On Top of Ruins

My thoughts on engineering, cryptography, protocols and AI

Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has released a new Ledger Recover service in 

. This new feature was met with a mixed response from the crypto community. Some people expressed outrage, arguing that transmitting key fragments to third parties compromises the fundamental purpose of a hardware wallet. To some, it even raised suspicions about a potential backdoor.

Stop using Ledger hardware wallets. Migrate away from them immediately. They’ve shown nothing but gross incompetence and wild misunderstanding of their own purpose. And now they’ve publicly  admitted to intentionally backdooring their own proprietary hardware. Stop using Ledger https://t.co/LLFFUsOW4y

Honestly, my initial reaction towards this feature was not negative. Having worked with a previous company that was focused on solving wallet management issues for everyday users, I comprehend the potential of a secure key recovery service. It could present a significant advantage to numerous users and could address one of the key obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of cryptocurrency by average users. The fact that this new feature is opt-in further reassured me that it would not pose a significant threat to other existing users.

However, on a second thought, I started seeing things from a different perspective. While I still believe that the recovery service has the potential to greatly benefit users, I have a few reservations about its current implementation in Ledger. There are a few serious issues that concern me and warrant further discussion and examination.

Before going into my specific concerns, I would like to dispel a common misconception. Many people who reacted with alarm have a misconception about how Ledger uses the Secure Element. They wrongly assume that the code run by the Secure Element is immutable, which is not the case. Ledger runs a custom operating system known as 

, which is executed within the the Secure Element of the SoC. BOLOS, being part of the firmware, can be updated to accommodate new features, such as supporting new cryptography primitives and additional blockchains. The updatable BOLOS invariably has access secret key materials to enable it to derive new keys using different algorithms. Essentially, the entirely of BOLOS forms the trusted computing base (TCB) of the Ledger system. Without the ability to update BOLOS, Ledger would be unable to support new signing algorithms or additional blockchains without rolling out new hardware models.

However, the firmware update of BOLOS is not unregulated. The code that operates within the Secure Element must be signed by the Ledger company. Furthermore, it can reasonably be assumed that a user passcode is necessary to authorize a firmware update. Therefore, even in a hypothetical scenario where Ledger is coerced by a governmental authority to release firmware incorporating a backdoor, this modified firmware couldn't be installed without the user's explicit consent.

 provides a comprehensive explanation of the interplay between the Secure Element, OS, and apps in a Ledger device.

@AbsoluteGnosis (1/2) Technically speaking it is and always has been possible to write firmware that facilitates key extraction. You have always trusted Ledger not to deploy such firmware whether you knew it or not.

Information security always involves balancing trade-offs. Methods exist to mitigate risks during firmware updates; one approach is to design hardware to generate key encryption keys based on firmware measurements. Thus, any firmware modification would erase the device. While this enhances security, it complicates the update process for users. Given that most users' threat models don't require protection against state actors, it's understandable that leading hardware wallet manufacturers allow firmware updates without necessitating a full factory reset.

My reservations about the Ledger Recover service center around two key areas: the potential risks inherent in its implementation and the broader human organizational issues. While these problems may not actually arise in Ledger's implementation, the Ledger team's rather poor job at communicating their implementation details to the technical community leaves me with no choice but to assume the worst-case scenario.

 contains the most comprehensive description that I could find from Ledger regarding the design of their new service:

Ledger Recover undeniably expands the attack surface

In my opinion, the FAQ published by Ledger not only failed to answer many crucial questions, it, in fact, exacerbates my concerns.

The FAQ describes that the private key is encrypted and subsequently divided into three fragments. This, however, leads to several questions: if the key is encrypted prior to its division, whose encryption key is used? Are these fragments encrypted within the Secure Element before distribution to individual operators, thereby averting interception at the software level?

If the key that wraps the users' key materials is under the control of a singular entity and if that entity can access the fragments (perhaps during initial setup), the “layers of protection” in their recovery service become moot.

Further, there's another aspect that needs clarification: are the encryption public keys embedded in the firmware, or are they obtained from software? If it's the latter, there exists a potential threat where an attacker could substitute the encryption key with a different one, enabling the interception of the key in transit, and consequently, access to the private key material.

