Blockchain

The MoonMath Manual: A Practitioner's Guide to Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems

The MoonMath Manual is a comprehensive, example-driven introduction to zero-knowledge proof systems, covering the mathematics from finite fields through elliptic curves to Groth16 and PLONK. Written to be accessible to practitioners without a cryptography PhD, it became a widely-used self-study resource for the ZK ecosystem.

Town Crier — Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts

Town Crier is an authenticated data feed system for smart contracts that uses Intel SGX trusted execution environments to fetch external data with cryptographic attestation. An early, rigorous oracle design predating Chainlink's dominance.

Decentralised Engagement Protocol: Bringing DeFi to Marketing

The Incent whitepaper v2.0 (2022) proposes a decentralized engagement protocol that uses DeFi mechanisms to replace centralized ad networks and loyalty programs, rewarding users directly with tokens for their attention. Frames itself as 'DeMa' (Decentralized Marketing) by analogy to DeFi for finance — an ambitious reframing of the attention economy's value flows.

AdEx: Decentralized Ad Exchange

The Move Prover: A Practical Guide

OtterSec's practical guide to the Move Prover — a formal verification tool for the Move smart contract language used on Sui and Aptos. Covers writing specifications that the prover can check, bridging the gap between formal methods theory and blockchain developer practice.

Awesome-MEV: MEV Research Resource List

A curated list of MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) research papers and talks — the definitive reading list for understanding how miners and validators extract value from transaction ordering on Ethereum. MEV is simultaneously a market efficiency mechanism and a form of tax on users.

DeFi Derivatives: A Comprehensive Landscape Guide

A comprehensive GitHub resource mapping the DeFi derivatives landscape — covering options, perpetuals, interest rate swaps, and structured products built on Ethereum. An invaluable reference for understanding how traditional financial derivatives translate to on-chain primitives.

Luabase: Web3 Data Stack

Luabase is a blockchain data platform that ETLs on-chain data into queryable SQL tables — 'we ETL blockchains so you don't have to.' An early attempt to give analysts standard SQL access to blockchain activity without dealing with raw node data.

MachineFi: Machine Economy at Consensus 2022

Rex St. John's thread on MachineFi (Machine Economy) from Consensus 2022 — IoT devices participating in crypto economic systems, earning tokens and staking autonomously. The concept later resurfaced as DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks).

Jito MEV Dashboard

Jito's public MEV dashboard tracking Maximal Extractable Value on Solana — validator tips, arbitrage volumes, and extraction rates. One of the first transparent MEV tracking tools for Solana, predating Jito's later block engine infrastructure.

MEV101: The 0 to 1 Guide for Maximal Extractable Value

A ground-up guide to Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in Ethereum and DeFi, covering sandwiching, arbitrage, liquidations, generalized frontrunning, flash loans, and Flashbots. A practitioner's introduction to the adversarial game theory and dark-forest economics underlying transaction ordering in public blockchains.

Maximal Extractable Value and Constant Function Market Makers

Research paper analyzing maximal extractable value (MEV) in the context of constant function market makers (CFMMs) like Uniswap. It formalizes how miners/validators can capture value by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions, with implications for CFMM mechanism design.

Scoring Aave Accounts for Creditworthiness

Cred Protocol's paper (arXiv:2207.07008) proposing a credit scoring system for Aave v2 accounts using a tree-based classifier trained to predict 'position delinquency' — whether a borrow position's health factor will drop below 1 within 90 days. It's a direct attempt to bring FICO-style credit infrastructure to DeFi, enabling undercollateralized lending.

Dogetoshi/MEV: Curated MEV Resources

Dogetoshi's MEV repository is a curated collection of resources on maximal extractable value — papers, talks, tools, and code for understanding how searchers, builders, and validators profit from transaction ordering on Ethereum.

Unidata: Open Web3 Data Aggregation Protocol

Unidata is an open protocol for aggregating and standardizing user activity data across Web3 — social posts, NFT collections, token holdings, DeFi positions — into a unified queryable graph. Designed as a data portability layer for decentralized applications.

