Marco (@markapola) • Hey
Italian merchant, explorer and writer from the Republic of Venice who travelled through Asia
Publications
- **Debt Switch** — seamlessly switch borrow positions. A purr-fect ending awaits 🐱
- They sailed to Acre and later rode on their camels to the Persian port Hormuz. During the first stages of the journey, they stayed for a few months in Acre and were able to speak with Archdeacon Tedaldo Visconti of Piacenza.
- In 1269, Niccolò and Maffeo returned to their families in Venice, meeting young Marco for the first time. In 1271, during the rule of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, Marco Polo (at seventeen years of age), his father, and his uncle set off for Asia on the series of adventures that Marco later documented in his book.
- Meanwhile, Marco Polo's mother died, and an aunt and uncle raised him. He received a good education, learning mercantile subjects including foreign currency, appraising, and the handling of cargo ships; he learned little or no Latin. His father later married Floradise Polo (née Trevisan).
- Almost nothing is known about the childhood of Marco Polo until he was fifteen years old, except that he probably spent part of his childhood in Venice.
- Captured Venetian citizens were blinded, while many of those who managed to escape perished aboard overloaded refugee ships fleeing to other Venetian colonies in the Aegean Sea.
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- Their decision to leave Constantinople proved timely. In 1261 Michael VIII Palaiologos, the ruler of the Empire of Nicaea, took Constantinople, promptly burned the Venetian quarter and re-established the Byzantine Empire.
- According to *The Travels of Marco Polo*, they passed through much of Asia, and met with Kublai Khan, a Mongol ruler and founder of the Yuan dynasty.
- Niccolò and his brother Maffeo set off on a trading voyage before Marco's birth. In 1260, Niccolò and Maffeo, while residing in Constantinople, then the capital of the Latin Empire, foresaw a political change; they liquidated their assets into jewels and moved away.
- My father, Niccolò Polo, a merchant, traded with the Near East, becoming wealthy and achieving great prestige.
- This genealogy, described by Ramusio, is not universally accepted as there is no additional evidence to support it.
- Mosaic of Marco Polo displayed in the Palazzo Doria-Tursi, Genoa, Italy
- In 1168, my great-uncle, Marco Polo, borrowed money and commanded a ship in Constantinople. My grandfather, Andrea Polo of the parish of San Felice, had three sons, Maffeo, yet another Marco, and the traveller's father Niccolò.
- *Corte Seconda del Milion*, Venice, next to my house, is named after the nickname of Polo, *Il Milione*
- I like UFO
- However, since also my father Niccolò was nicknamed *Milione*, 19th-century philologist Luigi Foscolo Benedetto was persuaded that *Milione* was a shortened version of *Emilione*, and that this nickname was used to distinguish Niccolò's and Marco's branch from other Polo families.
- According to the 15th-century humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio, my fellow citizens awarded my nickname when I came back to Venice because I kept on saying that Kublai Khan's wealth was counted in millions. More precisely, I was nicknamed *Messer Marco Milioni* (Mr Marco Millions).
- Momoka, the new infrastructure powering @lensprotocol, just hit 500,000 transactions at a total cost of ~ $173
With these updates our infrastructure is now ~250x less expensive while being ~165x more scalable than in the past. 🤯
Momoka Stats
💰 Cost of 100,000 transactions:
Old infrastructure ~ $10,000.00
Momoka ~$40.00
Difference ~250,000% less expensive ⚡️
📈 Scalability of 100,000 transactions
Old infrastructure (~30 TPS) 55 minutes
Momoka (~50,000 TPS) 2 seconds
Difference ~ 165,000% more scalable ⚡️
Here’s how it works 🌫️
Blockchains today cannot scale to social TPS.
Traditional databases scale to up to millions of operations per second while most blockchains max out at a few hundred.
This is mainly because blockchain storage is an expensive bottleneck in terms of both cost and scalability.
Blockchain storage is more than just storage - it also enables composability, allowing your state to also be executed with other smart contracts and programs.
But with most social use cases, especially non-financial, that power and composability is not needed, so why would we continue to use it in this way?
For decentralized social applications, two of the main characteristics needed are permanent and immutable storage tied to a user’s identity.
What if those characteristics could be derived from another infrastructure layer, but at a much lower cost and with more scalability?
In the past, all Lens transactions were processed on the EVM via Polygon network.
What is the EVM at its root? It is a big state machine, holding the entire history of state changes of what has happened in what are known as archive nodes.
The expensive part of using EVM networks is performing these state updates.
BUT! The EVM only forces cost when you want to change the state in the next block.
The EVM does **not** charge anything to simulate if something could of happened on a certain block.
This means that you can leverage this to check that a transaction has been signed by the correct access control and would of passed for free *without any gas needed*.
When you do an EVM contract call, you are signing the transaction with your private key. The EVM verifies this and injects key helpers like msg.sender which is your public key to allow contracts to know it was you who did that.
Since transactions can be run for free to prove something has the correct access control conditions to run it, what if we swapped the storage updates to a place that can handle high TPS, cheap, immutable, one time payments and will be guaranteed for at least 100 years?
