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meme10/23meme

Setting the bar high for the BONKUJI vault 🤝 Reply to @zoogieNFT: Just removed a whole bunch of slabs from the @BONKUJI_inu vault. From now on, my goal is to ensure that any modern card (2016 and onwards) added to the BONKUJI x Cozy gachas are psa 10 only I only want cards I’d collect myself in these gachas and I’m def a psa 10 guy 😬

10/100·CNeutral+1

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meme10/23meme

AI demand is a barbell, with the labs on one end and enterprise cost-cutting on the other. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the biggest market sits in the middle, and inference is still "an order of magnitude too expensive" to reach it. "On one end of the barbell are the AI labs who are consuming gobs and gobs of compute, unlike anything I've seen. And then a few runaway apps, ChatGPT, Claude Code, things like that." "On the other end of the barbell are enterprises who are largely using AI for cost avoidance and productivity, so automating customer service or fraud or business process automation." "In the middle of the barbell are the current production workloads of enterprises, many of which are using AWS and using inference today, but I would say the overwhelming majority of which still aren't in any pervasive way." "And that I think is gonna be the largest absolute segment of AI usage." "The cost of inference has come down quite a bit in the last few years, but it's still an order of magnitude too expensive, in my opinion, for it to be used as pervasively as possible." "If you're asking enterprises to rewrite their applications that use CPU today with AI accelerators... the amount of incremental benefit they have to get is a much higher bar to want to rewrite those apps. But if you can take the cost of inference down, that bar is much lower, and all applications are gonna be better and smarter and more capable." @ajassy Quoted @a16z: Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than early AWS. Jassy joins a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story. They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today. 0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021 1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail 3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth 5:20 When leadership principles clash 9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI 13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works 15:44 Why the US must build data centers 20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell 23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers 28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium 33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI 37:15 Why AI means smaller teams 42:13 AI's underrated risk: security 46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain 53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI 56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space YouTube: https://t.co/zE8sSmmO6N @ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg

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twitter10/23meme

Supreme Court Allows New Hampshire To Bar Student IDs At Polls For Midterms https://www.zerohedge.com/political/supreme-court-allows-new-hampshire-bar-student-ids-polls-midterms

5/100·CNeutral

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Twitter10/22news

Breakpoint Bound: Getting Around London, Finding Scran, and Some Sights to See (Part 3)

Part 3/5 in the @SolanaEvents guide to thriving (and surviving) at Breakpoint London 2026
Your flights are booked, room locked in, entry requirements sorted, and bags are packed; Article 2 cleared that runway. Now letâ€™s tackle getting from arrivals to the venue floor, finding solid places for scran (food) between the conference and side events, and navigating the city without wasting hours deciphering routes or sitting in transit.
Consider this your introductory playbook for everything between the hotel lobby and Olympia (the main venue for Breakpoint 2026), along with a few solid reasons to explore further. Weâ€™re not in the tour guide business, so this isnâ€™t a sightseeing list; itâ€™s on-the-ground intelligence so your time in London for Breakpoint also feels like you visited London.
Getting In: Heathrow + Gatwick
Most likely youâ€™re flying into Heathrow or Gatwick. Either way, compare the whole journey to your hotel, not just the airport train: changes, walking, luggage, all of it.
The fastest train on paper isn't automatically your best route.
From Heathrow
Elizabeth line: The balanced pick for heading into central London and beyond, with services through to east London. The Lizzy line deserves its praise, but check whether it takes you toward your hotel or past it.
Heathrow Express: The Paddington speedrun: about 15 minutes from Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3, with extra time from Terminal 5. Compare the fare and onward journey before paying for speed you might lose on the next connection.
Piccadilly line: Heathrow describes Piccadilly as its most cost-effective rail route into London. If you're based around Hammersmith or Earlâ€™s Court, check this before defaulting to a trip through Paddington.
Black cab or rideshare: worth comparing if you're exhausted, carrying a lot, need accessible transport, or can split the ride. Just don't assume door-to-door means quicker. Check the live journey time as well as the quote.
If you want to do this on a budget, then get the Piccadilly line two stops to Hounslow West and then Uber from there. It will save you the airport surcharge (takes a Â£40 fare to Â£15).
From Gatwick
Gatwick Express: Non-stop to Victoria in about 30 minutes, then take the District line to West London
Southern: Serves Victoria and Clapham Junction, making it worth checking for a west London destination.
Thameslink: Serves London Bridge, Blackfriars, Farringdon, and St Pancras, among other stops; compare it if your base is farther east or north.