Even without these potential vulnerabilities, the Ledger Recover service still breaks a crucial assurance many users rely on: that there is no possible way to extract or clone a secret key from a hardware wallet. Many wallet management procedures employed by large enterprises hinge on this assumption and the physical security of the hardware itself. An attacker who knows the passcode could use a fake identity to sign up for the recovery service and clone the private key to a new Ledger device. The new recovery service, at the very least, weakens - if not entirely disrupts - this assumption.

The Ledger Recover service relies on government-issued ID for verification. This implies that at least part of the recovery process involves human judgment. Whenever humans are involved, the organizational design always becomes a crucial point of discussion.

Firstly, how do Coincover and Ledger verify your identity? Is the verification process performed independently by both? Or does one party conduct the verification and the other merely a rubber stamp?

From their FAQ, a third party who retains one of the three shares of the key is termed an "independent backup service provider". This title suggests that this provider only offers a "backup service”. It is reasonable to expect that this provider would not be involved in the verification process. If this is the case, who has the authority to instruct the backup service to return a fragment?

These questions essentially revolve around the degree of independence of the three supposedly separate parties. If at least one of them is not practically independent, the entire 2-of-3 threshold secret sharing scheme may offer no protection to the majority party.

Furthermore, where are Coincover and the "independent backup service provider" based? If they are both situated in the same country, or in friendly nations, a single court order could potentially force two of the parties to surrender their key fragment. This could potentially lead to the seizure of assets, which represents a serious threat to some users’ security.

In conclusion, while Ledger's new recovery service has the potential to significantly benefit users, there are pressing concerns regarding its implementation and organizational structure. The increased attack surface, questionable independence of parties involved in key recovery, and the potential impact of governmental intervention raise legitimate doubts about the security of the system. Ledger needs to address these issues transparently and communicate their solutions effectively to the technical community to ensure user confidence and maintain the high security standards users have come to expect from hardware wallets.

Is Ledger's new seed phrase recovery service a backdoor?

A Closer Look at the Security Concerns On Ledger Recover

Web3 e outras coisas boas 🐯

@abambres.bsky.social on https://bsky.app

 do you keep using, promoting or authorizing products from 

Meta Platforms, Inc (aka Meta, ex-Facebook, Inc)

Examples of fines and lawsuits against Meta

SIN v Facebook: Tech giant sued over censorship in landmark case 👇🏼

Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws 👇🏼

The 16 biggest scandals Mark Zuckerberg faced over the last decade as he became one of the world's most powerful people 👇🏼

Recalling the negative effects of Facebook Inc before being renamed to “Meta” last October 28th, 2021:

said the 2007-2011 Facebook’s vice-president of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya

. He also said to feel “tremendous guilt” about Facebook, and has banned his children from using it. The comments were made shortly after Facebook’s first president Sean Parker described how facebook might be changing the way people’s minds work.

said Sean Parker (Facebook’s first president).

, Tristan Harris (ex-Google designer, featured in 

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who had joined the company to help combat misinformation, recently testified in front of the United States Congress and blew the whistle, saying Facebook prioritised profit over safety and was tearing our societies apart.

The most damaging document leak showed Facebook was aware of the 

damage its Instagram app was causing to teen mental health and wellbeing

The Metaverse started as a science fiction thing

. Neal Stephenson famously coined the term in his 1992 book *Snow Crash, *describing it as a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people. Lots of other science fiction media includes metaverse-like systems. In most current discourse, “the metaverse” is just a sexy, aspirational name for some kind of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) play which brings a sense of “presence”, i.e. being physically engaging with places and people (instead of watching them in 2D).

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab, actually built a 1994 version of a Metaverse with his friend Daniel Beck. Zuzkerman recently 

Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and the “founding father” of VR, wrote in his book 

. Some call this rebranding a way to wipe out all the dirt that has been ruining the reputation of the firm, while the latter calls it a way to reflect their commitment to a future where the 

Facebook, arguably the tech company with the biggest stake in the Metaverse, owns Oculus — a company that manufactures and sells VR/AR tools and is developing a 3D virtual platform called 

. Zuckerberg claims that after the completion of the project (next 10-15 years) VR/AR hardware will be as normalized as today’s use of smartphones.