Flipside Crypto — Blockchain Analytics Platform

Flipside Crypto is a blockchain analytics platform providing SQL-queryable on-chain data across Ethereum, Solana, Terra, and other chains. Notable for its bounty model where analysts earn FLOW tokens for producing quality dashboards — crowdsourcing blockchain data analysis.

ethereum-etl: Python ETL for Ethereum Blockchain Data

ethereum-etl is the standard Python library for extracting Ethereum blockchain data into structured formats — blocks, transactions, ERC-20 transfers, receipts, logs, internal transactions — with Google BigQuery export support. The reference implementation for blockchain data pipelines.

Building Blockchain Data Pipelines with The Graph & Singer

A tutorial on building blockchain data pipelines using The Graph's subgraph queries piped through Singer, the open-source ETL standard. Shows how to treat on-chain indexed data like any other data source in a standard analytics stack.

Apollo: Cross-Chain ETL for EVM Chaindata

Apollo is a cross-chain ETL tool from Chainbound for extracting raw EVM chaindata — transactions, logs, traces — across multiple networks simultaneously. Designed for analysts who need low-level on-chain data without running their own full archive nodes.

Finding Bugs Automatically in Smart Contracts with Parameterized Invariants

A 2020 WIP paper from Certora describing a framework of reusable parameterized invariants for automatically finding bugs in smart contracts, with the Certora Prover discovering two real bugs in MakerDAO's Multi-Collateral Dai. The core insight is that the hardest problem in formal verification is specification, and smart contracts are unusually amenable to shared invariants — enabling a community network effect.

MEV 2.0: The Rise of MPSVs

A Reciprocal Ventures piece arguing that MEV is evolving from searcher-bot competition to MPSV (Maximal Protocol Surplus Value) — protocols themselves capturing ordering value rather than external actors extracting it. Reframes MEV as a design choice rather than an inevitable externality.

The Layer-1 Chain Rotation Thesis: A Retrospective Analysis

A mid-2022 retrospective dissecting the 2021 L1 rotation games — capital flowing from Ethereum to Solana, Avalanche, Terra, and others on unsustainable incentive structures. A clear-eyed post-mortem of what drove and ended each cycle.

Transformative Autonomous Organizations

Black Sky Nexus's piece on Transformative Autonomous Organizations — a more radical framing of DAO governance that goes beyond token voting to explore how autonomous organizations could fundamentally restructure economic coordination and power relationships.

Espresso Systems: Shared Sequencing and Privacy for L2 Rollups

Espresso Systems is building shared sequencing and privacy infrastructure for Ethereum L2 rollups — a sequencer marketplace that multiple rollups can use to get MEV protection, fast finality, and cross-rollup atomicity. Positioned at the intersection of rollup scaling and the decentralized sequencer problem.

The Web3 Index

Web3 Index tracks real protocol revenue and demand metrics across decentralized networks — focusing on fee generation as a measure of genuine usage rather than token price or TVL. A useful signal-vs-noise filter for evaluating which web3 protocols have real economic activity.

Why and How zk-SNARK Works

Maksym Petkus provides a pedagogical ground-up explanation of zk-SNARKs, answering not just how they work but why each component exists. Structured to build from first principles with no cryptography prerequisites, making it the standard accessible reference for developers wanting to understand the math behind zkEVM and privacy-preserving protocols.

Towards a Theory of Maximal Extractable Value I: Constant Function Market Makers

Kulkarni, Diamandis, and Chitra's first paper in a theory series on Maximal Extractable Value in constant function market makers, showing sandwich attack price impact scales as O(log n) in trade count. It establishes the game-theoretic framework for MEV analysis that the field needed.

Notes on Ethereum L2 Solutions

Jin's 2021 notes on Ethereum L2 scaling solutions — covering optimistic rollups, ZK-rollups, state channels, and plasma. A solid survey of the L2 design space written before rollups became the dominant paradigm.

Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges

Daian et al. document how arbitrage bots exploit transaction ordering in decentralized exchanges through priority gas auctions, introducing the concept of miner extractable value (MEV). The paper shows that MEV isn't just a trading problem — it creates measurable consensus-layer security risks for Ethereum.

Where Are All the Crypto Use Cases?

Evan Conrad's honest accounting of where crypto actually has product-market fit versus where it remains speculative — distinguishing genuine use cases (remittances, stable stores of value in unstable economies, DeFi primitives) from overhyped narratives. A useful 2022 checkpoint for crypto skepticism with an insider's eye.