Beating the Jet Lag
You may not have two spare days to feel human again. Front-load your schedule lightly, especially if you're landing straight into a week of sessions and side events.
Shift before you fly! Nudge bedtime and wake-up time toward London time before departure; small adjustments beat arriving completely out of sync.
Hydrate like it's your job. Drink water, move around during the flight, and go easy on alcohol and caffeine. The welcome drinks can wait.
Get outside during the day. Natural light helps your body clock adjust, and switching to local sleeping hours helps too, obviously. Drop your bags, then try a jaunt around the neighborhood rather than immediately disappearing under the duvet.
Give yourself permission to skip the first late-night thing. Showing up functional beats showing up everywhere.
Use the Tube. Uber Is the Backup Plan.
For this trip, make the London Tube your first route check. Don't reflexively order rideshare for every coffee, dinner, or side event, especially when you're moving across town. Save rideshare for luggage, accessibility needs, or a late connection (if you're out past 1am, Uber home and skip the night buses). Less time in transit means more of your Breakpoint.
Tap, ride, repeat
Paying as you go with contactless keeps everyday travel simple, with daily caps based on your journeys and zones; the travel day runs from 4:30am to 4:29am the next morning. Most lines stop around midnight, with Night Tube on some lines on Fridays and Saturdays. You don't need to become a fare-system scholar, but these rules matter:
Use the same card or device throughout. Your physical card, phone, and watch count separately, even when theyâ€™re linked to the same bank account. Alternatively, you can get an Oyster card.
Tap in AND out on rail journeys. On buses, tap in only; missed rail taps can trigger maximum fares.
Don't assume one cap covers everything. Non-tube lines like Heathrow Express and Gatwick Express journeys don't count toward TfL's daily or weekly caps. Check airport fares separately!