3D spaces in the Metaverse will allow you to “hang out with friends, work, play, learn, shop, create, and more”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s goals for his company are another proof that he only cares about himself, simply resembling an Alien, without any clue of what is like to be humane. But he is definitely not alone. Other billionaires like Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Richard Branson (Virgin) are also more keen to 💲 than making life on Earth better for all, judging by the recent news about their scramble for space travel supremacy (

). As far as their greediness is concerned, the sky is the limit.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp ➜ 🗑️ 

⚠️Meta / Facebook Inc has long been harming people but most don't care.

Andrey Didovskiy

💎 Digital Asset Investor 🧙‍♂️ Crypto Content Wizard Laser focused on bringing incredible applications to Life 🌟

Existing at the intersection of finance and technology, DEFI has been heralded as the frontier of innovation and the solution to the woes of the traditional financial system.

Over the last few years, a tsunami of protocols and applications have come to market, harping on this promise, all claiming to provide some kind of unique value proposition that will enrich the lives of its user and protect them from the evils of legacy finance…

Assuming that these projects did have good intentions 

 the moat of informational asymmetry due to the complexities of the technology itself creates an enormous spread between truth, security, and reality. Moreover, DEFI inherits the underlying primitive of sovereignty from crypto, where the responsibility of asset ownership and management is entirely in the hands of the users, a level of responsibility that consumers have never been faced with.

While this noble, utopian mission has attracted the attention of people from around the world and drawn in hundreds of billions of dollars in TVL, it has not been able to express the full scope of potential implications during its development.

Even though all of the experimentation that has been taking place has flooded networks with more value, the level of security in the industry has not changed at all.

 (arguably, with Ethereum moving to POS it might have even degraded).

Therefore the only genuine way to protect yourself and your assets from the whirlwind of fuckery that is monitoring your wallets and trying to steal your money is by equipping yourself with knowledge.

Sure, it may not sound sexy. But if you can understand the fundamental touchpoints that can cause financial ruin, you will be far more emotionally prepared and most likely much wealthier.

So without further ado, let's put into focus how genuinely broad and varied the surface area of risk in DEFI really is.

MEV is a contentious topic in the world of crypto. Perhaps nowhere more so than in the DEFI sector.

Simply put, MEV is a botnet that is looking to front-run your transaction and squeeze out any potential excess value, that should trickle back to you. Imagine paying for a $17 shirt with a $20 bill and the clerk at the register told you there is no change because of the physical entropy he has to exert in order to manually organize the bills…

In DEFI, every single function from lending to trading is subject to MEV. These pretentious bots can reorganize/sandwich/delay your transactions, prioritize their own, and force you to miss opportunities. The best way to engage in on-chain finance is minimally; try to reduce the amount of interactions that must be done.

Given that DEFI protocols depend exist in blockchain environments that are not aware of information that exists outside of themselves, they need a method by which to get their data from somewhere.

Oracles are the connective tissues between on-chain and off-chain data. They are pipelines that funnel information from the real world into the digital economy.

Whenever you go to an exchange like Uniswap and see the price of Ethereum, what is happening behind the scenes is that Uniswap is asking an Oracle network (chainlink) to quote you a price from trusted sources. That Oracle then scans/queries other venues that provide the requested data point (Binance, KuCoin, 1inch, etc) and provides a spot price to trade at.

In this process of receiving a request, going to find the request, and fulfilling the request, subversion exits in two general ways:

The sources from which oracles get information collude to produce fake information or their servers are hacked and the data is spoofed. Chainlink might trust Binance for ETH price, but what happens if the information on Binance does something egregious (wicks the price 10x)?

Given how valuable the information that oracles provide is, it is not outside the realm of consideration that the oracles could be provoked through incentives by external forces to provide incorrect information.

The most fundamental form of risk exists in DEFI.

Smart contracts may be mathematically sound, but when their hard-coded structures are met by extremely savvy hackers that can identify logical loopholes and find exploits to drain protocol liquidity, cause mass token minting, or manipulate protocol functions, it is the end user that ends up paying the ultimate price.

Besides being subverted by malicious entities, poorly coded contracts might just result in internal systemic failures. A function that is accidentally defined incorrectly can result in an error that locks liquidity permanently or a single line of code that does not map the relationship between token owners and their rights to send the token can freeze assets in wallets with no ability to ever move them.

