Although he\u2019s had a variety of jobs in the industry, including a stint as Arcane Asset\u2019s chief investment officer, Eric Wall is probably best known for shitposting and arguing with people on Crypto Twitter. \u201cJust like any other person, I\u2019m scrolling my Twitter feed, and then you see people saying dumb shit that is incorrect, and that is based on a lie. And then I just argue with that person, and then those arguments lead to long-form Medium articles,\u201d he says with just a faint trace of a Swedish accent.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just trying to correct \u2018incorrectness\u2019 in the space.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He\u2019s been working on a super-secret project ever since he left Arcane early last year, so he doesn\u2019t have an official title apart from \u201cblockchain researcher\u201d and board member for Ethereum scaling solution the StarkNet Foundation.<\/p>\n After arguing with people for years for free, more recently, Wall has been attempting to make money from challenging antagonists to a bet and has also (semi-literally) begun collecting the skulls of his enemies. \u201cThat has been paying off in tungsten cubes and actual money,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s multiple cryptocurrency communities who have me as their favorite hate object basically. They want to put you in your place. And they have all sorts of idiotic ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n Wall recently moved to Portugal from Sweden, attracted by the crypto-friendly regulation and the lifestyle \u2014 and for safety reasons, after the next most prominent crypto future in Sweden was physically attacked<\/a> in an attempt to steal his crypto. He explains the tax system there is so transparent that anyone can look up your net wealth. \u201cIf you combine that with the fact you know they\u2019re into crypto, and it\u2019s very easy to pick out targets in Sweden,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Wall says he paid for the rent on his new flat through the hatred of HEXicans. He\u2019s been at loggerheads with the HEX community since 2019 when founder Richard Heart explained the scheme to him. In February last year, he made a bet with HEXican Dixon Piper that HEX \u2014 then trading at $0.18 \u2014 wouldn\u2019t reach a new all-time high by February 2023.<\/p>\n While he hasn\u2019t won yet (but almost certainly will, given HEX\u2019s current price), after HEX plunged to $0.04, he was able to hedge the bet and lock in a profit of $16,000 to pay for his apartment in Lisbon.<\/p>\n \u201cI have this place now with just the most amazing view that I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. I see the entire Portuguese coast from that window, from that balcony. I can have these HEXicans telling me how stupid I am while looking at that view.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, he bet Blockstream CEO Adam Back that PlanB\u2019s \u201cfloor model\u201d was going to be wrong \u2014 which it was. \u201cSo, Adam had to pay up a tungsten cube with his face engraved into the cube,\u201d he says. He won another bet against Bitcoin Magazine\u2019s CK Snarks that the Ethereum Merge really would happen in 2022.<\/p>\n His plan is to build up a collection of 20 tungsten cubes with the faces of his vanquished foes so that people think twice about arguing. \u201cYou\u2019re going to be pretty intimidated,\u201d he says. \u201cDo you want to be the next face in this collection?\u201d<\/p>\n 2021 I won a tungsten cube from Adam Back over S2F\/PlanB. <\/p>\n 2022 I won a tungsten cube from Christian Keroles (Managing Director at Bitcoin Magazine) over the Merge. <\/p>\n 2023 I plan to win against @bitcoinerrrrr<\/a> over ETH withdrawals. pic.twitter.com\/T2sIy2qolp<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Eric Wall (@ercwl) January 9, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Wall is a recovering Bitcoin maximalist who was once known as the \u201caltcoin slayer\u201d for his brutal takedowns of altcoins during the era of ICOs. One of the most qualified critics in the space \u2014 he literally wrote his Master\u2019s thesis about blockchain \u2014 he can zero in on technological issues and communicate those problems effectively to less technical members of the crypto community.<\/p>\n Back when he was pointing out that most ICO altcoins were centralized shitcoins with myriad security issues, he was a hero to Bitcoiners. But ever since he started busting myths about Ethereum and suggesting that Bitcoin was being left behind by smart contracts, scaling and NFTs, they\u2019ve liked him much less.<\/p>\n As you have no doubt gathered, Wall goes to great lengths to prove he is correct and once spent a month downloading an Ethereum node purely to bust the Bitcoiner myth that it took 8 terabytes of data to fully validate transactions.