IntroductionAirdrops are a beautifully unique part of crypto. Teams are eager to pay YOU just for interacting with their products. Often this payout can be in the range of 5+ figures. Free money falling from the sky is fun for those who receive it, but often stirs rage in those who are excluded. Furthermore, many complain that current airdrop strategies are ineffective at retaining “real” users and cater mostly to bot farms and sybil attackers. As a result in many cases token price and daily ...

IntroductionAirdrops are a beautifully unique part of crypto. Teams are eager to pay YOU just for interacting with their products. Often this payout can be in the range of 5+ figures. Free money falling from the sky is fun for those who receive it, but often stirs rage in those who are excluded. Furthermore, many complain that current airdrop strategies are ineffective at retaining “real” users and cater mostly to bot farms and sybil attackers. As a result in many cases token price and daily ...

IntroductionA lot of chatter has circulated about base-layer censorship in the wake of the attacks on Tornado cash. If you weren’t aware, Tornado cash was sanctioned on the pretense of being a criminal operation, with one of its main developers being arrested in Amsterdam. Fearing sanctions, a large number of dApps as well as stablecoin issuers and exchanges began considering blacklisting addresses on their frontends that had previously interacted with Tornado Cash out of fear of incurring pe...

IntroductionA lot of chatter has circulated about base-layer censorship in the wake of the attacks on Tornado cash. If you weren’t aware, Tornado cash was sanctioned on the pretense of being a criminal operation, with one of its main developers being arrested in Amsterdam. Fearing sanctions, a large number of dApps as well as stablecoin issuers and exchanges began considering blacklisting addresses on their frontends that had previously interacted with Tornado Cash out of fear of incurring pe...

From the coast of Canaan, a great many longships cast off towards the Western waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, they would pass the pillars of Hercules and venture into the waters of the Atlantic, conducting trade and settlement with the West African coast as well as the North of Europe. Their ships had mechanisms not seen before; battering ram bows and reinforced hulls. The adventures these ships undertook brought unthinkable wealth to their captains and owners, placing the unconventi...

From the coast of Canaan, a great many longships cast off towards the Western waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, they would pass the pillars of Hercules and venture into the waters of the Atlantic, conducting trade and settlement with the West African coast as well as the North of Europe. Their ships had mechanisms not seen before; battering ram bows and reinforced hulls. The adventures these ships undertook brought unthinkable wealth to their captains and owners, placing the unconventi...

IntroductionProgramming a smart contract is one of many distinct programming paradigms one must adapt to in order to succeed. Similarly to MVC architecture for apps, Object-oriented programming, or any other design pattern, one must learn the individual quirks of creating a smart contract as a part of the learning process. At a fundamental level smart contracts work quite differently from other programs for one primary reason: smart contracts run on a global state machine. There are many impl...

IntroductionProgramming a smart contract is one of many distinct programming paradigms one must adapt to in order to succeed. Similarly to MVC architecture for apps, Object-oriented programming, or any other design pattern, one must learn the individual quirks of creating a smart contract as a part of the learning process. At a fundamental level smart contracts work quite differently from other programs for one primary reason: smart contracts run on a global state machine. There are many impl...

Today in crypto there are a number of novel technologies quickly advancing and gaining public interest. ZK technology and its applications, decentralized networks offering services such as compute, data storage and indexing, modular blockchains and many more. These technologies are exciting and often monopolize the attention of the crypto-aware public. One among these trends to briefly take hold of the prevailing narrative were soulbound tokens; developers, twitter threadoors and crypto exper...

Today in crypto there are a number of novel technologies quickly advancing and gaining public interest. ZK technology and its applications, decentralized networks offering services such as compute, data storage and indexing, modular blockchains and many more. These technologies are exciting and often monopolize the attention of the crypto-aware public. One among these trends to briefly take hold of the prevailing narrative were soulbound tokens; developers, twitter threadoors and crypto exper...

IntroductionRecently there has been a wave of DNS hijacking attempts across multiple dApps and public RPC endpoints for entire blockchains. The financial consequences of these events has been nearly zero and they certainly do not compare to some of the recent high profile exploits that have taken place within DeFi and beyond. Exploits of the traditional variety (bridge hacks, flash loan and other economic attacks, social engineering and theft, etc) have been taking place since the dawn of cry...

IntroductionRecently there has been a wave of DNS hijacking attempts across multiple dApps and public RPC endpoints for entire blockchains. The financial consequences of these events has been nearly zero and they certainly do not compare to some of the recent high profile exploits that have taken place within DeFi and beyond. Exploits of the traditional variety (bridge hacks, flash loan and other economic attacks, social engineering and theft, etc) have been taking place since the dawn of cry...