Logic that might hold up in a closed alpha on a testnet somewhere will not be the same as the logic in a public mainnet.

The ultimate combination of the two smart contract failures can be seen with the painful example of Terra/Luna (r.i.p. billions of dollars).

You might have heard this one before, crypto assets are volatile.. very volatile.

Where traditional financial instruments, such as stocks, might swing +/- 3% in a day, it is totally normal for a crypto asset to swing upwards of +/- 15% in that same day.

When it comes to DEFI, we're not talking about the price risk you have regarding just holding an asset, we are talking about how the price movement can impact the more exotic forms of portfolio exposure. There are two general classes of this exposure:

When tokens are provided to an AMM and the price deviates from the exact rate at the moment of deposit, impermanent loss takes place. If ETH is at $2,000 and somebody provides liquidity to an ETH/USDC pool they would supply an equal amount of 1ETH+$2,000 USDC. Doing so would obviously incur basic transaction costs, already putting them in the hole, but then if the price of ETH rises to $2,200 then the user will only be entitled to claim 1.1 ETH + $1,800 USDT. Considering there would be another basic transactional cost incurred the user would have to be exposed to an unknown duration of providing liquidity to cover those base costs from the generated yield. Moreover, the user would have to now go through more intermediaries in order to balance out their position proportionally (selling the 0.1eth for USDT). The reason this is called impermanent loss is whenever price fluctuations exceed the returns that could have been had by simply holding the asset. Think about it, the person who provided liquidity provided $4,000 worth (1ETH @ $2,000 + $2,000). When they withdrew, they got $4,000 worth (minus fees). If instead of providing the liquidity they had just held the same assets they would have $4,200 (1ETH @ $2,200 + $2,000).

Image ETH is trading at $2,000. Say you want to borrow $2,000 USDT. In order to do this, you must provide excess collateral in ETH to take the loan. So you lock up 2 ETH ($4,000) and take out the loan. Next week, ETH plummets to $1,000. Now the collateral you posted is worth $2,000; a level that is algorithmically considered risky (if you only have $2,000 worth of collateral for a $2,000 loan, you are not incentivized to pay it back). To protect the lender, your assets get market sold (likely at $1,100ea) and you're stuck with $1,000 instead of your original 2 ETH.

Even if a protocol is designed properly and everything seems to be working fine, there is a not-so-subtle dependency of that protocol on the network to which it is deployed.

Validators behaving out of line, consensus mechanisms proving to be inadequate, and sudden outages, among other things can trickle up the stack and result in damaging effects to the DEFI users.

As a decentralized entity, a DEFI project must have some form of governance in place to steer the project’s development and oversee its operational specifications.

In the event of a sudden revolt from the governing committee that results in some radical parameter adjustment holds the DEFI user in a perpetual limbo of uncertainty. While most of the time the governing body will be aligned with a vision of progression, that vision is highly subjective to interpretation.

Not to mention that flash loan attacks have taken place where proposals are forcefully pushed by entities that acquire large enough token amounts on the open markets just to vote on their own proposals.

There are no heroes in this industry. Everybody is fighting for themselves. The insane majority of projects simply do not give a sh*t about you.

Scammers will create the most elaborate systems to subvert your conscious mind. They will pretend to be representatives from a project or exchange you are involved with. They will call you, text you, email you and do anything else possible to trick you into doing some kind of action.

The most common forms of social engineering are:

2. Pretending they are official reps from other projects.

3. Asking you for help through a DM and offering a reward.

4. Telling you they can help you make money.

If anybody contacts you about anything remotely related to the above. IGNORE them. If you feel worried about anything, opt to go directly through the official interfaces (website/app) that you use and reach out to the projects. 

Official moderators/admins will not initiate contact with you directly without your prompting.

Still in its infancy, this sector lacks any standard framework of definitions. So many idiotic projects throw around buzzwords in an attempt to sound convincing and tempt unknowing users.

One of the most painful to watch is when a Memecoin starts offering people a DEFI ecosystem for NFT financialization that can help solve the interoperability problem between blockchains.

If the last message made sense to you, beware, you will be taken advantage of. If you caught on the stupidity of it, kudos you are protected.

The misrepresentation of intentions is called a Rug Pull. As the name might hint out, people put money into a project and then the rug gets pulled right out from under them. Shadowy super coders create fake contracts to collect money and then at some point just “poof” and disappear with the funds.