A few habits that make life easier
Check the live route. Use Google Maps, Citymapper, or Transport for London (TfL) before leaving and check the last train before committing to â€œone moreâ€� at the mixer or pub. Breakpoint runs Sundayâ€“Tuesday, so don't bank on the Friday/Saturday Night Tube.
Dodge the busiest windows when you can. As a planning rule of thumb, try to avoid major central interchanges around 7â€“9am and 4:30â€“6:30pm on weekdays. Give yourself breathing room rather than scheduling a cross-city sprint.
Compare the walk or a Lime bike. Sometimes the best connection is your feet or the pedals, not a ride with two changes. Between central London venues, a bike is often fastest: London Hacker House to Soho is 10â€“15 mins by bike and 20+ on the Tube.
Be easy to share a train with. Let people off first, move away from the doors, and get your backpack out of somebody else's face.
Know Your Lines, Not Just Your Neighborhood
â€œHead eastâ€� isn't a route. Pin the actual venue, check your nearest station, and look at the number of changes before deciding something is convenient.
Olympia: the station is right there
Kensington (Olympia) station is beside the venue, served by the Overground's Mildmay line and Southern rail services. These are the useful options:
Mildmay line, light blue: Use the Clapham Junction branch for Kensington (Olympia), rather than assuming every Mildmay train goes there.
District line, green: West Kensington or Baronâ€™s Court plus a walk is a practical approach; direct District trains to Kensington (Olympia) are limited, mainly running at weekends, with extra weekday service for some major events.
Piccadilly line, dark blue: Hammersmith is another approach, followed by a walk or bus to the venue. Check live routes and station works before traveling.
â†’ A familiar line name isn't enough. Check the destination on the train.
Beyond Olympia:
Where to Eat, Drink + Get Some London XP
Article 2 covered where to sleep. Now work outward from Olympia: stay nearby for a quick reset, head toward central London for a proper afternoon out, or make Soho the evening plan. These are options, not a checklist. Nobody needs sightseeing FOMO on top of conference FOMO.
Kensington / Holland Park: a breather beyond the hall. Check out design and architecture exhibits at the Design Museum on Kensington High Street, or duck into Holland Park to clear your head in Kyoto Garden. Make the park a daylight plan; gates close around dusk. When hunger hits, the Churchill Arms serves up solid Thai dishes inside a classic flower-filled pub.
Hammersmith / Shepherd's Bush: pubs, gigs, practical errands. The Dove in Hammersmith has cozy rooms, cask beer, and Thames views. For entertainment, check the Eventim Apollo or O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire; Westfield London covers shopping and food when the group can't agree. Pick the pub for a small catch-up, the gig for a night off from talking shop.
South Kensington: culture, then something good to eat. The V&A is the art, design, and performance stop; or explore the Natural History Museum or Science Museum. Nearby, CERU serves Eastern Mediterranean food just off Old Brompton Road. Give this a real lunch break or spare afternoon, rather than speedrunning a museum between calls. It also works when the weather kills the park plan.
Chelsea / King's Road: the polished afternoon-to-evening option. Think boutiques along King's Road, contemporary art at the Saatchi Gallery, or a performance at the Royal Court Theatre. For dinner, the Cadogan Arms on King's Road does elevated pub classics, including fish and chips, pies, and steaks. Check the menu and book for a group.
Soho / Chinatown / Covent Garden: dinner that turns into a night out. Soho picks include Kiln for Thai grills and claypots and Bubala for meat-free Middle Eastern small plates. Bar Termini on Old Compton Street does coffee and Italian aperitivo in a tiny space: think two-person catch-up, not the entire TG group chat. Chinatown and Covent Garden are within walking distance, with West End entertainment in the mix. Kiln currently takes walk-ins only, so build in a wait. Pick dinner first, then decide how ambitious the evening gets.
Late night adventurers
In London, most places close at midnight, and there are only a few 24/7 spots. Try Hippodrome Casino in Soho/Trafalgar Square, or if youâ€™re in East London, a late-night stop at Polo Bar, Duck & Waffle, Sushi Samba.
Plus for those lucky enough to get a pass, the Superteam UK office at Somerset House is 24/7.

A little farther out from Olympia, if you have the time
South Bank: A riverside walk for London Eye and Big Ben views, with the Southbank Centre and National Theatre along the way. Your â€œProof of Londonâ€� photo, handled.
Shoreditch / Spitalfields / Brick Lane: Street art, market browsing, and food around Old Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane, well known for its curry. Make east London a deliberate outing, not a detour between Olympia sessions.
The British Museum is one of the best in the world, with a collection of 8 million objects spanning human history (plus admission is free!)
If youâ€™re staying in London for more than a few days, there are football games the week before (Arsenal v Hull), Shakespeare at the Globe, shows at the West End, and other concerts & activities to explore.
Money in Your Pocket + AWARENESS
A few reminders:
Check your card setup before travel. Review overseas fees and any bank travel settings, and keep a backup payment method separate.
Most restaurants already include a service charge on your bill; otherwise 10â€“15% is customary but discretionary, while drinks at a pub generally don't call for a tip.
Keep your phone close. Don't leave it on an outdoor table or stand distracted at the curb with it held out. It is your wallet, your ticket, and possibly your hotel key this week.
Know the emergency numbers. Call 999 for an emergency or immediate danger, 111 for non-emergency medical matters, and 101 for non-emergency police matters.
Charge the portable battery. Save your hotel address. Stay aware without spending the whole week looking over your shoulder.
Your Getting-Around Checklist
[ ] Airport route checked against the actual hotel address
[ ] Google Maps, with important locations pinned
[ ] Same contactless card/device chosen for daily travel
[ ] Olympia route saved, including the walking route, closest tube station and important lines
[ ] Buffer added around rush-hour journeys and important meetings
[ ] A nearby food option and one London outing picked
[ ] First day's schedule leaves room to recover
[ ] Backup payment method and charged portable battery packed
What's Next in This Series
You've landed, you're moving, and you know where to grab food without making every decision a group-chat referendum. Now it's time to talk about what happens INSIDE Olympia. Up next is Article 4: Working the Conference Floor, Etiquette, + Best Practices. How to work a floor this size, approach people without being that guy, and navigate the unwritten rules that separate a great Breakpoint from a wasted one.
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Follow @SolanaEvents for the rest of the series and real-time updates as Breakpoint London approachesBreakpoint Website | Breakpoint FAQs for London(Historical earnings: Latest disclosed actuals for 2026Q2 (period end 2026-06-30) show basic EPS of 14.41, diluted EPS of 14.24, and net income of USD 174.771 billion. Consensus expectations: Consensus for 2026Q3 expects EPS of 3 and revenue of USD 127.677 billion.)

