Donovan Choy, Blockworks Journalist Profile

Articles

Understanding MegaETH's need for speed

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

MegaETH is an EVM L2 that settles to Ethereum. What makes it special? Well...it's fast. MegaETH markets itself as the first "real-time" blockchain. It theoretically claims to be able to process about 1.7 gigagas/s (or 1,700 Mgas/s) in transaction speeds on its current testnet. Let's put that into context. 1,700 Mgas/s completely dwarfs the speeds of the major L2s like Optimism (15 Mgas/s) and Arbitrum (128 Mgas/s).
A tale of market woe

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

When Trump said "tariff" was the most beautiful word in the dictionary, he neglected to mention that beauty is subjective. Since Trump's "reciprocal" tariff announcements on April 2, the S&P 500 is down about 10.6%. Even gold, typically considered to be uncorrelated with equities, took about a 6.4% dive on the tariff news. Crypto markets held up over the weekend, much to everyone's surprise. Many theories were offered for explanation.
Lens launches mainnet today, bringing a potential new era to SocialFi

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

About 11 months after its initial announcement, the mainnet of Lens Chain goes live today with its V3 deployment. Lens Protocol launched in February 2022 on the Polygon sidechain. In May 2024, Lens announced that it was migrating off Polygon to its own L2 chain built within the zkSync Elastic Network. For the deal, Lens was reportedly paid 0.5% of the total ZK token supply (worth about $6.5M today). The shift to its own L2, however, was motivated primarily by costs and scalability.
Justin Sun's allegations of FDUSD insolvency cause 9% depeg

3 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

FDUSD, the sixth-largest stablecoin (market cap $2.5 billion), saw a significant depeg yesterday morning to $0.91. The peg has since recovered, though FDUSD suffered a market cap loss of about $200m. The cause? The tweets of Tron founder Justin Sun. Sun blasted First Digital, the issuer of FUSD, in a tweet alleging that the Hong Kong-based firm was "effectively insolvent and unable to fulfill client fund redemptions" for its stablecoin.
Can Ethereum win big with data availability?

3 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

If you ask the average person in crypto what problems the industry faces today, "too many chains, not enough apps" quickly comes up as a common gripe. This complaint has a striking parallel to the days of the early internet. During the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, skeptics similarly criticized the perceived overinvestment in excessive infrastructure, particularly fiber optics.
A new era of privacy-focused L2 solutions

3 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

After about 16 months from when the team first announced its roadmap and more than two years of R&D later, COTI launched v2 of its mainnet yesterday. COTI's v2 mainnet marks a shift from its DAG (directed acyclic graph)-based protocol L1, launched in 2018, to a new EVM-compatible and privacy-focused L2 chain. The goal is to gradually migrate user activity from the L1 to the L2 and eventually sunset the L1, COTI CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen told Blockworks.
What would a market of a thousand stablecoins look like?

4 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

Another day, another stablecoin launch. Fidelity Investments is looking to launch its own stablecoin through its digital assets arm, the Financial Times reported Wednesday. There are few details on the Fidelity stablecoin currently, but a safe guess is that it'll be backed by US Treasurys.
Trading decentralization for growth

1 month ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

"What if the internet had had a decentralized payments system from day one?"This is one of the crypto industry's favorite thought experiments. It may surprise you to know it was almost a reality. Legendary cryptographer and computer scientist David Chaum founded the company DigiCash in 1990, which produced the digital payment system "ecash."Ecash was revolutionary in its time.
Making sense of DAOs in 2025

1 month ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, . Centralized firms are like mini-dictatorships. They're not perfect, but their corporate model has worked well on the basis of economic efficiency. Firms reduce transaction costs, which is why they exist at all, argued the Nobel Laureate economist Ronald Coase in 1937. Are DAOs centralized companies? Yes and no.
Speculative assets are paving the way for fundamental drivers

1 month ago | blockworks.co | Donovan Choy

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, . The current mood on Crypto Twitter: Speculation is dead and fundamental revenue drivers are back in. "Speculation is dead" points to the increasing consensus that memecoins are a dying meta. The straw that broke the camel's back was of course the controversial LIBRA memecoin launch last month.