As a general rule of thumb, if a project’s slogan/mission statement is chock full of buzzwords, stay TF away.

There are many more complex security vectors that arise whenever interchain operations are introduced and advanced multi-lingual social engineering tactics are considered.

All that matters at the end of the day for your safety is the understanding that risk does not get removed with blockchain architecture, it is merely transformed into a new type of risk.

DEFI’s siren call is the displacement of human infrastructure with automated smart contract infrastructure. Trading off human error with mathematical logic. Even though intuition might guide us into believing that mathematics is more reliable than humans, the truth of the matter is that humans have room to correct errors, mathematics does not know the difference. Therefore, the risk profile of this transition of trust is nearly impossible to quantify.

Just don't forget that there is no such thing as a safe investment in crypto.

May your journey through Decentralized finance be fruitful and may your bags always be protected.

The 8 Dangers of DEFI

Odds are that if you are alive in the 21 century, you have heard the term blockchain at least once. It is the magic pixie dust that powers distributed ledgers and imbues cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum with “trust”.

Since its arrival in the public domain, some 14 years ago, this nascent technology has undergone countless iterations and become the colloquial backbone of the digital economy.

Throughout its evolution, hundreds, if not thousands, of different versions of blockchains have arrived on the marketplace all claiming to be different and promising to solve some kind of existential problem. Regardless of the variance in their designs or marketing tactics, at the highest level, the overarching purpose of all blockchain technology can be boiled down to the distribution and securitization of information under a ridged data structure.

Given the hyperbolic rate of innovation taking place in the sector, it becomes difficult to understand what exactly they are providing and distinguish them from one another.

Ultimately, one of the most effective methods used in the industry today for classifying/categorizing them is according to the four-layer framework based on the function of their implementation.

This is the foundation upon which distributed computation takes place.

A helpful way to think about layer 0, is to think about traditional internet protocols. Hardware and networking reside on this layer.

In order for a blockchain to operate there must be equipment that hosts software to interact with circuit boards that are fed binary code in order to configure their transmission, connectivity, and other base functionality.

Just like phones require radio frequency waves to actually capture signals and connect to one another, Blockchains need some kind of medium through which they send their messages. For older-generation networks such as Bitcoin, the traditional internet protocol TCP/IP catalyzes this. This has been necessary but sub-optimal as there is a dependency on centralized ISPs (Internet Service Providers).

Moreover, blockchains (up until recently) have not been compatible. They have been siloed systems that do not have a standard for communicating with each other. Recent innovations such as IBC (Inter-Blockchain-Communication) provided by the Cosmos network, have begun to slowly disintermediate ISPs by allowing blockchains to send messages between themselves.

Layer 1 — (L1) — Independent Core Functionality

Synonymous with architecture, security, decentralization, and ownership; Layer 1 refers to the core tenets of how a distributed ledger is implemented.

Sometimes referred to as the “implementation layer” Layer 1 pertains to the fundamental operations of an individual distributed ledger.

Designed to provide guarantees of immutability, Layer 1 includes all of the unique elements of a blockchain such as block time, programming language, client software, and consensus mechanism.

Given that security is the main driving force here, layer 1 is considered to be the settlement layer for transactions, much of the narrative of trust in decentralized systems comes from this layer.

Constrained by the physical bounds of computation (i.e. bandwidth) L1 suffers from diminishing operational efficiencies alongside increased adoption (as more users join the network, it becomes slower).

Secure computation is expensive and confined within a tight range of processes, that is where the entire reason for being for Layer 2 comes in, to increase the efficiencies of its underlying Layer 1.

Inheriting the primitives and security guarantees from their mother chain; Layer 2s move the vast majority of computation off the main layer and periodically push attestations of their activity back to the base chain. That is why some decentralization maximalists refer to L2s as “off-chain” activity.

Once the boundaries/maximal capabilities/threshold of layer one were realized, innovation at this layer began to blossom. Resulting in many interesting technological solutions such as sidechains, state channels, rollups, and sharding being developed.

