Hello!

In one of the most anticipated events of the year (in web3 land), Ethereum has successfully merged from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) - I wrote about this last week as part of the piece on Energy & Crypto. Some of the fascinating stats I came across:

• Ethereum will go from using 23 million megawatt-hours per year to just 2,600

• The network’s climate pollution will drop from 11 million tons of CO2 emissions to just 870 tons

• 88% reduction in ETH issurance post-Merge, which will make ETH deflationary moving forward (this is a good thing, because it means there’s less reason for people to sell their crypto to pay for costs)

This week’s newsletter is going back to what we know well - company deep-dives! This will be a short piece covering the newly-launched Paloma, a fast & secure messaging chain.

Anyone who follows this post knows that I’m a sucker for a good developer tool - this is one I’m excited to dive in on, without further ado, let’s get to it!

Paloma: The Messaging App for Blockchains

An obvious need for any company is to communicate with customers easily. This might be for marketing purposes (to share notifications, alerts or personalized offers) - in the 21st century, that’s best done using in-app notifications and the like.

Now, to send anything like this to users via an app, used to be notoriously difficult. There would be integration issues and certain feature elements not playing nicely with each other.

Then, along came Twilio.

Twilio was/is the darling of the web2 world - in a nutshell, they provide communication tools that developers embed within their applications. You want the ability to start a Voice feature in your application? Now you can use the Twilio integration. Want to send prompt notifications to users who signup and provide their mobile number? There’s Twilio for that.

But, web3 is different.

So, what’s the challenge with communication in web3?

There’s a ton of networks, applications and blockchains with completely differerent methods to communicate. At least with most apps and websites, there’s a common language and way to process information (basically, they all speak the same Grade-3 level of English…useful for a simpleton like me).

The challenge for developers is that they’re leaving opportunities on the table by not snapping some of these lego blocks together. If they know voice is going to be important for their product and customer, then why not validate this thinking by integrating this in with another tool?

Also, an even bigger challenge - developers building across multiple protocols are often forced to build their own custom infrastructure or use inadequate solutions that lock them into one blockchain communications approach. It takes a ton of time to build a communications approach for one blockchain, what happens when you need to create a custom approach for ten different blockchains? Nightmare.

So, what’s Paloma?

Paloma is, in their own words, a “cross-chain communications blockchain protocol whose design aims to deliver the fastest, and most secure, cross-chain communications network between any public blockchain or decentralized networking protocol.” 

In english: They make it easy to faciliate communication between different chains.

In the same way Twillio unlocked cross-carrier SMS messagnig with their developer-friendly API, Paloma has a similar Software Development Kit (SDK) to enable any developer to send complex smart contract communications across multiple blockchains.

What are some of the benefits of the Paloma protocol?

1. Fast Messages - Paloma’s validators are incentivized to deliver blockchain messages with the lowest latency possible. Developers know their messages are delivered as fast as possible to each chain.

2. Strongest Security: Paloma’s validators monitor each other’s messages and performance on the network. When validators underperform or cheat, they are punished by losing their staked assets.

3. Greatest Scale: Paloma allows any blockchain to communicate with any other blockchain via Paloma blockchain governance.

Team:

1. Taariq Lewis - Taariq (Founder) has been involved in the Blockchain space for 10+ years - he was the Founder of Bitcoin Business, a media site informing its audience on the digital asset landscape. He was also the CEO of Promise, a credit and repayment tracking protocol.

2. Jason Jacobs - Jason followed Taariq from Promise and joined Paloma / Volume as a Senior Engineering Consultant.

Conclusion:

Enabling communication tools isn’t the same in web2 - web3 has deeper levels of complexity because of how easy it will/should be to switch your data and assets from one platform to another.

Paloma has strategically positioned itself to take advantage of this, but it’ll face threats to maintain the high level of benefits it currently offers. Let’s see if it’ll keep to those standards or if trade-offs will need to be made.

🔗 Links Of The Week

👩🏼‍🎨 When Creation Goes to Zero

Fascinatingly terrifying piece on the creation costs of starting a project going to zero (like how the internet made distribution costs trend towards zero).

🇺🇸 America’s Most Remarkable Kid

Story about a unschooled genius that tragically drowned last year - a heartbreaking story but one that I’d recommend reading, if only to read about his impressive feats by the tender age of fourteen.

🔨 Discipline is Destiny: 25 Habits That Will Guarantee You Success

Not usually one for listicle articles, but Ryan Holiday is the man. Resonated with: #3 Just be about the work, #6 Keep the main thing the main thing, #12 View everything in the calm and mild light and #25 Do your best.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s edition - I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two.

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Fahim