Subject
38 entries
Crypto
Bookmarks
Best Practices for Ethereum Beacon Chain Staking (September 2022)
Reddit thread from r/ethstaker documenting best practices for staking on the Ethereum Beacon Chain in September 2022 — just before The Merge. Covers client diversity, slashing prevention, key management, and hardware choices for home validators.
Navigating Web3 Compensation: A Framework Report
Framework Ventures' 2022 report on compensation structures in Web3 — covering how crypto-native organizations pay differently from traditional companies, the role of token compensation, and what the data shows about salary bands in the space.
Advertising and Web3
An essay arguing that advertising has real value worth preserving as the web transitions toward web3 models. A contrarian take against the reflexive crypto disdain for ads — worth reading alongside the dominant narrative.
What I'm Frustrated by in Crypto
Amir Bolous's honest critique of crypto circa 2022: most on-chain activity is speculation, not genuine problem-solving, and the space has abandoned basic startup discipline around product-market fit. A well-reasoned internal critique from someone who remains cautiously optimistic.
Botto: AI Artist with a Million-Dollar Track Record
Botto is an AI artist by Mario Klingemann that generates 350 artworks weekly, has a community of token holders vote on favorites, and mints one NFT per week — earning $1M in its first five weeks. A real implementation of human-AI collaborative taste formation.
Point Network: Full Web3 Architecture
Point Network aimed to decentralize all core internet components — domains, storage, and content delivery — unlike web3 projects that kept centralized DNS. It launched mainnet in September 2022 but failed to achieve adoption after the FTX collapse and was acquired by Arweave/AO.
Overlay V1 Core: Stability and Robustness for Data-Stream Derivative Markets
Technical paper extending the Overlay Protocol — a decentralized system for creating derivative markets on any data stream — with a three-part risk framework: funding payments, bid-ask pricing, and circuit breakers. The key challenge is managing the risk that any market can have unbounded open interest against the protocol's treasury.
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.
Maya Woulfe: Link in Bio
Maya Woulfe's bio link page — a bookmark capturing a crypto/Web3 person of interest in mid-2022. Low content; primarily a reference to the person.
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.
Trait Sniper: NFT Rarity and Trading Tool
Trait Sniper is an NFT rarity and sniping tool that calculates rarity scores for NFT collection traits and reveals them before official reveals. Used to identify underpriced NFTs with rare traits at mint or on secondary markets.
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.
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.
Formfunction: 1/1 NFT Marketplace on Solana
Formfunction is a 1/1 NFT marketplace on Solana focused on individual digital artists — not bulk 10k PFP collections. Emphasized low environmental impact and direct artist-to-collector relationships. An early attempt at building an artist-first NFT market on Solana.
Querying Live Crypto Trades with SQL in Real-Time
QuestDB tutorial showing how to query live cryptocurrency trade data in real-time with SQL — ingesting from Coinbase's WebSocket feed into QuestDB and running time-series queries. A practical demo of time-series SQL for financial market data.
Running a Bitcoin Lightning Network Node
A guide to running a Bitcoin Lightning Network node — covers the LND or c-lightning stack, channel management, and liquidity. Lightning enables near-instant BTC payments by routing transactions off-chain through a network of payment channels.
Tokenomics DAO
Tokenomics DAO is a community focused on researching and discussing token economic design — how token supply, distribution, incentives, and governance mechanisms shape crypto protocol behavior. A 2022-era community for the nascent field of token engineering.
Crypto Pay Guide: Compensation Model
C3's Crypto Pay Guide covers compensation models for full-time crypto/web3 employees — how to think about base salary, token grants, vesting schedules, and the tax implications of being paid in tokens. Useful context for the 2022 crypto hiring boom.
Token Terminal: Fundamentals for Crypto
Token Terminal provides fundamental financial metrics for crypto protocols — revenue, P/S ratios, TVL, and active users — applying traditional equity analysis frameworks to blockchain-native projects. Useful for evaluating which crypto protocols have real business traction.
Quick and Dirty Anon Building Guide
A practical guide to building crypto projects anonymously — covering wallet setup, separate identity compartmentalization, and social media opsec. Reflects the 2021-2022 pattern where many crypto builders went anon to reduce personal legal and regulatory exposure.
The Defiant's Definitive Guide to DeFi
The Defiant's comprehensive guide to decentralized finance — covering lending protocols, DEXs, yield farming, stablecoins, and how they interconnect. A well-structured entry point from one of the most trusted DeFi media publications.
Theoretical Advances in AMM Understanding
A technical deep-dive on theoretical advances in understanding automated market makers (AMMs) — covering impermanent loss, concentrated liquidity, and how AMM design choices create different economic tradeoffs for liquidity providers. Essential reading for DeFi protocol design.
Radicle: Peer-to-Peer Code Collaboration
Radicle is a peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git — no central server, no platform dependency, repositories hosted on a distributed network. The decentralized alternative to GitHub for sovereign code hosting.
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.
loldefi
loldefi.com — a DeFi-themed community or humor site bookmarked during a DeFi research session alongside Foundry, Alpha Pro, and AMM theory. Content unavailable at processing time.
Alpha Pro: Permissionless Options-Selling on DeFi
Alpha Pro is a permissionless DeFi platform from Charm Finance for automated options-selling strategies on Ethereum — earn yield by systematically selling options (strangles, etc.) with on-chain execution and no centralized management. The on-chain equivalent of systematic options-selling desks.
Web3 Is Going Just Great — Jan 15, 2022 Entry
A specific incident entry from Molly White's Web3 Is Going Just Great, cataloging a crypto/NFT failure from January 15, 2022. The site is the canonical running ledger of web3's broken promises and outright frauds.
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.
The Worrisome Rise of NFTs
Nautilus magazine's critique of NFTs at the height of the 2021 boom — covering environmental harm from proof-of-work blockchains, manufactured scarcity, and the disconnect between NFT hype and actual value creation. Science journalism applying a skeptical lens to speculative tech.
The Ultimate Guide to GMI — Bankless
Bankless's guide to 'GMI' (Gonna Make It) — the crypto-native meme-term for successfully navigating the crypto space into wealth and freedom. A document of the 2021-2022 speculative peak's cultural vocabulary and belief system.
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.
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.
The Community Garden: The Case for Leaving FAANG for Crypto
Paradigm's essay making the case for senior engineers to leave FAANG companies for crypto/web3 in 2021 — arguing that the technology primitives, ownership opportunities, and mission alignment make the career trade-off favorable for the right person.
"RIP My Portfolio" — December 2021 Crypto Drawdown
A retweeted image lamenting crypto portfolio losses in December 2021 — saved during the mid-cycle correction that preceded the 2022 bear market. A timestamp on market sentiment at a specific moment.
Web3 Is Going Just Great — Main Site
Molly White's Web3 Is Going Just Great — the canonical running timeline of crypto/NFT/web3 failures, scams, and disasters. First bookmarked when the site launched in December 2021, before it became widely cited.
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.