Hello there Stranger, you seem to have stumbled upon this post by accident, well this is no accident by the way, so time for a long ass story about how this post came to be, so get comfortable and enjoy. So all these began about 8 months ago, after I invested a significant amount of time airdrop farming a project, and (lol) got absolutely nothing in return, I was so pissed at myself instead of the individuals that did this to me, I was pissed that I ended up in this situation and more pissed at myself cause, I made the realization that “these developers are no smarter than I am, well fuck them let me go build my own”, so that night I started researching about L2s and how to build one (I was moving mad), then concluded that forking an existing L1, that would save me much time, so the next week I got to work and I cloned the Aptos codebase, then I began building the codebase, and lo and behold my PC went off, after several attempts, I used Htop to see what was happening, and Htop revealed to me that the build takes too much resources, so in essence the build failed cause I had a potato PC (lol), so I started looking for alternatives and concluded to go into a single solution instead of trying to build a whole infra, I looked at current L2s and saw that the popular ones (Base, Optimism) all used a centralized sequencer, and then I stumbled upon Consensus, and went deep into Raft, I concluded that the best way to actually learn something is by building the thing, cause reading the Raft paper over and over was boring as hell, so I decided to just build a Raft implementation based off what I already know, and it turned out completely different from what I wanted, I started with “I will build a Raft implementation based off what I already know”, and I basically got carried away, it was so much fun and built “a Leader-Worker Parallelization Model for Transaction Execution” here is the link to the project DeSync-V0
After I completed that, I just started building side projects, one of which was a memecoin betting platform on solana, whereby users bet on whether, a memecoin would hit a certain price/marketcap within a period of time, I built the UI, Database(Postgres), Backend(API Fetching) and Smart Contract (Solana), it was all working well, but I had issues with the Payout Logic, and since it was written in Rust, I immediately got annoyed cause to me the syntax felt too complex and hard to follow (checkpoint #1), so I abandoned it here is the project by the way Gamblooors so after that shit show, I decide to go into smart contract auditing and security and within a month I was solving Damn Vulnerable DeFi CTFs, I really enjoyed them, here are some of the reports I wrote while learning Audit Stuff, so after a month I essentially got bored of the CTFs then decided to try my luck on real contests and oooh boy it was very bad, I basically got lost, I didn’t know how to approach them, with CTFs at least you knew what you had to do, you just have to look for ways to exploit openings, but audits were different, it required thorough review of the codebase, in the middle of all of this I had a random though that what if smart contracts could be represented mathematically, then we could use proofs to find invariant violations (checkpoint #2), mind you I hated maths, hell the last time I even did maths was say 2-3 years ago, the thought felt random but pure, so I decided to build a tool that did just that, then I began researching about it and discovered that Certora already does this exact same thing, then I saw that to implement something like this, requires a lot of foundational knowledge I couldn’t hack in 1-2 weeks of extensive research, and it would take too much time.
So I left that too, and stumbled upon game theory and loved the concept of economic bugs and from there made a realization that every single complex system, is essentially a game made up of multiple actors driven by incentives, I decided to approach audits via this lens and loved it, but unfortunately most protocols had simple and mostly rounding error bugs (maths related) then looked for areas that suited me then came across bug bounties, cause it essentially gave me a reason to understand how a protocol works and find bugs, so I decided to try Optimism’s bug bounty on Immunefi out and decided that I would build a toy implementation of op-geth (I just needed an excuse to build something while I learnt about the OP-Stack), I decided to build the toy op-geth, cause I reasoned the best way to find bugs is by building a toy of it and in the process of building certain edge cases would naturally reveal itself, so I documented everything, you can read about the OP_STACK OP_Stack and for a detailed breakdown about OP-Geth check What Can Op-Geth Do (ENTRY POINT) also here is the toy Toy OP-Geth, I used an architect-builder workflow approach to build the toy, I (the architect, provided specification documents in plain English, its way easier to articulate what you already know in a fluent language, then used an LLM to convert that to technical specification then I enforced the invariants, not by logic but by structure ie It should be impossible for state A to move to state B, if the state transition invariants are enforced at the structural level and not by logic, logic just verifies what’s said to be true), guess what language this toy was written in ? if you guessed Rust, you might as well just try your luck at the next lottery, I was like, how is it that a language I battled with a couple of months ago, feel so fluent (checkpoint #3).
After I completed the Toy, I began diving into what life really is and what our purpose is, after lots and lots of thought and thinking, I came to the conclusion that every complex system, has actors and these actors all have their designated roles, and to discover that role, one must embark on a journey of self discovery, everyone has an internal compass that tells them what they truly want and if a decision is the right thing (trust your gut they say), most times, this compass essentially provides intuitive answers to question/issues we may have, cause I realized when problem solving is done with the conscious mind, it tend to lead to lackluster solutions, but when its done by the subconscious mind, the solutions tend to be perfect, then you begin wondering where the hell did this come from, looking back at everything that has happened, you could say that they were all random individual events, but I disagree, I have been trying to make sense of what happened, the random stumbles, the intuitive answers, perfect arrival of solutions, certain catalysts that spark certain things, its all too orderly to be random, looking back at everything that happened it makes perfect sense, but trying to make sense of it moving forward that’s where it gets tough, then after further analysis of what was happening, I concluded that the stumbles the seemingly random events were not random after all, they were all done by the subconscious mind, it seems the subconscious already knows what we want before we even want it, when one is immersed in ego, it clouds the signal and replaces it with noise, throughout my stumbles and all, I was literally just having fun, it literally felt like play, if I approached a problem a certain way I would get an immediate internal feedback, if I felt that there is a much better way to approach something then there is, you just have to trust in yourself/signal that the truth would reveal itself, but not everyone can have this kind of trust in something not concrete, while researching more on what this all meant, I found that what I was experiencing had parallels in Dharma, Carl Jung’s Synchronicity, following the signal essentially means surrendering control and basically just going with the flow, one must be accepting to be a vessel, and realize that while following the signal, you aren’t doing anything, but rather its being done through you (checkpoint #4).
So after some time I stumbled on the book the Sovereign Individual (I really cannot remember how I found this book by the way), and well damn, that book is somewhat prophetic, after I concluded with the book, I began work on a brand new project, this project was very different from the rest in the sense that, the other stemmed from the fact that ‘I’ wanted to create it, but this was different, cause I didn’t even have the full concept fleshed out and I just began work on it and, it started to take shape and make sense, the project had a feel of inevitability, like it had to exist, hell I couldn’t even procrastinate even if I wanted to, the internal friction was too much to bare so I didn’t even think of resisting and just went with the flow, its very important to always have fun in what you do, once something feels like work then you may be doing something wrong, alignment matters, when the soul/mind is aligned with a task the body responds accordingly, the discomfort you feel is your body telling you “Yo, you may be going about this the wrong way”, so what I ended up creating was, A Decentralized Economic Realm with Blockchain-Based Governance and Peer-to-Peer Transactions, DeSync
This entire write up basically sums up a journey of 8 months, there really is so much fun in finding things out, its very important for us, humans to embark on that painful and very uncertain journey of self-discovery, its necessary for us to discover our individual role in the complex and beautiful system we call the Universe, the truth appears in different forms, different religions, different field of studies, if you strip them of all the noise and view them from first principles they all point to the same fundamental thing, you literally cannot connect the dots looking forward only backwards, its your duty to find that out, I followed the signal and that’s what led me here, I wont have done any of these if I didn’t take that blind leap of faith, what’s stopping you ?
“There is no greater disservice to mankind by not helping humanity in ways only you can”