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was extremely difficult, but it was possible, and it didn\u2019t take 8 terabytes of space on the hard drive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n One of the big reasons for the shift from maxi to mini (he\u2019s still a proponent of Bitcoin) is that Wall has been fascinated for years with building decentralized finance on an open and permissionless settlement layer. That was the essential subject of his thesis, and the need for decentralization to bring it about was only reinforced by seeing the limitations of permissioned blockchain platforms while working for Cinnober and Nasdaq. So, he was naturally drawn to the DeFi sector on Ethereum when it began to emerge in 2019.<\/p>\n That same year, it became clear that Ethereum and other blockchains could scale using zk-Rollups or optimistic fraud proofs, whereas Bitcoin had \u201calmost entirely abandoned\u201d the idea of doing anything with DeFi. So, he got behind DeFi on Ethereum.<\/p>\n \u201cThat made me fall out of favor with Bitcoin maximalists because I was their golden kid: the one that was supposed to slay the altcoins, not one that was supposed to say actually, there is a use case here though, and this system actually does scale, and it\u2019s not as bad as you think.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo, then I had to change Bitcoiners\u2019 understanding of the Ethereum system because they were now the ones that were spreading false facts about how the system works.\u201d<\/p>\n He concedes his former Bitcoiner friends think he\u2019s become a \u201cshitcoiner for financial motives.\u201d But Wall also wants to scale Bitcoin, too, and is involved in a research project with StarkNet and the Human Rights Foundation to investigate how to apply zk-Rollup scaling to Bitcoin, pondering \u201cwhat the benefits of that would be and how feasible it is.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo, I am working on that, on trying to introduce that system and those technological benefits to Bitcoin.\u201d<\/p>\n Wall was born in 1991 in the Swedish city of Link\u00f6ping and spent a gap year after high school traveling through Australia and Norway, working odd jobs from a deckhand on a luxury yacht to a \u201cchugger\u201d (charity mugger).<\/p>\n He studied computer engineering at Lund University, and his time there was notable for his organizational efforts as the \u201cfunmaker\u201d of \u201cSweden Silent Party,\u201d a series of silent disco events inspired by one the best nights of his life in Byron Bay. He also became one of the first Scandinavian engineers to write a Master\u2019s thesis about using blockchain to run a securities exchange in conjunction with local fintech Cinnober.<\/p>\n He was introduced to Bitcoin in his first year of university in 2011 by a classmate who showed him an article about darknet marketplace Silk Road<\/a>. Buying Bitcoin at the time for $4 was a week-long process that required wiring money to Mt. Gox in Japan, so he gave up. A year later, Bitcoin had doubled to $8, and he thought he\u2019d \u201cmissed the boat.\u201d \u201cBut I became interested in this asset that increased 100% in one year\u201d and saw an opportunity to \u201cget an edge\u201d in a totally new asset class. He lost everything in Mt. Gox but gained a new career as a blockchain researcher and, later, blockchain lead at Cinnober.<\/p>\n During his time there, and later at Nasdaq, he realized that companies or even countries weren\u2019t going to agree to create the sort of infrastructure required to build a genuinely decentralized, cross-jurisdictional system for the settlement of securities.<\/p>\n \u201cIt needs to be something that the Chinese and the Japanese and the U.S. can use as a mutual system,\u201d he says. \u201cBut that was a gargantuan task. That\u2019s never going to happen from the inside. I understood that later. It has to be a system that comes from the outside and keeps growing.\u201d The only likely candidates were Bitcoin and Ethereum.\u00a0<\/p>\n He told his bosses to put a hold on the enterprise blockchain stuff and to instead sell their incredibly fast matching engine tech to the big crypto exchanges. His colleagues thought crypto was a game or a joke \u2014 until Bitstamp turned up in a private jet.<\/p>\n \u201cEven big stock exchange teams didn\u2019t spend that kind of money on a meeting with Cinnober,\u201d he says. \u201cThen they actually did take it seriously, and we did deliver a solution to them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Read also<\/p>\n Meet Dmitry: Co-founder of Ethereum\u2019s creator Vitalik Buterin<\/p>\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n The Vitalik I know: Dmitry Buterin<\/p>\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n During this time, he also became the Swedish media\u2019s go-to guy for crypto commentary. He was determined to seize the opportunity but hated the stressful, anxiety-inducing process of appearing on live TV, so he\u2019d load up on valium to get through it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThen everything was fine. It didn\u2019t matter like getting a big camera in my face. I was completely zoned out,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cBut because I was so into crypto, I was doing crypto 17 hours a day. Even in that state, I could still articulate and explain everything about Bitcoin and what was going on even if I was only half conscious.