Sidechains are exactly what they sound like, a chain that runs in parallel to another chain. Many similarities to an L1 in the sense that they are open ledgers with a sequenced list of transactional blocks that provide some kind of guarantees, sidechains differ primarily in their consensus models. Layer 1 consensus models are optimized for security and decentralization whereas layer 2 sidechain consensus models are optimized for throughput; thus making them more centralized.

State channels are secure communication pipelines. Employed through a bi-directional multi-signature structure, this technology is not as transparent as the other alternatives and does not have a consensus model for miner/transaction validation. Instead, all of the activity that takes place on a state channel happens privately between the channel’s service providers. Closer to being considered almost fully off-chain.

Rollups are far more complex than the prior two to explain, but at the highest level, rollups are somewhere between an L1 and L2. Nested on the main layer rollups keep transactional data secure within the original environment. However, the processing of transactional data happens off-chain.

A Layer 1 can have many different Layer 2’s deployed to it.

A high-level way of thinking about this technical topology is federations, smaller states within a nation. If you live in America, you can choose which state you prefer. Every state will have its own specific laws and ideologies but all states will share basic human laws under the umbrella of the federal government.

Lightning Network, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum

Perhaps the most intuitive of all the layers, end-user functionality exists on layer 3.

Tasked with abstracting away the technical complexity of blockchain technologies, L3 is where DAPPs and user-facing protocols are hosted.

This is where the digital world of binary code and smart contracts finds its real-world applicability. Interaction with this layer involves a GUI (graphic user interface) for utilizing the broad range of trusted encrypted software tooling such as proving liquidity, trading, making payments, and staking among other things.

AAVE, Uniswap, Compound, OpenSea, Metamask

This should now give you a concrete understanding of what the term “Layers” means in the general context of crypto and blockchain.

There does exist another conversation around blockchain layers that pertains to the low-level structure of the technology itself. If you are interested in finding out how blockchain architecture is structured I provided an introductory framework called: 

“The 5 Layers of Technology in Blockchain Crypto Networks”.

It's been an absolute pleasure going over this!

I hope you find this helpful on your journey through the blockchain 😁

The 4 Layers of Crypto Networks

Blockchain: Layers 0–3

Whenever the topics of security & decentralization around blockchain come up, the discussion tends to fall into one of two camps, consensus mechanisms or node hardware.

Certainly, these are both valid & important points to address, however, there is another vector that is hidden from plain sight.

In the context of blockchain/DLTs, a client is a piece of software that connects a node to the network & allows its user to read/write information to/from the blockchain. So, a miner would need to install a software client on their hardware device in order to join & participate in the network.

Clients provide key network operational functionality including: an execution environment for processing transactions, storage of transactional data, P2P networking tools, and APIs for interfacing with the network directly.

Every blockchain must have its own client software that complies with the protocol/consensus rules of that specific chain. Ethereum clients do not work in Bitcoin & a Bitcoin client does not work on Solana.

Each client will vary based on the language that it is written in & their own unique operational specifications 

(some might be focused on memory optimization while others focus on performance optimization through consensus modularity for launching side-chain).

Generally speaking, clients are categorized by their node application type. Typically, there are four (3 + 1) types of node clients for a blockchain; full nodes, archival nodes, lite nodes & miner nodes.

The most common type of node on a network that contributes to network security/consensus & stores the most recent state of the chain. They act as the main carriers of information that validate blocks, verify transactions & serve data to other nodes. These node types do not provide any incentive for being operated but do act as a means of direct connection to a chain. 

The most demanding, in terms of memory, of all node types, archival nodes store the entire history of a blockchain. In order to run an archival node, an immense amount of storage space is required; therefore, these are rarely, if ever, run by individuals. Once a chain reaches a certain stage, server farms or enterprise-grade clusters of machines are required. These nodes are for providing strong network security & data-rich services such as explorers or on-chain data analytics.

Sometimes also called SPV (simplified payment verification) node, this version of clients only contain a tiny sliver of the state & only store data relevant to a specific set of information. Lite nodes connect to a full node in order to get access to on-chain data. A good example of a lite node is a wallet. Wallets only require information that is related to a certain account & have no desire/need to participate in network operations. These are clients for most of the basic user applications.

The reason this is a +1 is because this variation of a node client does not apply to all blockchains; it does not exist in staking networks & is only applicable to POW chains. As the name might suggest, miner nodes have a single function, to mine. These client types have evolved to become suited for single-purpose equipment such as ASICs in Bitcoin. Sometimes, this function meshes with full node operations, but the vast majority of the time it will be a separate function.