IntroductionCrypto and the dweb hold the promise of dragging governance and decision making processes out of boardrooms and out from behind closed doors, thrusting them into the open for all to see, comment on and participate in. The crypto-deam is sometimes portrayed as an egalitarian future in which everyone has a voice and is able to express their concerns and needs to the fullest extent possible. In this hypothetical future, society has been transformed into a kind of digital labor union,...

IntroductionCrypto and the dweb hold the promise of dragging governance and decision making processes out of boardrooms and out from behind closed doors, thrusting them into the open for all to see, comment on and participate in. The crypto-deam is sometimes portrayed as an egalitarian future in which everyone has a voice and is able to express their concerns and needs to the fullest extent possible. In this hypothetical future, society has been transformed into a kind of digital labor union,...

Blockchain was built by anons. More than a decade after the infamous “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” genesis block was added to the Bitcoin chain, we still don’t know who Satoshi was, where Satoshi was from, or if Satoshi was even an individual or a group of multiple people. In addition to this are the theories that suggest Satoshi was an alien, a time traveller or a prophet. Basically, the status of Satoshi is that of an entity, not a person. Today the...

Blockchain was built by anons. More than a decade after the infamous “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” genesis block was added to the Bitcoin chain, we still don’t know who Satoshi was, where Satoshi was from, or if Satoshi was even an individual or a group of multiple people. In addition to this are the theories that suggest Satoshi was an alien, a time traveller or a prophet. Basically, the status of Satoshi is that of an entity, not a person. Today the...

Note: this is heavily based off of Ruben from Coinmonk’s 2021 article here. I do not mean to steal credit from a very obviously smart person. However, I am still doing this for 3 reasons. 1, my goal here is for this to be as simple as possible, leave out the complicated disk recovery stuff, and make it more non-tech friendly, 2, the more this info is out there online, the more likely someone is to find it and get use out of it, and 3, there were some details not in that article I found elsewh...

Note: this is heavily based off of Ruben from Coinmonk’s 2021 article here. I do not mean to steal credit from a very obviously smart person. However, I am still doing this for 3 reasons. 1, my goal here is for this to be as simple as possible, leave out the complicated disk recovery stuff, and make it more non-tech friendly, 2, the more this info is out there online, the more likely someone is to find it and get use out of it, and 3, there were some details not in that article I found elsewh...

IntroductionI am a visual learner. Especially when it comes to data. Seeing shapes and colors helps me understand what is going on with a dataset as mathematics are being applied to it. I wanted to apply this to liquidity pools on Uniswap as a way of understanding how the liquidity in these pools behave at a fundamental level and to eventually test a hypothesis that I cannot answer without a visual aid. Uniswap pool visualizations are nothing new; graphs like the below are quite common:But un...

IntroductionI am a visual learner. Especially when it comes to data. Seeing shapes and colors helps me understand what is going on with a dataset as mathematics are being applied to it. I wanted to apply this to liquidity pools on Uniswap as a way of understanding how the liquidity in these pools behave at a fundamental level and to eventually test a hypothesis that I cannot answer without a visual aid. Uniswap pool visualizations are nothing new; graphs like the below are quite common:But un...

Recently Bitcoin has caught a second wind of activity after the viral success of Ordinals NFTs that make use of bitcoin block space to store their metadata. After a few weeks ordinals have appreciated massively in value and also now consume about 50% of all bitcoin blockspace. One would think that bitcoiners worldwide would rejoice at this news; finally, a potential long-term usecase for their dearly beloved blockchain that could actually drive meaningful fee revenue to miners as the block su...

Recently Bitcoin has caught a second wind of activity after the viral success of Ordinals NFTs that make use of bitcoin block space to store their metadata. After a few weeks ordinals have appreciated massively in value and also now consume about 50% of all bitcoin blockspace. One would think that bitcoiners worldwide would rejoice at this news; finally, a potential long-term usecase for their dearly beloved blockchain that could actually drive meaningful fee revenue to miners as the block su...

Let’s play a game. Look at the chart below, and guess what the token in question is (pair is against USDT).le public goodWhatever you may have guessed, you’re probably right. Basically every DeFi chart, especially older DeFi, looks like this. Nice little speculative pump followed by unlocks, position unwinds and dumping that brings the token right back to 0, followed by months of anemic volumes and little price action. Although the entire market is starting to look like the above reference ch...

Let’s play a game. Look at the chart below, and guess what the token in question is (pair is against USDT).le public goodWhatever you may have guessed, you’re probably right. Basically every DeFi chart, especially older DeFi, looks like this. Nice little speculative pump followed by unlocks, position unwinds and dumping that brings the token right back to 0, followed by months of anemic volumes and little price action. Although the entire market is starting to look like the above reference ch...