1. Lido Alliance application: Bolt
Forum post here
Vote: Onboard Bolt to Lido Alliance
Rationale:
I take very seriously the possibility of centralization on Ethereum, and particularly off-protocol systems that side-track the working assumptions of Ethereum.
I’ve gone into a rabbit hole of preconfirmations and they have potential to improve certain UX and potential censorship issues on chain.
My role is to defend the decentralization of Ethereum, but not to defend the current state of Ethereum as an immovable thing. Changes must be compatible with the idea of keeping Ethereum decentralized in order to benefit from the emerging properties of decentralized systems: redundancy, resilience, censorship resistance…
There are pre-confirmation designs that seem to be able to respect these principles. Currently Bolt has solved the problem of connecting users with block proposers with a centralized endpoint. I believe this is not OK for a final design.
That said, I believe Bolt has the chops to overcome this problem in other ways and even myself am no stranger to “Decentralize till it hurts, centralize until it works, then decentralize again”, a motto those who know me have heard me say countless times.
Hence, I vote yes for onboarding Bolt to Lido Alliance even though I have voiced my concerns and reserve the right to vote negatively down the line should Bolt’s protocol for preconfirmations failed to address these hurdles in the future.