The Single Client Dilemma & Common Concerns

Whenever a blockchain network has only one client, it is a double-edged sword that can serve as a security issue. Of course, there are always multiple sides to any story, but the base truth is with only one implementation of the client protocol, a single bug/vulnerability/fault in that implementation can potentially compromise the entire network.

What happens whenever/if ever there is a bug found in the client?

What happens if/whenever a hacker finds a vulnerability in a client?

What if the client was designed in such a way that it keeps new developers out from joining & requires a strict set of specially trained developers?

Multi-Client Architecture refers to a software design principle where there are multiple 

 implementations of a client for a given blockchain protocol.

There are four prominent reasons that MCA improves the overall health & well-being of a blockchain network:

The vast majority of projects only have one client version & rarely mention the introduction of any new ones 

(after all developing clients requires funding).

However, a few technology-focused OG projects such as Ethereum, 

) Solana, have taken this subject matter seriously & are leading the implementation of MCA. 

Massive credit must be given to Ethereum for always having the most diverse set of client software. As of this writing, there are 

The most robust protocol client that allows users the flexibility to run any version of a node. Implementation of Ethereum in the GO programming language

Implemented in the .NET programming language, Nethermind is a protocol execution client that optimizes operations for Full nodes.

A fork of Geth client (also in the GO programming language) that is focused on maximizing the efficiency of storage for archive nodes.

Enterprise-focused client in the JAVA language. Created & open-sourced by the hyperledger foundation, Besu provides the extended modularity to swap out the consensus mechanisms for private implementations.

I am personally very supportive of having a diverse set of clients but am very aware of the possibility that even with more clients available it is not guaranteed that they will attract enough attention to displace older, original clients that are already battle tested.

I hope this serves you well on your journey through the blockchain

How Client Architecture applies to decentralization & security in Crypto

BlogChain by Adil Kazani

Delivering interesting content every single week on Web3, Security, Crypto, NFTs and AI. It's FREE, Takes less than 5-minutes to read, and you are guaranteed to learn something. Let's front-run the opportunity!

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First, make sure to keep your device and recovery phrase in a safe place, and never share your recovery phrase with anyone else. Additionally, always verify that the address you are sending your NFTs to is correct before completing the transaction.

Perspectives of securing NFTs with Ledger: 

I believe that securing NFTs with a Ledger device is the best option available. Ledger is a well-established company in the crypto space, and their hardware wallets are known for their security. By storing my NFTs on a 

, I can be sure that they are safe from hackers and other cyber threats. Additionally, Ledger devices are easy to use and can be used to store a wide variety of cryptocurrencies, making them a great choice for anyone who wants to keep their digital assets secure.

Perspective 2 - The Traditional Collector:

I am not convinced that using a Ledger device to secure NFTs is necessary. I have been collecting art for many years, and I have always kept my collections in a secure location in my home or in a safe deposit box at my bank. While I understand that NFTs are digital assets and require a different kind of security, I am not comfortable with the idea of storing them on a device that could potentially fail or be lost. In my opinion, the best way to secure NFTs is to keep them offline and in a secure location.

I am not convinced that using a Ledger device to secure NFTs is the best option available. While Ledger devices are known for their security, they are not foolproof. Hackers are constantly finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities in software and hardware, and it is possible that a Ledger device could be compromised in the future. Additionally, the cost of purchasing a Ledger device may not be worth the added security, especially for those who do not have a large collection of NFTs. In my opinion, the best way to secure NFTs is to use multiple layers of security, including strong passwords, two-factor authentication, and offline storage.

I believe that using a Ledger device to secure NFTs is essential. NFTs are becoming increasingly valuable, and it is important to protect them from theft or loss. A Ledger device provides an extra layer of security that is necessary for those who have a significant investment in NFTs. Additionally, using a Ledger device can give investors peace of mind, knowing that their NFTs are safe and secure. In my opinion, anyone who is serious about investing in NFTs should use a Ledger device to secure their assets.

 are among the most popular and trusted solutions on the market. However, with so many options available, it can be challenging to determine which hardware wallet is the best fit for your specific needs. 

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