay attention to it.

And then over 2021, by the end of the year, it was just like an obsessive hobby.

So then I quit to go, finally go do it in

And it's funny how some people can, you know, just come into crypto and drink from the firehose, an insane amount and go to the top very quickly.

I think I was 1 of them as well when I joined.

And That's why I see so many parallels, because I think we have a very similar style of learning.

And it's 1 that has a lot of feedback loops built in, at least for myself, right?

And when I write, it allows me to publish.

And when I publish, it allows me to A, get a big dopamine boost, which is 1 thing, but it also allows you to build a brand and a network.

And having that network, you were saying earlier, like 90% of your learning happens when you send your article to a dozen different people after it's already done.

And having this network allows you to do that, right?

It allows you to ask any question to anyone.

And for me, my, I think my research process is a little different.

Like I schedule like interviews with people way earlier and ask them questions way earlier because I'm not as technical as you, I think, primarily.

So I can't chew through these topics as far myself as you can.

And so network for me was always super important.

And that's why this virtual cycle between learning and writing and publishing and network and then repeat.

This is basically what my whole kind of crypto career was built on in the first couple of years.

Yeah, like this is realistically the whole reason that I got into crypto and like, at least as a job.

It was a lot of fun throughout 2021 as like clearly a fun hobby.

I just wasn't at the, okay, I'm going to go quit my real job and go do this magic internet money job for like the first year.

The main thing that did convince me is that I started to realize a little bit of like what we're talking about now, like kind of gets to is I think the main thing that particularly as a new person that like makes you able to like get by reasonably well in crypto, it's not like a background of 10 years of experience and a depth of existing technical knowledge and whatnot.

It's honestly just understanding how to make the process work in your favor, of just understanding the workflow, particularly for a field that there's just so much, there's always just too much information.

The thing that is going to get you to stay on top of that is not 10 years of pre-existing knowledge, it's understanding just what is the process that works for me to be able to process this, and focus my time and resources in the right place, and work on that, and get ahead on that thing quickly.

And that's just a personal process, and using the people around you, that kind of thing.

It's not like any existing technical knowledge for the most part, which is like, it makes it a lot of fun.

As someone who is coming in, it's just completely new.

You legitimately can come in and just like actually be pretty good at what you're doing, which is just like a lot of fun if you focus in the right places.

How do you pick on a topic and then focus on that?

So sometimes it's like oddly obvious to me.

Like the first big report that I did, it was shocking to me that it just didn't exist.

It was like right after I had started at Delphi at the beginning of last year, and it was like the big Ethereum report.

That was the thing that I wanted to do right away.

It was very clear that, OK, Ethereum is clearly the most important thing that everyone is building around, everyone is building on top of.

And yet it also seems really clear that when you speak to like 99.9% of people, the roadmap is just too big at this point for most people to fit it inside of 1 brain.

It's kind of scattered in different places.

If I understand the MEV side of things really well, I probably don't understand what's this whole new Dank Sharding thing.

And it was kind of scattered all over the place.

As someone who just like, I came in from the outside, this is the most important thing.

And there's no way for anyone to just like have a comprehensive understanding of this in 1 place.

Like it was the thing that I knew that I wanted to read really, really badly.

And I was like, this is helpful for a lot of other people if I'm coming in and it's the most important thing and I really want to read this thing.

Like it was that, it was like, this is the thing that I would have loved to have in front of me right now.

I would say from there going forward, some of them kind of just like naturally follow on like what you're already working on.

And that's when it becomes easier to like find things that are on the edge of like, what is the interesting new idea?

Like, you're probably going to be more likely to find that if you are a quote unquote expert, whatever focus in an area.

The next new interesting NFT, PFP project, whatever that pops up, I'm not going to be the person who finds it because I don't understand the first thing about any of those.

But To the extent that there's an interesting new idea in restaking or MEV or whatever it is or shared sequencing, I'm reasonably likely going to be 1 of the first people to be on top of that kind of thing because it just naturally follows from what you've been doing.

But sometimes it's just the very obvious thing like the Ethereum report.

It was like shocking to me it didn't exist.

Because when an outsider comes in and learns about crypto, they can see these things that are very obvious to an outsider, but not to the people who are already in crypto.

And I mean, that there should be a certain report is 1 example of that.

Another, I actually had the same realization when I came into crypto And I thought, I mean, why is nobody talking about how kind of this whole Bitcoin and Ethereum system, I mean, it's basically all a social contract between different people, you know, and the technology is just an instantiation of this social contract in this community.

And there's clearly the social layer that, you know, decides what should happen to the protocol.

And also when there's a bug that kind of determines, you know, how it should be fixed.

And if there's a fork, it determines which chain is canonical and all of these things and it was like when I came into crypto still in in 2017 you know it was heresy to say that there's a social layer in Bitcoin.

I mean and if you think about it today like to anybody who comes in new and they just look at the facts, you know, that are laid out, it's so obvious, right?

