People tend to overestimate how easy it is to create a blockchain. Just because you were able to deploy a network doesn’t make you an expert on blockchain. As a matter of fact, even an intern can do it in minutes. Here, try it. You know what else is easy to deploy? A webpage. Creating a blockchain is easy, and you can do it at zero cost and effort for as long as you don’t care about the design and spec of your network. Understanding the engineering constraints to design a secure and functiona...

People tend to overestimate how easy it is to create a blockchain. Just because you were able to deploy a network doesn’t make you an expert on blockchain. As a matter of fact, even an intern can do it in minutes. Here, try it. You know what else is easy to deploy? A webpage. Creating a blockchain is easy, and you can do it at zero cost and effort for as long as you don’t care about the design and spec of your network. Understanding the engineering constraints to design a secure and functiona...

If you’ve been here long enough, you would have already heard of the blockchain trilemma where you can only pick two out of three between security, speed, and decentralization. But that is so 2020. Some years ago, we expect one single blockchain to perform various functions for us. For instance, Ethereum has become congested because it was juggling between validating incoming transactions, arranging them into blocks, executing them, and finally keeping all these growing records available at a...

If you’ve been here long enough, you would have already heard of the blockchain trilemma where you can only pick two out of three between security, speed, and decentralization. But that is so 2020. Some years ago, we expect one single blockchain to perform various functions for us. For instance, Ethereum has become congested because it was juggling between validating incoming transactions, arranging them into blocks, executing them, and finally keeping all these growing records available at a...

Excuse any typo or grammar lapses in this post. Yer donkey just got poisoned by spoiled milk and is now drunk typing on a high fever. This helps tho. Today’s topic requires some courage to be published. We’d be talking about one of the most controversial protocols in DeFi and how ZK was used for its privacy-preserving properties: Tornado Cash. Do you know one of the founders of got jailed for it… fortunately he’s already released as of today-- just with a monitoring device on his ankles. Goms...

Excuse any typo or grammar lapses in this post. Yer donkey just got poisoned by spoiled milk and is now drunk typing on a high fever. This helps tho. Today’s topic requires some courage to be published. We’d be talking about one of the most controversial protocols in DeFi and how ZK was used for its privacy-preserving properties: Tornado Cash. Do you know one of the founders of got jailed for it… fortunately he’s already released as of today-- just with a monitoring device on his ankles. Goms...

Here I am, resurrecting my blog like a dusty necromancer coming back for one last summon. And what brought me back from the digital grave? Larpers. Everywhere. People posing as crypto 'experts' when they haven’t done the actual work of researching whatever the hekk it is they are talking about. It’s all vibes and appearances and no substance. Lately, the Orb and World has been made an antagonist in the Filipino crypto scene. And everyone suddenly became a data privacy expert and mor...

Here I am, resurrecting my blog like a dusty necromancer coming back for one last summon. And what brought me back from the digital grave? Larpers. Everywhere. People posing as crypto 'experts' when they haven’t done the actual work of researching whatever the hekk it is they are talking about. It’s all vibes and appearances and no substance. Lately, the Orb and World has been made an antagonist in the Filipino crypto scene. And everyone suddenly became a data privacy expert and mor...

In the beginning, the only way you could buy crypto was either through bargaining with another human or going through the hoops of centralized exchangez. And it’s all good, but manually finding a seller that will meet your quantity and price is difficult and centralized exchanges are prone to mismanagement. So from these inefficiencies, DEXes are born. And safe to say that as of the moment, the most popular DEX that is catering to hundreds of thousands of crypto users is Uniswap. This has bee...

In the beginning, the only way you could buy crypto was either through bargaining with another human or going through the hoops of centralized exchangez. And it’s all good, but manually finding a seller that will meet your quantity and price is difficult and centralized exchanges are prone to mismanagement. So from these inefficiencies, DEXes are born. And safe to say that as of the moment, the most popular DEX that is catering to hundreds of thousands of crypto users is Uniswap. This has bee...