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a similar story at crypto conferences, where Wall\u2019s ingrained Swedish standoffishness made the hundreds of brief interactions he had as a well-known figure quite stressful.<\/p>\n \u201cFor them, they only get, like, five seconds with me on an escalator, and that\u2019s how they\u2019re going to remember me for years. So, I always feel like I want to deliver on that interaction. Which makes me feel a lot of pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s stopped taking meds these days after realizing he was meeting the same people multiple times at conferences and forgetting them.<\/p>\n \u201cI have realized that now, at this point, like, I\u2019m gonna just be natural. I think I feel comfortable. I\u2019ve overcome my Swedishness eventually.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Cinnober was eventually taken over by Nasdaq in early 2019 for $190 million, and Wall found himself in a massive bureaucratic organization with little agency and lots of rules.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter Nasdaq acquired, they told us, well, \u2018The great thing about Nasdaq is you\u2019re never gonna have more than six bosses above\u2026\u2019 It\u2019s a very flat organization,\u201d he says with dry humor. \u201cEvery tweet that I wrote had to go through the Nasdaq approval department.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, Wall was fighting with multiple token projects online about their hyped claims. \u201cI thought that I was doing something very important,\u201d he explains. One notable conflict, still running today, was with the Iota founders after he argued in a 2017 Medium post saying the protocol does not provide any censorship resistance and is centralized around the Iota foundation\u2019s coordinator node.<\/p>\n This guy bet me 1 BTC that IOTA would disable the Coordinator in 2018 based on a technology I had debunked in detail how it was fraudulent (it was admitted years later and the CTO was fired and the project completely redesigned)\u2014yet he is upset me with *me* for wasting his time. https:\/\/t.co\/MufJ6E0b0U<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Eric Wall (@ercwl) November 25, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Unfortunately, Iota was also being considered by the Swedish Central Bank to help create a central bank digital currency, so Wall\u2019s online antics were not considered politically helpful.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were lying about what their technology could do, and you still had to treat them as respected industry participants, which I wasn\u2019t going to do. So, I didn\u2019t ask for permission from Nasdaq to tweet, and it ended up with us going our separate ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Subscribe<\/p>\n The most engaging reads in blockchain. Delivered once a Wall then decided the best way to participate in the blockchain revolution was to participate in the economy, \u201c<\/strong>So, I changed strategy and became a hedge fund manager,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n It\u2019s quite the leap from engineer to trader, and Wall tried and abandoned a variety of approaches. Initially, he learned technical analysis, using rules-based trading around indicators like Bollinger Bands and moving average convergence\/divergence. But after writing an algorithm to backtest the rules, he realized they performed no better than random chance. Similarly, he thinks most charts and models are ludicrous, which is why he constantly jokes about the superiority of the Rainbow Chart (\u201chas emoji\u201d).<\/p>\n 1\/15 Today, I’m comparing the two currently most popular bitcoin price models: Rainbow chart vs S2F!<\/p>\n Rainbow chart: S2F: A thread 👇 pic.twitter.com\/1Td6pZXPM4<\/a><\/p>\n
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Bitcoin maxi to mini<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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What\u2019s behind the Wall?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\n Features<\/span><\/p>\n
\n Features<\/span><\/p>\nMedia crypto commentator<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Nasdaq takeover<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\n week.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"Subscribe](\"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/reading-copy.png\")
\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nArcane Assets<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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✅ Tried & tested log regression (2014)
✅ Never changed
✅ Has emoji 🌈<\/p>\n
❌ New & complex (2019)
❌ Changes often
❌ Sounds like a sex position<\/p>\n
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