And so I felt almost like a fraudster, you know, just like writing this stuff down, you know, because It was so obvious.

And you know, that the narrative also behind, you know, that kind of make up the community and the composition of the community can change and that way, like different narratives can dominate.

And that was kind of the other big article that I wrote in the beginning, visions of Bitcoin with Nick Carter.

And yeah, some of the stuff was so obvious that it's, it's really funny that that it doesn't exist.

Yeah, it's a kind of blindness that you develop when you're too deep in crypto.

And that's why renewal of communities and like fresh blood coming in from the outside is so important.

The other thing that I wanted to dive in, John, is how do you how do you do the research process for an article like, for example, the 1 that you wrote on Ethereum's roadmap?

Because are you using, are you working a lot with kind of primary sources?

Or are you, you know, reading a lot of kind of secondary sources?

What is your personal approach of working?

I'd say the timing of some of it has changed since I started to now, thankfully.

Like I can just generally do them more quickly.

But I mean, for the Ethereum 1 and the kind of 1 or 2 after that in particular, I would say the majority of it was go into a hole for a month and ignore everyone around me and try to ignore like every other responsibility I possibly have and just go into this thing and put all like get every last thing possibly checked.

I mean, for that, I was starting from absolutely, like literally explain it like I'm fives, to understand stuff like KZG commitments in there.

Like I was looking up what is a polynomial when I started that.

I was like, oh yeah, it's this equation thing that I remember learning in high school or whatever, literally watching Khan Academy videos and stuff like that.

So starting from absolute ground up, you end up with 1, 000 tabs open on your computer.

And I would say That is the normal, what my computer actually looks like, is Google Doc on 1 side and just 1, 000 tabs open on the other side.

And this is everything that I need to go through on this topic.

It will take me however long it takes me.

And it is going through that and then just synthesizing and building as I go.

And then once you're most of the way of, OK, I've kind of checked the boxes, thought through most of the stuff that's out there and that I've gotten to where I want to get to, there's always the edge of the map of, OK, I understand the stuff that's out there, but the stuff that makes it really interesting and adds that extra understanding is talking to the people at the end to the stuff that probably isn't written down yet and is still floating around in their heads.

And that's the stuff that makes it really interesting is having all of those conversations at the end of the report.

I would just say it's generally a little bit shorter usually, where usually I won't need to like pull myself off for a month or so to make 1 of those reports now.

Like usually it'll be like a week or 2 or something like that.

But I very much split up my time into when I'm trying to, when I'm doing 1 of their ports, it is I will spend 90% of my time on that thing for a week or whatever it is.

And just try to just ignore everything around me and the world outside.

And then the next few weeks I go back to, okay, I have a job and I need to do all these other things that I was ignoring for the last couple of weeks.

And then after a few weeks, I just have an itch to like, okay, I want to sit down and just like, go all the way in on something else and then like, pick the next thing.

What did you do in crypto that you are most proud of?

It was the Vitalik quote tweet on the Ethereum report that I did.

You're most proud not of the report, but of the quote tweet.

And that is still the pin thing on my Twitter, is that.

Particularly at the time that I was the most proud of was I'd been in crypto for a month.

And all of the people that I was talking to about that, they were like celebrities to me at that point, in the nerdiest way possible, those were the celebrities to me.

So having been in crypto for a month, and I just spent a month on this big Ethereum report and then Fatal1k retweeted it and was like, oh, this is really good.

That was definitely the most excited I was, especially right after starting.

So I want to kick it into second gear here.

Okay, we covered a lot of kind of the personal.

I think we are getting a sense of who you are and what you're interested in.

And now I would like to talk a little bit about the topic of this podcast.

So we got together because we both love thinking about crypto infrastructure.

So I would like you to just map it out with me.

What are the things, what are the key areas in crypto infrastructure that exist today that you are excited about?

Yeah, there's kind of a few, I'd say, big buckets that most stuff falls into.

And the boundaries of all of those things are really loose and they kind of all overlap with each other.

1 obvious 1, particularly for you, is the whole MEV slash supply chain.

And it gets fuzzy because there is still no definition of what MEV is, and everything is kind of MEV or not, and we're not really sure.

So a lot of the protocol level, like thinking about like enshrined PBS, like, okay, how do we address this thing?

Obviously for you guys with Suave over at Flashbots, like trying to approach it very differently than everyone else's today.

And then kind of applying a lot of that logic over to roll ups is a lot of what I'm spending my time on right now.

So thinking about, OK, we've got all these new blockchains that we've kind of decided, like this is the way that everyone is going to use blockchains for the most part of the future is kind of the Ethereum vision.

And it's still super early stages of, okay, what do these things look like?

Like, should they look like Ethereum when they start thinking about decentralization and per-proposal builder separation and whatnot?

Or should they look just completely different and have completely different trade-offs?

See all Uncommon Core 2.0 transcripts on Youtube

The Reboot