tl; drtoday i go over my implementation of a simple library for authenticated data structures and sparse merkle trees. the source code, in rust, can be found here.🎵 today’s moodhttps://open.spotify.com/track/6AtBumPb5RsfgG3Xo6UsTW?si=2368f6231a324825 “the first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” - carl jung “the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. it insists th...

tl; drtoday i go over some openzeppelin contracts while discussing features and vulnerabilities (such as reentrancy and ownership). this post is suitable for web2|3 hackers, solidity or non-solidity peeps, and computer nerds in general 🤓. for a general intro to solidity, you can check my web3-starter-sol.👾 today’s outline000. an open and secure zeppelin 001. utils/ - Context.sol: a wrapper for msg.sender and msg.data - Array.sol: handy methods for arrays 010. access/ - Ownable.sol: providin...

tl; drtoday i go over a tool i wrote to learn and run simple experiments on PIR (a fascinating research subject in cryptography). here is the source code. this particular research is highly based on the work of alexandra henzinger on SimplePIR/DoublePIR and janmajaya mall’s zuzalu demo. if you are advanced in the subject already, here is an excellent presentation by alexandra (at the simons institute, a foundation from quant-father jim simons, which also sponsored part of my research in my ph...

tl; drtoday i go over the smart contract i created two years ago for a nft collection celebrating the sunset of filmmaker dao. it was called the “storytelling card”, and folks were able to generate their unique nfts on the fly by inputting an int up to 1337:.the collection is still alive at generativestory.com.my contract was loosely based on the loot project, and it deployed a (sort of) generative erc-721 collection in the ethereum mainnet (for the cost of ~$2k or so). here is the source cod...

tl; drtoday i go over a deep tour on IPFS (an 8 years-old distributed filesystem based on - and the origin of - libp2p)..an old IPFS cli.in one sentence, IPFS is: a suite of protocols and specs for organizing|representing, and transferring|routing data through content addressing, which is mapped to peer addresses through a distributed hash table (DHT)..decentralized.the IPFS protocol is an alternative to location-based addressing (i.e., when a CDN serves HTTP requests), providing low-latency ...

today i go over a deep learning experiment modeling trading agents (and MEV bots) with reinforcement learning through MDP. my journey with machine learning started back in my phd, when i spent two good semesters mathematically and programmatically deriving all the ml classifiers, while researching complex networks (graph) classification. when i was an engineer at yelp and then at apple, i had the opportunity to build several in-house ml projects as well (some of my research can be found in my...

tl; drtoday i go over a MVP for a scalable event scanner for ethereum, through indexing and parsing block events. this is step 0 for building distributed systems that allow training machine learning models on the chains (e.g., high-frequency trading with deep learning) and other shenanigans. this is one data engineering approach: when you consciously decide to build a data lake and want to learn more about how blockchain emit logs. this project can be built in one day. for a rust agent that p...

tl; drthe strategytoday i go over a hypothetically profitable strategy that runs an oracle manipulation attack on GMX. for my previous two bots, cointbot and cowsol, i provided a complete and original production-level strategy and source-code. for this one, i will only supply the idea.the status quothis vulnerability is not new, and whoever is following the space closely is probably pretty aware of it. last year, there was some conversation about adding a twamm mechanism to the fast price fee...

tl; drtoday i go over a CLI tool and a set of trading bots that i’ve written to detect profitable cryptocurrency pairs to be shorted or longed on trading exchanges. these statistical algorithmic strategies are named cointegration, which has been around for a long time, for either traditional or decentralized finances.🎶 today’s moodhttps://open.spotify.com/track/1tDWVeCR9oWGX8d5J9rswk?si=8ba65b4175ac4e1f🧘🏻‍♀️✨ cointegration strategy for pair tradingpair trading is a classic example of a str...

tl; drtoday i go over one of my MEV bots, cowsol, which runs arbitrage strategies for CoW protocol. set a nice soundtrack, grab your favorite beverage, and solve the puzzles with me.🎶 today’s moodhttps://open.spotify.com/track/4Y2W4zKa3q72ztbkA0r8Va?si=c79621ab86ca4b95🐮🧩 piece #1: coincidence of wants💡 the cow protocol is a fully permissionless trading protocol that uses this novel idea of batch auctions to find prices and maximize liquidity, the “coincidence of wants”.🫱🏻‍🫲🏽 put it si...

tl; drtoday i go over ethereum post-merge architectural changes, how to integrate mev-boost, and the PBS && relays discussion.🎶 today’s soundtrackhttps://open.spotify.com/track/1ncrjr3qFEGCZcYJ5ikSD2?si=2bcc8abc487b46f1🧩 0: mev*the concept of maximal extractable value (mev) was coined by the 2019 research paper flashboys 2.0, and encompasses the profits generated by participant parties when producing new blocks on a blockchain.*since the ethereum blockchain doesn't enforce rules on the...

tl; drtoday i go over how to set a goerli validator with geth and prysm, both locally or using (docker) containerization. the code in this post is available here.🎶 today’s moodhttps://open.spotify.com/track/1sotD6Cn8aOtUsL0bd5HTJ?si=ec5ea69d52b84dbcwhy run a testnet node validatorall right, anon, if you are serious about being a blockchain leet h4xoor developoor buildoor, you gotta run your own node at some point in your life. this way, you will able to understand the many pieces of the ethe...