EVM
Eaton Vance California Municipal Bond Fund
stock NYSEAMERICAN

AMP, Neon EVM, REQ, ANKR. No FA.

I’m a backend/blockchain dev working mostly with TS/Node, Solidity/EVM and Rust/Solana.
I’ve already done stuff around RWA tokenization, vesting/NFTs, cross-chain swaps, wallets, NFT ecosystem, etc.
Now I want to build something more towards **DeFi/protocol engineering**, rather than projects that are basically API integrations + a smart contract.
I’m also open to going completely outside my current stack like something in Rust, low-level backend/infrastructure, or a protocol I haven’t worked with before.
Currently thinking about(got this from GPT):
* Lending/borrowing protocol
* Perps/derivatives
* AMM/DEX from scratch
* Cross-chain intents + solver system
* DeFi infrastructure / risk / liquidation system
What would you guys pick if the goal was to **actually understand DeFi protocols under the hood?**
Open to completely different ideas as well.

point 1 is the one i cant argue with. bootstrapping liquidity is the real problem and no amount of crypto fixes it. thats the honest answer.
but its also why interop is the second thing we build after contracts. liquidity doesnt have to be born inside the chain if the chain can settle against BTC and EVM without custody. you dont need a deep local market if a swap can close atomically against a market that already exists.
on point 2, i think that assumes ethereum’s model, where privacy is a layer added on top of transparent execution. thats where the cost comes from. on DOM theres no privacy mode that costs extra, its the base construction, and a scriptless contract has no execution at all. the contract kernel is 115 bytes, same size and same weight as a plain payment. so a contract there costs the same as sending coins, not more. thats measured, not theory.
and point 3 is closer to what were doing than you might think. a private appchain still needs the primitives underneath, conditional settlement, multisig, timeouts. thats exactly what were building. the difference is were putting it in the base layer instead of spinning up a chain per app.

They have already proven themselves and are one of the most popular defi apps in the EVM ecosystem.

The fundamentals are strong, Cronos zkEVM is winding down, Cronos EVM daily transactions hitting all time low everyday, Cronos POS doing great job of printing extra 70b tokens, Cronos price looking strong at 0.05, likely seeing 0.04 soon.

Yeah, quite a bit actually 🔥
[VeWorld.ai](http://veworld.ai/) ..AgentSuite is in early access and actively being developed, and Interstellar is now moving forward with its first EVM upgrade, VIP-255, going to a governance vote on August 10
There’s also plenty more on the 2026 roadmap around agent infrastructure, VeBetter and further network upgrades 🙌