10/100·CNeutral+19

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news10/20news

Scale Without Sacrificing Speed: Espresso Now Handles Up to 1 Million TPS with Subsecond Finality One million transactions per second, each finalized in under a second. That’s Espresso mainnet’s newly benchmarked performance ceiling, following an upgrade the network’s validators completed last week. We benchmarked it on 100 nodes with emulated global network latency. Espresso was built to be a base layer for independent chains and financial applications, which means staying fast at peak volume while leaving room for the much larger transactions ahead as post-quantum signatures and privacy proofs go mainstream. At 1 million TPS with subsecond finality, Espresso can do both. Most blockchains trade throughput for speed, or speed for throughput. Delivering both meant rethinking how Espresso handles consensus, networking, block building, and data availability. Espresso by the numbers Our latest benchmarks, achieved on 100 nodes with emulated global network latency: 181 MB/s of data throughput, equivalent to 1 million stablecoin transfers per second assuming an average transfer size of 180 bytes 337ms average finality time under normal conditions 778ms average finality time under peak load of 1 million TPS More than 27 million blocks finalized since Espresso mainnet launched in November 2024 Running fully permissionless proof-of-stake consensus since early 2026 Integrated chains include ApeChain, with Celo, LitVM, and MegaETH in the process of integrating A base layer built for the job, not retrofitted for it Espresso leaves execution entirely to the chains and applications that integrate with it. That means Espresso has no VM, which makes sense when you step back and ask what a base layer for other execution environments really needs to do. The list is short: Reach BFT consensus on transaction ordering and data availability Handle massive throughput Do it all with fast, deterministic finality Execution isn’t on the list. That leaves Espresso-integrated chains free to pick their own VM, fees, sequencer, and privacy and compliance rules while still inheriting Espresso’s decentralized security, real-time finality, and throughput. Much as today’s internet infrastructure doesn’t care whether it’s serving a streaming movie platform, VR game, or a news blog, Espresso is agnostic to how the chains using it are designed, including whether they bridge to Ethereum, Solana, Litecoin, or nowhere at all. Leaving out execution is also what makes the performance possible, because Espresso’s 100 globally distributed nodes can devote themselves to one job: reaching consensus on ordering and data availability as fast and at as large a volume as possible. HotShot, Espresso’s purpose-built proof-of-stake BFT consensus protocol, was designed for exactly that. General-purpose chains weren’t. Ethereum was built as a single execution environment; when it adopted its rollup-centric roadmap, it quickly became clear that its slow finality while not an issue in its own execution environment (because of atomic execution) was causing massive fragmentation among the chains that settle to it. On Solana, posting large amounts of arbitrary data is costly enough that an ecosystem of chains settling to it never formed. Neither was built to be a base layer for other chains, and that’s okay. Espresso was. Thousands of independent chains We expect the world’s financial activity to run across thousands of independent chains, each with its own execution environment, rules, and users. Crypto calls them L2s, rollups, or appchains, yet once you strip away the labels, each one is simply an application built to its own specs, batching transactions and sending them to a base layer that uses BFT consensus to finalize ordering and data availability. What these applications need from that base layer is decentralized security, fast finality, and trust-minimized interoperability, without being asked to give up control of their own architecture. As more of the world’s applications, and its capital markets, become independent systems instead of features bolted onto someone else’s chain, the question stops being which chain wins and starts being whether all of them can act on each other’s state at the speed and volume real markets require. That comes down to finality time. Financial systems built as L2s on Ethereum wait 16 minutes for finality, splintering