Ethereum today is incredibly congested—it’s even more congested now than it was during the height of the ICO bubble. This is impressive, but also worrying! Ethereum 2.0 is still a ways away, but the tiny island of Ethereum 1.0 is already populated to the point of saturation. Artist’s rendition of Ethereum 1.0 (source) You’ve probably heard that Ethereum 2.0 is going to be sharded. Beyond base scalability improvements, sharding is how...
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Imagine a college friend reached out to you and said, “Hey, I have a business idea. I’m going to run a market making bot. I’ll always quote a price no matter who’s asking, and for my pricing algorithm I’ll use x * y = k. That’s pretty much it. Want to invest?” You’d run away. Well, turns out your friend just described Uniswap. Uniswap is the world’s simplest on-chain market making...
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If you’ve spent any time at all on crypto Twitter, you’re familiar with the web3 narrative. It goes like this: in the beginning, the web was “truly decentralized.” Against all odds, the World Wide Web won against the corporatist designs of companies like Microsoft, and cyberspace became the territory of hobbyists and hackers. The Internet was henceforth enshrined as a neutral platform. And any publisher, no matter how small or...
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Flash loans have been the center of attention lately. Recently two hackers used flash loans to attack the margin trading protocol bZx, first in a $350K attack and later in a $600K copycat attack. These attacks were, in a word, magnificent. In each attack, a penniless attacker instantaneously borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars of ETH, threaded it through a chain of vulnerable on-chain protocols, extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars in...
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By Haseeb Qureshi and Ashwin Ramachandran It was August 2017. The price of Ether was near an all time high, the Ethereum blockchain was exploding with usage, and the chain was buckling under the ever increasing demand. Researchers and developers were frantically searching for new scalability solutions. At blockchain conferences around the world, developers debated scaling proposals. The Ethereum community was desperate for a solution. In the middle of this...
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Today I’m launching Introduction to Cryptocurrency, an online course teaching the basics of programming cryptocurrencies. The first two modules are already released, and the remainder of the course will be coming out over the next few months. Introduction to Cryptocurrency is a multidisciplinary exploration of cryptocurrencies from the ground up, spanning computer science, history, cryptography, and economics. The course has nine modules in total: History: money, the cypherpunks, and Satoshi...
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I recently turned 30. When the decade began in 2010, I was still 20, a professional poker player, a college dropout, and deeply unhappy. What did I believe I’d be doing a decade later? I don’t think I knew, only that I definitely wouldn’t be playing poker anymore. I’d be doing something much more valuable to the world, I thought. But I had no idea what it might be. I...
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