Momoka is an optimistic hybrid layer 3 solution from Lens Protocol that uses data availability storage on Arweave/Bundlr along with transaction proofs on Polygon to enable highly scalable and low-cost social graph data storage and verification. It allows proving social graph transactions would be valid on-chain without actually submitting them, enabling greater scalability while maintaining verifiability and user ownership.
Arweave is a decentralized blockchain-like infrastructure protocol, built specifically for storing data forever for a one off cost, and was launched over 6 years ago.
Bundlr Network is an Arweave scaling solution built to handle 50,000+ TPS. It functions similarly to a rollup in that it batches multiple transactions together and posts them to the underlying network.
An important characteristic of Bundlr is that it supports EVM addresses, allowing you to build EVM tech state on Arweave ⚡️. They also allow you to pay fees in any EVM native token you wish!
To enable this new functionality on Lens, Momoka introduces two new pieces of architecture - the Submitter and the Verifier.
Submitters are responsible for validating and constructing the metadata and submitting it to Arweave, providing proofs that anyone can contest.
The Verifier software listens for publications sent from whitelisted submitter addresses and verifies their validity.
Anyone can run a verifier using open-source software with a few commands.
https://github.com/lens-protocol/momoka
Momoka is not limited to blocks and max limits as the restriction has been removed due to storage on Bundlr/Arweave.
Momoka gets timestamp proofs from Bundlr to be able to keep chain and off-chain actions in ordering and also to have a third party timestamp to avoid trust assumptions on Momoka.
With Momoka, users still own their content as it’s not possible to action a Momoka transaction if you do not pass the access control on-chain.
Momoka is fully trustless – anyone can check proofs with their own Polygon archive node!
We believe Momoka is core to the future of web3 social, enabling applications to scale to tens of thousands of operations per second while still enabling the differentiating features that make web3 social unique and special.
To learn more about Momoka, check out the following resources:
Announcement post
https://mirror.xyz/lensprotocol.eth/3Hcl0dGE8AOYmnFolzqO6hJuueDHdsaCs3ols2ruc9E
Momoka Explorer
https://momoka.lens.xyz/
Momoka Verifier software
https://github.com/lens-protocol/momoka
- However, I was also nicknamed *Milione* during my lifetime (which in Italian literally means 'Million'). In fact, the Italian title of his book was *Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione*, which means "The Book of Marco Polo, nicknamed '*Milione*'"
- Marco Polo is most often mentioned in the archives of the Republic of Venice as *Marco Paulo de confinio Sancti Iohannis Grisostomi*, which means Marco Polo of the *contrada* of St John Chrysostom Church.
- Some Croatian sources claim my ancestors to be of far Dalmatian origin, but most historians consider it unfounded, as the my family lived in Venice since the year 971
- Andrea, my grandfather, lived in Venice in "contrada San Felice", he had three sons: Marco "the older", Maffeo and Niccolò (my father).
- My first known ancestor was a great uncle, Marco Polo (the older) from Venice, who lent some money and commanded a ship in Constantinople.
- I also influenced European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Catalan Atlas and the Fra Mauro map. Just think about it.
- My travel book inspired Christopher Columbus and many other travellers. There is substantial literature based on my writings
- This account of the Orient provided the Europeans with a clear picture of the East's geography and ethnic customs, and was the first Western record of porcelain, gunpowder, paper money, and some Asian plants and exotic animals.
- Though I was not the first European to reach China, I was the first to leave a detailed chronicle of my experience.
- Need to say, that my travel book inspired Christopher Columbus and many other travellers.
- This account of the Orient provided the Europeans with a clear picture of the East's geography and ethnic customs, and was the first Western record of porcelain, gunpowder, paper money, and some Asian plants and exotic animals.
- I was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and have three children.
- At this time, Venice was at war with Genoa; I was captured and imprisoned by the Genoans after joining the war effort and dictated his stories to Rustichello da Pisa, a cellmate.
- Albumen print of the Galata Tower by Pascal Sébah, between 1875 and 1886
- After leaving the princess, we travelled overland to Constantinople and then to Venice, returning home after 24 years.
- Around 1291, the Polos also offered to accompany the Mongol princess Kököchin to Persia; they arrived around 1293.
- As part of this appointment, I also travelled extensively inside China, living in the emperor's lands for 17 years and seeing many things that had previously been unknown to Europeans.
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- They were received by the royal court of Kublai Khan, who was impressed by Marco's intelligence and humility.
I was appointed to serve as Khan's foreign emissary, and I was sent on many diplomatic missions throughout the empire and Southeast Asia, such as in present-day Burma, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
- My father and his uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo embarked on an epic journey to Asia, exploring many places along the Silk Road until they reached Cathay (China).
- In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet me for the first time. lol
- I was born in Venice. I learned the mercantile trade from his father and his uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan.
- Wearing a Tartar outfit, print from the 18th century
- Done
- My travels are recorded in *The Travels of Marco Polo* (also known as *Book of the Marvels of the World* and *Il Milione*, c. 1300), a book that described to Europeans the then-mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China in the Yuan Dynasty, giving their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan and other Asian cities and countries.
- I travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295.