markets into isolated islands that are stitched back together by third-party bridges, trusted RPCs, and messaging protocols that each add cost, latency, and additional points of failure. With fast enough finality, they interconnect from the start. That’s why this milestone matters beyond the number itself. Subsecond finality at 1 million TPS is the strongest evidence yet that independent chains inheriting security and finality from a base layer are the right architecture for building onchain, whether the chain belongs to a bank, an exchange, or a crypto-native team. Achieving 1 million TPS Real markets put three demands on the infrastructure underneath them. It has to: Keep up with their busiest days, not just their average ones. Stay ahead of where transactions are headed. Today’s transactions are relatively small. Post-quantum signatures and built-in privacy proofs will make them much larger, and only higher-throughput infrastructure will be able to carry them without slowing down. Stay fast under pressure. A base layer that finalizes one transaction quickly but slows to a crawl at peak volume isn’t infrastructure real-world applications can reliably build on. That’s the bar our benchmarks were built to test. Espresso’s latest benchmarks place its erasure-coded data availability layer at 181 MB/s of throughput. Assuming an average stablecoin transfer size of 180 bytes, that puts the network’s theoretical throughput ceiling at roughly 1 million stablecoin payments per second. For context, that’s about six times the peak data throughput recorded on Solana (29.68 MB/s)¹, and well beyond Tempo (3.74 MB/s)², BNB Chain (1.18 MB/s)³, Arc (0.48 MB/s)⁴, Avalanche (0.43 MB/s)⁵ and Ethereum (0.35 MB/s)⁶. These results come from a benchmark run on 100 nodes with emulated global network latency; we added artificial latency to all network calls that matches the real latency nodes would experience were they deployed globally, though the nodes themselves were run in the same region. That distinction matters as throughput benchmarks depend heavily on the test conditions under which they were recorded: Nodes passing messages across a server rack will always post better numbers than nodes passing messages across an ocean, and benchmarks run on small networks will always post better numbers than ones run on more nodes. We want to share numbers that are intellectually honest and reflect what Espresso is capable of when real-world applications integrate with the network in production. The Foundation: HotShot Espresso’s finality guarantees come from HotShot, our purpose-built BFT consensus protocol. Rather than use an off-the-shelf implementation like CometBFT, we built HotShot on the academic HotStuff protocol and adapted it to our own needs. Our team of decentralized computing and consensus design experts continue to push its performance to the bleeding edge. That work started from a very different premise than most consensus protocols used by other L1s. For example, Gasper, the consensus protocol underpinning Ethereum, was built so that blocks could continue being produced even when a large number of validators go offline. That flexibility is a big part of why Ethereum takes 16 minutes to finalize transactions. From day one, we designed HotShot for another job: finalizing data from external execution environments as fast as possible, with BFT safety guarantees that keep finalized blocks from being rolled back. The version of HotShot that got us to 1 million TPS and subsecond finality on mainnet is a substantial improvement of that protocol. Our technical deep dives cover the engineering optimizations and consensus changes that got us here. The journey from 6s to <1s When we launched Espresso mainnet in November 2024, it finalized blocks in roughly 6–10 seconds, the product of HotShot’s legacy chained protocol, which needed roughly three full consensus views plus data availability certification before any single block was final. Two major upgrades have since brought that down to under a second: Proof-of-stake upgrade (early 2026), 6 seconds → 3 seconds: Alongside the move to proof of stake, we upgraded HotShot’s core protocol from HotStuff to HotStuff-2, which removes a full round of voting. We also replaced the KZG-based VID scheme used to distribute erasure-coded block data to validators with a faster Merkle-based one. Subsecond finality upgrade (October 2026) 3 seconds → 337 milliseconds: A