Though he’s had quite a lot of jobs within the trade, together with a stint as Arcane Asset’s chief funding officer, Eric Wall might be finest identified for shitposting and arguing with folks on Crypto Twitter.
“Identical to some other individual, I’m scrolling my Twitter feed, and then you definately see folks saying dumb shit that’s incorrect, and that’s primarily based on a lie. After which I simply argue with that individual, after which these arguments result in long-form Medium articles,” he says with only a faint hint of a Swedish accent.
“I’m simply attempting to appropriate ‘incorrectness’ within the area.”
He’s been engaged on a super-secret challenge ever since he left Arcane early final yr, so he doesn’t have an official title aside from “blockchain researcher” and board member for Ethereum scaling answer the StarkNet Basis.
After arguing with folks for years without cost, extra not too long ago, Wall has been trying to earn cash from difficult antagonists to a wager and has additionally (semi-literally) begun amassing the skulls of his enemies. “That has been paying off in tungsten cubes and precise cash,” he says.
“There’s a number of cryptocurrency communities who’ve me as their favourite hate object mainly. They wish to put you in your house. And so they have all types of idiotic concepts.”
Eric is the “prime antagonist” for Richard Coronary heart and Hex. Supply: Twitter
Wall not too long ago moved to Portugal from Sweden, attracted by the crypto-friendly regulation and the approach to life — and for security causes, after the following most outstanding crypto future in Sweden was bodily attacked in an try and steal his crypto. He explains the tax system there may be so clear that anybody can search for your internet wealth. “For those who mix that with the very fact you understand they’re into crypto, and it’s very straightforward to pick targets in Sweden,” he says.
Wall says he paid for the hire on his new flat by way of the hatred of HEXicans. He’s been at loggerheads with the HEX neighborhood since 2019 when founder Richard Coronary heart defined the scheme to him. In February final yr, he made a wager with HEXican Dixon Piper that HEX — then buying and selling at $0.18 — wouldn’t attain a brand new all-time excessive by February 2023.
Whereas he hasn’t received but (however virtually actually will, given HEX’s present worth), after HEX plunged to $0.04, he was capable of hedge the wager and lock in a revenue of $16,000 to pay for his house in Lisbon.
“I’ve this place now with simply probably the most wonderful view that I’ve ever seen in my life. I see the whole Portuguese coast from that window, from that balcony. I can have these HEXicans telling me how silly I’m whereas taking a look at that view.”
Equally, he wager Blockstream CEO Adam Again that PlanB’s “ground mannequin” was going to be fallacious — which it was. “So, Adam needed to pay up a tungsten dice together with his face engraved into the dice,” he says. He received one other wager in opposition to Bitcoin Journal’s CK Snarks that the Ethereum Merge actually would occur in 2022.
His plan is to construct up a set of 20 tungsten cubes with the faces of his vanquished foes so that individuals suppose twice about arguing. “You’re going to be fairly intimidated,” he says. “Do you wish to be the following face on this assortment?”
2021 I received a tungsten dice from Adam Again over S2F/PlanB.
2022 I received a tungsten dice from Christian Keroles (Managing Director at Bitcoin Journal) over the Merge.
2023 I plan to win in opposition to @bitcoinerrrrr over ETH withdrawals. pic.twitter.com/T2sIy2qolp
— Eric Wall (@ercwl) January 9, 2023
Bitcoin maxi to mini
Wall is a recovering Bitcoin maximalist who was as soon as generally known as the “altcoin slayer” for his brutal takedowns of altcoins throughout the period of ICOs. One of the crucial certified critics within the area — he actually wrote his Grasp’s thesis about blockchain — he can zero in on technological points and talk these issues successfully to much less technical members of the crypto neighborhood.
Again when he was declaring that the majority ICO altcoins had been centralized shitcoins with myriad safety points, he was a hero to Bitcoiners. However ever since he began busting myths about Ethereum and suggesting that Bitcoin was being left behind by good contracts, scaling and NFTs, they’ve favored him a lot much less.
As you haven’t any doubt gathered, Wall goes to nice lengths to show he’s appropriate and as soon as spent a month downloading an Ethereum node purely to bust the Bitcoiner fable that it took eight terabytes of knowledge to totally validate transactions.
“It was extraordinarily troublesome, but it surely was attainable, and it didn’t take eight terabytes of area on the exhausting drive.”
One of many huge causes for the shift from maxi to mini (he’s nonetheless a proponent of Bitcoin) is that Wall has been fascinated for years with constructing decentralized finance on an open and permissionless settlement layer. That was the important topic of his thesis, and the necessity for decentralization to carry it about was solely bolstered by seeing the constraints of permissioned blockchain platforms whereas working for Cinnober and Nasdaq. So, he was naturally drawn to the DeFi sector on Ethereum when it started to emerge in 2019.
That very same yr, it grew to become clear that Ethereum and different blockchains might scale utilizing zk-Rollups or optimistic fraud proofs, whereas Bitcoin had “virtually solely deserted” the concept of doing something with DeFi. So, he obtained behind DeFi on Ethereum.
“That made me fall out of favor with Bitcoin maximalists as a result of I used to be their golden child: the one which was speculated to slay the altcoins, not one which was speculated to say truly, there’s a use case right here although, and this technique truly does scale, and it’s not as dangerous as…
https://cointelegraph.com/journal/reformed-altcoin-slayer-eric-wall-shitposting-scaling-ethereum/