Decrypting Crypto

Decrypting Crypto

Here I decrypt crypto topics, trends and tech.


MadFia: A Prediction Market Playground for Altcoin & Memecoins

8 Jun 2024 4 minute read 0 comments Arhat

Introduction Another interesting DeFi primitive being used to drive retail adoption. DeFi + elements of Prediction Markets. At its core, MAD Market is designed to promote Altcoin PvP (Player vs Player) battles, allowing users to stake their chosen to...

Dropped Connections, Dropped Transactions: Solana's Struggle with Surging Transaction Demand

8 Apr 2024 5 minute read 2 comments Arhat

Recently, we saw Solana bombarded with trolls about failed transactions onchain. Before I start, it's important to understand that the issues Solana is facing are not unique to this blockchain. Every major blockchain platform has faced scalability a...

Starport Kernel Framework for Lending Protocols

7 Jan 2024 15 minute read 0 comments Arhat

A few days ago, I went through the Starport whitepaper, the lending kernel built and designed by Astaria. I really liked reading through it. Mainly because it addresses one key problem with DeFi that I'm sure has been bugging a lot of us: Backwards C...

Front-Running the Front-Runners: Understanding Inter-Block Market Manipulation

25 Dec 2023 7 minute read 1 comment Arhat

AMMs & composable swap protocols have led to exponential growth in decentralized trading activity. However, complex economic predicates encoded directly on public blockchains introduce subtle vulnerabilities. Adversaries exploit observable informatio...

OFAC and You: Is Your Ethereum Transaction Caught in the Block Builder's Compliance Filter?

20 Dec 2023 3 minute read 0 comments Arhat

Recently, bloXroutes announced that their MEV Relays would start rejecting blocks that contain transactions going to or coming from wallets on the OFAC sanction list. This means transactions involving these non-compliant wallets could potentially be...

Privacy Pools: Towards Practical Privacy & Compliance with Smart Contracts

7 Sep 2023 3 minute read 1 comment Arhat

Yesterday, Ameen Soleimani shared a new privacy paper exploring the concept of Privacy Pools, a novel smart contract-based privacy-enhancing protocol. Imagine a scenario where you prove that you've paid your taxes w/o revealing your exact income. In...

Understanding Solana's Local Fee Markets and Blockspace Structure

2 Sep 2023 8 minute read 2 comments Arhat

Solana has gained attention for its speed, low fees, and innovative blockchain architecture. However, as network usage grew in 2021-2022 and somewhat slowed down in 2023, users faced issues like periodic congestion and rising fees. Understanding Sola...

MEV Endgame: Exploring Mempool Privacy Schemes

29 Aug 2023 7 minute read 3 comments Arhat

I recently dived deep into Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) after months of seeing DeFi protocols being taken advantage of. I wrote a complete deep dive here (https://mirror.xyz/0x1dE17B6c736bcd00895655a177535c2a33C6febA/D7OfvJfGGGndCa8aMtqD6NnOPtcUt2...

An Optimistic Plan for Base Protocol's Decentralization

26 Aug 2023 4 minute read 0 comments Arhat

Base released a decentralization plan that would focus on introducing fraud proofs and diverse client software to make the chain censorship-resistant. To match the censorship resistance of layer-1 chains like Ethereum, layer-2 rollups need to minimi...

friend.tech: Tokenizing Incentives for "Friends"

24 Aug 2023 1 minute read 0 comments Arhat

A few days ago, I wrote a short write-up on friend.tech and my thoughts on it initially.   I went through the contract code in detail to understand what it actually does. And it is an Automated Market Maker in disguise. Read my detailed analysis here...