redesigned version of HotShot that finalizes each block within a single view, plus networking, data availability, and block-building changes. The short version, covered in full in our engineering deep dive, is that we rebuilt consensus, networking, block building, and data availability together instead of treating them as separate systems to optimize one at a time. What subsecond finality and 1M TPS unlock Pairing 1 million TPS of capacity with real-time finality means any chain, centralized exchange, or real-world system can trust the finalized ordering of an Espresso-integrated chain, along with the state that follows from it, the moment a block lands. Crosschain activity starts to feel like it’s happening inside a single execution environment. An order placed on one chain can match and settle against an order on another, and a payment on one chain can trigger an action on a second, with no centralized sequencer to trust and no multi-minute wait on a slow base layer. The payoff arrives first wherever waiting has always cost the most. Institutional finance is moving toward a web of sovereign, purpose-built systems that interoperate on demand, much as banks and exchanges do today, only faster and more programmable. Real-time finality lets each of those systems act on another’s state as soon as a transaction becomes irreversible, and none of them has to surrender governance over its own environment to do it. Built for what’s next The next generation of onchain applications will demand more from a base layer than speed alone, carrying more data in every transaction and proving more about themselves while still finalizing the moment a user acts. Private payments will attach a zero-knowledge proof to every transfer. Crosschain collateral management will let a lender on one chain accept collateral held on another and respond the instant its value shifts. Real-world assets will carry their own compliance data, from investor eligibility to transfer restrictions, everywhere they move. Quantum-safe applications will sign transactions with post-quantum signatures, some more than 30 times the size of the ones in use today. A base layer short on throughput would buckle under that weight, and one with slow finality would undercut the reason to build these applications onchain in the first place. Espresso was designed to supply both at the scale they will require. The upgrade behind these benchmarks is already running on mainnet. If you’re building a chain or evaluating base layers for what comes next, get in touch. Footnotes Highest TPS observed on Solana mainnet Tempo’s TPS number extrapolated from gas limit + average block time of 555ms BNB’s TPS number assumes 70m gas limit per block on mainnet & 21k gas per tx Arc’s TPS number taken from benchmarks run on 20-node testnet Highest TPS observed on Avalanche c-chain Ethereum’s TPS number is historical peak found across L1 + L2 ecosystem on 7 January 2026 About Espresso Systems Espresso Systems builds digital asset infrastructure for institutions and enterprises that demand speed and customizability without sacrificing architectural control. It is lead developer of Espresso, a high-performance blockchain that provides the subsecond finality and massive data throughput making real-time settlement possible at institutional scale. Unlike legacy blockchains that impose their own rules on applications that build on them, Espresso provides a foundation for custom applications that need decentralized security and real-time finality without forcing them to sacrifice speed, connectivity, or architectural control. Companies and blockchains like Celo, ApeChain, Gate, Litecoin Foundation, and others have already chosen Espresso for the architectural control and native interoperability legacy infrastructure cannot match. Founded in 2020 by a team out of Stanford’s cryptography program, Espresso Systems has pushed the state of the art in blockchain, consensus protocol, and distributed network design. It is backed by over $50 million of capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, and more. Website | Docs | GitHub | X | HackMD | LinkedIn | Espresso Foundation(Historical earnings: For 2026Q2 (period ended 2026-06-30), reported basic EPS of 0.42, diluted EPS of 0.39, net income of USD 0.103 billion, and revenue of USD 1.395 billion. Consensus expectations: Consensus for 2026Q3 expects EPS of 0.4 and revenue of USD 0.797 billion.)

10/100·CNeutral+16