Olimpio on Lens Protocol

A tweet by @olimpiocrypto about Lens Protocol — the decentralized social graph built on Polygon. Saved in June 2022 when Lens was launching and the Web3 social space was generating significant developer interest.

Ethereum Smart Contract Development in Solidity

Zheng, Gao, Huang, and Guan (Springer 2021) provide a comprehensive textbook on developing Ethereum smart contracts in Solidity, covering the EVM, contract patterns, security vulnerabilities, and real-world DApp development. A practical reference for anyone building on Ethereum.

Proof of Useful Work: Blockchain Web Services

A 2022 technical whitepaper proposing Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) as an alternative to Bitcoin's proof-of-work, directing miners' computation toward paying clients' ML training jobs and scientific simulations instead of purposeless hash puzzles. A direct response to the energy waste criticism of PoW mining.

Smart Contract Development Topics and Issues

A survey of smart contract development topics and common issues, covering the technical challenges, security vulnerabilities, and tooling landscape for writing and deploying contracts on blockchain platforms. Useful as a structured overview of what goes wrong in smart contract development and why.

Alethea AI: Intelligent NFTs

Messari's report on Alethea AI's 'Intelligent NFTs' — NFTs fused with AI personalities that can converse, learn, and evolve. An interesting 2022 experiment at the intersection of AI characters and blockchain ownership, now mostly a historical artifact of the peak NFT era.

Quantstamp Audits Portfolio

Quantstamp's audit portfolio page showcasing their security work across major protocols including ETH2.0, OpenSea, and MakerDAO. Quantstamp was one of the first institutional smart contract audit firms and helped establish what professional blockchain security work looks like.

Clockwork Finance: Automated Analysis of Economic Security in Smart Contracts

Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF) is a formal verification system for reasoning about economic security in DeFi smart contracts, introducing 'extractable value' (EV) as a rigorous notion. Applied to Uniswap, Sushiswap, and MakerDAO, it automatically discovers $56M/month in MEV-like opportunities.

Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection via Information Graph and Ensemble Learning

Zhang, Wang et al. propose SCVDIE, a smart contract vulnerability detection method combining seven neural networks with information graphs via ensemble learning. By pretraining on an information graph and ensembling diverse architectures, they achieve higher accuracy on small vulnerability datasets than individual models or static analysis tools.

Dune Analytics SQL Snippets

A GitHub collection of SQL query snippets for Dune Analytics and Google BigQuery targeting on-chain Ethereum data. Practical reference for blockchain data analysts who want reusable queries for common DeFi analytics tasks.

Orchid: Decentralized VPN Marketplace

Orchid is a decentralized VPN marketplace where users pay for bandwidth with OXT tokens on Ethereum — an attempt to build a censorship-resistant, market-driven alternative to traditional VPN providers. Interesting experiment in crypto-native privacy infrastructure.

MEV Day — Flashbots Conference

MEV Day was a Flashbots-organized conference bringing together MEV researchers, searchers, and protocol designers to share work on maximal extractable value. A snapshot of the state of MEV research and practice in 2022.

Flashbots Documentation

The official Flashbots documentation covering MEV-Geth, the Flashbots auction, searcher bundle submission, and the broader philosophy behind transparent MEV extraction. The canonical reference for anyone building MEV searchers or integrating with Flashbots infrastructure.

EigenPhi: MEV Analytics

EigenPhi is an on-chain MEV analytics platform that scans Ethereum blocks for arbitrage, sandwich attacks, and liquidations, showing the bots, victims, and profit flows. One of the first accessible dashboards for visualizing MEV extraction in real time.

Aptos FullNode + Identity Docker Guide

A Docker-based guide to running an Aptos FullNode with identity configuration — practical setup guide for the Aptos testnet period before mainnet launch. Aptos (founded by ex-Meta/Diem engineers) was one of the most anticipated new L1s of 2022.

Proof of Learning (PoLe): Blockchain Consensus via Neural Network Training

Proof of Learning (PoLe) repurposes the computation wasted on Proof-of-Work consensus by directing it toward training neural networks, making blockchain nodes useful ML workers. The cheating-prevention mechanism (Secure Mapping Layer) is the interesting technical contribution — a linear layer baked into the network architecture that makes it costly to fake training progress.

