While it's been an epic few years at Helium, I couldn't resist the call of another migration-level challenge. Those of you who know me know I can't resist chewing some glass. As such, I am going to join @DriftProtocol team and help them relaunch. Why? Because I genuinely believe that Drift provides a valuable set of primitives to the ecosystem and is worth saving. This is also the best path to funding user recovery; we must build something so useful it can generate the revenue needed for the recovery pool. Tall order. The landscape has shifted. Trust is eroded. Things that are worthwhile are rarely easy, and this is no exception. I fully acknowledge I could be applying for a job at Wendy’s in 6 months. Everyone has forks in the road in their careers, easier paths vs harder paths. I have chosen the harder path at every turn; and it has paid off. Not every swing hits, but even in failure you massively level up your skillset. My focus is on improving the security stance of Drift, getting it relaunched, then turning it into the best perps exchange in existence: First, that means working with STRIDE to ensure we're following the best multisig and opsec practices. I won’t be taking this endeavor alone, the chads at @asymmetric_re and @osec_io have been incredibly helpful and continue to be deeply involved in auditing both new code and new operational practices. Security does not come from one individual, it comes from cultivating a culture of security and having outside professionals continuously verify that work. Second, I am overhauling the codebase (within reason). Over the years it has picked up a large set of features, many of which no longer need to be used. The protocol has solid bones, but tight coupling has led to a buildup of tech debt that is easier to fix during this downtime. Third, I want to build multiple levels of security and circuit breakers into the protocol. DeFi protocols must be structured to limit the ability of a single incident or contagion to create havoc. I will be thinking from the perspective of defense-in-depth; there should be layers of protection to prevent incidents like the April 1st hack. The program should reject suspicious changes even if they come from an operational multisig. Lastly, and more long term, I want Drift to become the most compelling perps exchange on the market. I am very much looking forward to entering the arena that is perps on Solana. It is an honor to be competing with the chads on all the other teams (Phoenix, Bulk, Gm, Imperial, Pacifica, etc). Steel sharpens steel, and I eagerly await the firehose of knowledge over these next few months. Solana needs as many shots on goal as it can get. One (or many) of us will win.

Help me beat Vibhu Use the code BP26-NOAH It's not a working code. You will pay full price and you will like it. For the culture.

My Dad forced us to watch 2001 Space Odyssey and it was one of the most boring movies I’ve ever seen. Forcing my children to play Halo campaigns will be my contribution to passing this tradition down.

There’s nothing quite like the vitriol you get for doing something nice that you don’t have to, and then deciding to stop. How dare you stop giving us free labor! Work damn you!

Hey Trump, there’s oil and nuclear weapons in North Korea.

Every production codebase looks like the one on the left, even pre AI. The only ones that look like the right are either (a) side/passion projects that nobody uses or (b) thoroughly optimized rewrites of an extremely well-defined product that doesn't require frequent changes

> Birth the greatest blockchain known to man > Release a phone > Forever known as Phone Guy Toly down horrendous.

OSS works...

We are live! Improved opsec. Contracts re-audited from scratch. I know this has been a long time coming for those of you impacted by the exploit. Every day the exchange was offline was revenue that could have been directed to the recovery fund. I personally appreciate your patience. In the wake of the incident, the last thing I wanted to do was rush security for the sake of earlier revenue, so we took our time and did things properly. This is the biggest step towards recovery. More announcements coming on the DFX launch and recovery pool. For now, the protocol is collecting fees which will be added to the recovery pool once it is live. It is a long journey to recovery, but every journey starts with the first step.