Lato-lato is the current craze where I live as of the time of this writing. And thank goodness coz while the ear-splitting clacks of this toy can be heard all over the town, it gave me an epiphany about a certain DeFi protocol that I’ve been dying to understand. The protocol iz Pendle Finance. Most crypto apers miss this because admittedly the barrier to understanding what it does is high. But I think it’s a hidden gold mine just waiting to be discovered by the wider crypto public. So… here w...

Lato-lato is the current craze where I live as of the time of this writing. And thank goodness coz while the ear-splitting clacks of this toy can be heard all over the town, it gave me an epiphany about a certain DeFi protocol that I’ve been dying to understand. The protocol iz Pendle Finance. Most crypto apers miss this because admittedly the barrier to understanding what it does is high. But I think it’s a hidden gold mine just waiting to be discovered by the wider crypto public. So… here w...

In da past two weeks, I have encountered at least 3 people who talk about quantum menace as if it will be the end of all existing blockchains today. So here are some facts: -Majority of the hashing functions used to generate private keys for blockchain addresses are using Elliptic Curve Cryptography which is NOT quantum safe. It means digital signatures may be forged to make transactions on behalf of an account. This is probably where they’re coming from. -Hashing algorithms like Keccak256 ar...

In da past two weeks, I have encountered at least 3 people who talk about quantum menace as if it will be the end of all existing blockchains today. So here are some facts: -Majority of the hashing functions used to generate private keys for blockchain addresses are using Elliptic Curve Cryptography which is NOT quantum safe. It means digital signatures may be forged to make transactions on behalf of an account. This is probably where they’re coming from. -Hashing algorithms like Keccak256 ar...

I’ve always thought that not being able to use your staked assets was sort of the catch in earning your staking rewards. That’s the way it works with time deposits in banks, or even in securities where if more people hold the asset the stronger it becomes. On hindsight, having all that liquidity locked up in a validator is kind of a bummer for the whole ETH ecosystem. Consider these two scenarios: First is an eth economy where the value of the currency is high because a lot of it has been loc...

I’ve always thought that not being able to use your staked assets was sort of the catch in earning your staking rewards. That’s the way it works with time deposits in banks, or even in securities where if more people hold the asset the stronger it becomes. On hindsight, having all that liquidity locked up in a validator is kind of a bummer for the whole ETH ecosystem. Consider these two scenarios: First is an eth economy where the value of the currency is high because a lot of it has been loc...

I haven’t escaped Cairo hell yet when the Cairo 1.0 rolled out, promising ZK-STARK-provable computation with simpler syntax and better security through an intermediate representation they call Sierra. Now after a few traumatic attempts at understanding the old version of Cairo (excuse me I’m quite normie), my fear was that the addition of this new steps will make it more complex, but luckily I was proven wrong.A Quick Rundown on How Cairo WorksCairo is specifically designed for creating valid...

I haven’t escaped Cairo hell yet when the Cairo 1.0 rolled out, promising ZK-STARK-provable computation with simpler syntax and better security through an intermediate representation they call Sierra. Now after a few traumatic attempts at understanding the old version of Cairo (excuse me I’m quite normie), my fear was that the addition of this new steps will make it more complex, but luckily I was proven wrong.A Quick Rundown on How Cairo WorksCairo is specifically designed for creating valid...

Depending on who you ask, the definition of Web3 wildly varies from “a new buzzword that crypto scammers use” to “the next big thing in the history of interwebz”. I’m here to tell you that both are true. And I’m not gonna pretend that Web3 is a utopian dream where only good projects emerge because that is simply not the reality of it. Web3 is a tool… it can be used for either good or bad and a lot of gray areas in between. But it is one powerful tool, so today I’m going to dissect what makes ...

Depending on who you ask, the definition of Web3 wildly varies from “a new buzzword that crypto scammers use” to “the next big thing in the history of interwebz”. I’m here to tell you that both are true. And I’m not gonna pretend that Web3 is a utopian dream where only good projects emerge because that is simply not the reality of it. Web3 is a tool… it can be used for either good or bad and a lot of gray areas in between. But it is one powerful tool, so today I’m going to dissect what makes ...