Agatha: Smart Contract for DNN Computation

Agatha is a system for verifiable DNN computation on Ethereum smart contracts, achieving native-speed off-chain inference with only 3% overhead via a graph-based pinpoint protocol. It bridges AI and blockchain by solving the mismatch between neural network computational graphs and the VM-based execution model that existing verification schemes assume.

The (Edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto

Molly White's annotated rebuttal of the New York Times' 'Latecomer's Guide to Crypto' — a line-by-line fact-check and counter-argument from one of crypto's most rigorous critics. Valuable counterpoint to promotional crypto coverage.

Protos: Informed Crypto News

Protos is an independent crypto news publication positioning itself as more rigorous and skeptical than mainstream crypto media — 'informed crypto news.' Saved during the 2022 peak, when low-quality crypto coverage was ubiquitous and critical voices were rare.

Agoric: JavaScript Smart Contracts with Object-Capability Security

Agoric is a smart contract platform built on JavaScript with a hardened security model — uses object-capability security to make contracts composable and safe by construction. An unusual approach in a space dominated by Solidity and Rust.

Ethereum Foundation Annual Report 2022

The Ethereum Foundation's April 2022 annual report covering 2021 activities, philosophy, and financials. A window into how a non-controlling organization stewards a decentralized public blockchain.

Breadcrumbs: Blockchain Investigation Tool

Breadcrumbs is a visual blockchain investigation tool — traces transaction flows as a graph, identifies counterparty clusters, and flags sanctioned addresses. Used for AML compliance, due diligence, and on-chain forensics.

Hypercycle: Blockchain Architecture for Scalable AI Microservices

SingularityNET's Hypercycle whitepaper proposes a lightweight agent-based blockchain architecture for cheap, high-speed execution of AI microservices, built on Cardano's EUTxO model, the TODA ledgerless blockchain, and a Proof of Reputation system. An ambitious attempt to make AI services composable on-chain.

LayerZero: Trustless Omnichain Interoperability Protocol

LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that enables trustless direct messaging between any two blockchains via a lightweight on-chain endpoint and an oracle+relayer security model. Addresses blockchain fragmentation without requiring a trusted bridge custodian.

Solana Workbench: Developer Tool for Solana

Solana Workbench is a GUI developer tool for Solana smart contract development — manage local validators, deploy programs, inspect account state, and run transactions without the CLI. A Remix-style IDE for the Solana ecosystem.

Akash: Decentralized Cloud Computing

Akash Network is a decentralized cloud marketplace where anyone can sell spare compute capacity and anyone can buy it — an open alternative to AWS/GCP with on-chain pricing and Kubernetes-based workload orchestration.

EPNS: Decentralized Push Notification Service

EPNS (Ethereum Push Notification Service, now Push Protocol) is a decentralized notification layer for Web3 — enabling dApps to send opt-in push notifications to wallet addresses across chains. Fills the gap between on-chain events and user awareness.

What Is It Like to Join a DAO?

Aragon's first-person account of joining a DAO — the onboarding friction, the role of Discord, token-gating, contribution paths, and how governance proposals actually work in practice. Ground-level view of how decentralized organizations operate day-to-day.

The Eth2 Book

An online book covering Ethereum 2.0 — the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake via the Beacon Chain. Written in early 2022 as The Merge was approaching, providing technical depth on Casper FFG, attestations, and validator mechanics.

Running an Ethereum Full Node on a Raspberry Pi 4

A guide to running an Ethereum full node on a Raspberry Pi 4 — a self-sovereign approach to blockchain access that avoids trusting centralized RPC providers like Infura. Technical tutorial covering hardware, software, and sync process.

Speeding Up the EVM (Flashbots Research)

Flashbots research on techniques to speed up the Ethereum Virtual Machine — covering parallelism, caching, and other optimizations to increase throughput beyond the EVM's sequential execution model. Relevant to scaling Ethereum L1 without moving to L2.

Ethereum EVM Illustrated

A visual primer on the Ethereum Virtual Machine internals — accounts, transactions, message calls, gas, the stack/memory/storage architecture, and Go-Ethereum source code. The best single-document mental model for how the EVM actually works at the bytecode level.

L2BEAT: The State of the Layer Two Ecosystem

L2BEAT tracks TVL and security risk across all Ethereum Layer 2 solutions — classifying each by how much trust is required (training wheels vs. fully trustless). The most authoritative public resource for comparing the actual security properties of different L2s.