1/ The whitelist is off. Velocity Beta is now open to everyone. wBTC, wETH, SOL, and USDT count as collateral in one account. 2 bps, the lowest tier we charge, for a limited time. Trade Now → velocity.exchange

San Diego is not a real place. I love it here

⚠️⚠️⚠️ IF YOU BUILD A V0, V1, V2 PROGRAM (WHICH YOU MAY DO WITH YOUR CURRENT TOOLCHAIN IF U HAVENT UPGRADED RECENTLY) AND TRY TO DEPLOY, YO SHIT GONNA GET REJECTED AT DEPLOY TIME UPGRADE TO THE LATEST TOOLCHAIN AND MAKE SURE UR ENTIRE TEST SUITE USES V3 BEST TO FIGURE THIS OUT NOW AND NOT WHEN U NEED EMERGENCY UPGRADE

A personal note, not a Velocity update. I had just moved to nyc when Drift got hacked, ready to take Drift and my career to the next level. Instead I spent five months in fight mode, on calls with partners, investors, traders and friends, some of whom lost everything, putting out fires every day and trying to get the exchange back up and get people to come back. I couldn't undo what happened, all I could do was tell people we weren't giving up and would keep finding a way forward. There's a guilt that doesn't go away. People I talked to lost their jobs, their savings, everything they'd built, and I still have mine. That's why I'm not taking this job lightly. Now the audit's done and we're live in beta. I know coming back is a hard ask for anyone who lost money on Drift and I don't blame anyone who says no, but I'm grateful to everyone who's said yes. I can't promise how fast recovery goes but we'll keep going. Product ideas that generate revenue: DMs open. I'm left curved (our lawyers aren't)

PSA to those of you regularly using new products: Audits cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take weeks to complete. Self-bootstrapped startups can't even afford them. There's actively a disincentive for your favorite protocols to stay on top of security, as it impedes their ability to iterate and find pmf. Do they pay $50k to audit a new feature that it turns out nobody uses? Make sure what you're using has been audited by someone you trust, and that what's running on mainnet is the code that was audited (verified builds, open source required). If you can't verify that's fine, but don't put all your eggs in that one basket. Solana Foundation has a program that provides audits for anyone with more than $10m TVL, which should definitely help.

Going to address this head on. We did not just audit the refactor diff from Drift to Velocity. We audited the *entire* codebase. This couldn't be further from a rush job. If we wanted to rush it, we could have just audited the diff, called the old code fine, and launched months ago. We wanted to err on the side of safety, which meant re-auditing the full codebase. This is expensive, and takes a long time. Drift is one of the largest Solana programs in existence with tens of thousands of lines of code. But it was the right thing to do, because safety is our priority. Yes, it's a lot of findings. But relative to the amount of code, it makes sense. Most findings were in pre-refactor code, and most of them would not result in LoF in any real situation. It was a herculean effort to (1) review this massive monolith, thanks auditors! (2) fix every issue no matter how small. That is why the launch has been pushed back so far.

Hi, I’m 9 Corgi from USA 🇺🇸 I bark at the wind Would love to connect with more builders that can help terrorize my parents

AI agents being overly verbose is a psyop to make you burn extra tokens when your next agent consumes the previous ones slop. They can’t keep getting away with it!

I bought my SMB for 300 SOL years ago and will only sell it for 1000 SOL. Do with that information what you will.

In a world where price discovery happens on-chain, CLOB quoting fundamentally cannot compete. The calculus is simple: a CLOB quoter listens to on-chain state from off-chain, then pushes new quotes to the chain. That's a full round trip of latency. The PropAMM pays 0 latency.

Huge milestone. Fully audited and ready to go. Big thanks to the folks at @asymmetric_re and @osec_io for the herculean effort of reviewing from scratch what is probably one of the largest feature-rich programs on Solana. For those who have been asking why this took so long, you can have a look at the repo now. We've made a number of changes and improvements, as well as combing over the existing code for safety. You cannot rush safety, and I pushed back on the "wen!" comments for precisely this reason. Velocity needs to win back your trust. Part of that is a commitment to doing things the right way. Now that we have a strong foundation, excited to improve Velocity to have the best market microstructure. Step 1. Relaunch what we had. Step 2. Make it extremely competitive with new innovations. Onward! 🫡

PropAMMs and CLOBs can and should coexist. CLOBs are great for traders. Users placing orders. Without a CLOB, there's no place for resting limit orders with price-time priority PropAMMs are great for MMs because they can cheaply quote Soon™ for perps, cooking something 🙂