Decrypting Crypto

Decrypting Crypto

Here I decrypt crypto topics, trends and tech.


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 1 comment 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...

Friend or Frenzy? Inside the Hype Machine Powering Friend.Tech's Meteoric Rise

22 Aug 2023 4 minute read 0 comments Arhat

Friend.Tech has firmly established itself as a leading topic of discussion in crypto Twitter, seeing meteoric growth over the past few days. The revolutionary SocialFi platform enables users to invest in tokenized shares of influencers, with share pr...

The Interoperability Arbitrage: Cross-Chain Infrastructure as Asymmetric Upside

18 Aug 2023 10 minute read 1 comment Arhat

A few days ago, I wrote an introduction piece on Chainlink's CCIP. I want to dive deep into the multichain infrastructure of what web3 represents and how we, as users, can build and benefit from this infrastructure.  Cross-chain infrastructure repres...

The SOL Hidden Tax: Stake-Weighted Secrets of Solana

14 Aug 2023 3 minute read 4 comments Arhat

Solana has built-in advantages for major stakeholders that few people recognize. Let's break this down: First, Turbine prioritizes delivering transactions to validators with more staked SOL. Simply put, the more SOL you stake, the faster you get key...

Bridging Blockchains: The Ingenious Design of Chainlink's CCIP

12 Aug 2023 2 minute read 5 comments Arhat

I wanted to touch base on Chainlink's CCIP and the components that make up the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. There are 3 key components: Committing DON for proving message existence Executing DON for transferring messages ARM for security a...