ARK Big Ideas 2022

ARK Invest's 2022 annual Big Ideas report lays out their investment thesis across five disruptive technology platforms: genomics, robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. It's both a market forecast and a statement of where ARK believes exponential cost curves will reshape entire industries over the next decade.

Keep the Web Free: No to Web3

A manifesto from the Yesterweb community arguing against Web3 — identifying it as predatory marketing, concentrated power under decentralization rhetoric, artificial scarcity, and a regressive wealth transfer mechanism. The clearest statement of the old-web skeptic's case against crypto.

A3MC: Independent Blockchain Research Lab and Validator

A3MC (art3mis.cloud) is an independent blockchain research lab and validator operation — running Solana validators at 7.5% APY with 99.99% uptime, plus participation in Avalanche, The Graph, MultiversX, and Mina Protocol. Enterprise-grade validator infrastructure from a decentralized team.

Messari Crypto Theses for 2022

Ryan Selkis's flagship Messari annual crypto report for 2022 — a ~120-page deep dive into every major sector of the crypto market including DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, L1s, and regulatory outlook. Indispensable primary source for understanding the state of crypto at the 2021/2022 peak.

Empirical Analysis of EIP-1559: Transaction Fees, Waiting Time, and Consensus Security

This empirical study of Ethereum's EIP-1559 upgrade analyzes real on-chain data from the August 2021 London Hardfork to measure effects on transaction fees, waiting times, and miner incentives. It confirms improved fee predictability but also identifies new volatility patterns and security implications from the base fee burn mechanism.

Arweave — Be Careful

A Reddit warning thread about Arweave, the permanent decentralized storage blockchain. The 'be careful' framing captures the skepticism that arose alongside Arweave's speculative hype during the 2021 storage-chain boom.

Holographic Consensus — DAOstack's Scaling Mechanism

Matan Field's foundational paper on holographic consensus — DAOstack's mechanism for scaling DAO governance by using prediction markets to surface which proposals deserve the full DAO's attention. The core intellectual contribution behind the Genesis DAO and DAOstack protocol.

DEX Metrics — Dune Analytics Dashboard

A Dune Analytics dashboard tracking decentralized exchange (DEX) volume, market share, and activity across major DeFi protocols. The canonical public resource for comparing Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve, and other DEX activity in 2022.

1confirmation 2021 NFT Year in Review

1confirmation's data-driven review of the 2021 NFT market: $19.6B in trading volume, 2M active users, and a breakdown of visual art, PFPs, collectibles, and gaming. The bull case for NFTs as a fundamentally better business model for creators, written before the 2022 collapse.

Programming Bitcoin — Jimmy Song

Jimmy Song's 'Programming Bitcoin' book repository — a hands-on O'Reilly book that teaches Bitcoin internals by implementing the cryptography and protocol layer from scratch in Python. The deepest technical introduction to how Bitcoin actually works.

Mysten Labs — Sui Blockchain Infrastructure

Mysten Labs is the company building Sui — a new Layer 1 blockchain focused on object-centric state and high-throughput parallel execution. Founded by ex-Meta (Diem/Libra) researchers who spun out after Facebook killed its blockchain project.

Free Resources to Get a Blockchain Job — For Non-Coders

A free curriculum guide for non-technical people to learn enough blockchain/web3 to get a job in the space within 6 months. Covers communities, certifications, content creation, and non-engineering roles available in crypto.

Figment Series C — $110M "WAGMI Round"

Figment's $110M Series C announcement (branded as their 'WAGMI Round') — Figment is a leading proof-of-stake staking infrastructure provider supporting validators across 40+ blockchain networks. A signal of institutional capital flowing into PoS validator infrastructure in late 2021.

Layer-1 Platforms: A Framework for Comparison

The Block Research's comparative framework for seven Layer-1 blockchains — Algorand, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Cosmos, Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, and Solana. A structured way to think about what actually differentiates L1 architectures, commissioned by Algorand in 2021.

Secrets of Crypto Thread

A Twitter thread from SecretsOfCrypto explaining crypto concepts or market dynamics, saved in May 2021 at the height of the crypto bull run. Context suggests educational content about crypto investing or mechanics.