Autor: Jane Austen
Flash Loans, Sandwich Attacks, and the Reshaping of DEX Behavior As decentralized finance evolved, Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) shifted from a niche concept into a structural force shaping how on-chain markets operate. What was once an abstract idea about transaction ordering has become a defining feature of DeFi execution, influencing liquidity, pricing, and user experience across decentralized exchanges (DEXs). One major catalyst in MEV’s rise was the introduction of flash loans. Flash loans allow users to borrow large amounts of capital without collateral, provided the loan is repaid within a single transaction. This innovation dramatically lowered the barrier to sophisticated…
Over the past year, Ethereum has felt different to use. Periods of congestion now arrive regularly enough that they no longer feel like anomalies. Blocks fill quickly. Fees spike suddenly. Transactions that would have been trivial months ago now require attention, adjustment, and sometimes retries. Execution has become competitive. Block Space Is Scarcer Than It Looks At a protocol level, nothing has changed. Ethereum still processes transactions exactly as designed. Blocks have fixed limits. Gas exists to meter computation. What has changed is demand. As more applications share the same execution layer, they begin competing for the same finite resource.…
Why Most ICO Tokens Failed Despite Strong Ideas The ICO boom marked one of the earliest attempts to scale blockchain-based fundraising at a global level. In a short period of time, thousands of projects raised capital directly from the public, leveraging smart contracts to distribute tokens instantly and transparently. Yet despite the creativity and ambition behind many of these ideas, the vast majority of ICO tokens failed to sustain long-term value. The problem was rarely a lack of vision. Instead, it was a mismatch between liquidity and infrastructure. ICOs made it easy to issue tokens, but far harder to support…
Until recently, I believed governance was mostly a distraction. If the protocol is correct, the thinking went, outcomes should follow naturally. Code executes deterministically. Consensus is mechanical. Social questions dissolve into math. The last few weeks have made that belief harder to defend. What happened around The DAO didn’t break Ethereum in a technical sense. Blocks kept producing. Transactions kept confirming. From the network’s point of view, everything functioned as specified. And yet, it felt broken. Code Can Be Correct and Still Feel Wrong The DAO was an experiment in coordination at a scale we hadn’t really tested before. Capital…
I’ve been thinking a lot about Proof-of-Work lately, not from the perspective of ideology, but from the perspective of mechanics. Most explanations describe mining as a race. Hash power competes, blocks are found, rewards are distributed. That description is accurate, but incomplete. There’s a quieter part of the process that feels underexplored: what actually happens inside a block before it exists. Between a transaction being broadcast and a block being mined, there is a gray zone. The mempool lives there. At first glance, the mempool looks like a simple queue — transactions waiting their turn. But the more time I…
The evolution of blockchain technology entered a new phase with the emergence of Ethereum. While Bitcoin established the foundation for decentralized value transfer, Ethereum expanded the scope of what blockchains could achieve by introducing programmable logic directly onto the network. This shift laid the groundwork for an entirely new generation of decentralized applications and economic models. At the heart of Ethereum’s innovation is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Rather than functioning solely as a ledger for transactions, Ethereum was designed as a global execution environment—one capable of running code in a decentralized and deterministic manner. This allowed developers to deploy…
Facebook Tweet Email Link AP — Southwest Airlines will soon require travelers who don’t fit within the armrests of their seat to pay for an extra one in advance, part of a string of recent changes the carrier is making. The new rule goes into effect January 27, the same day Southwest starts assigning seats. Currently, plus-size passengers can either pay for an extra seat in advance with the option of getting that money back later, or they can request a free extra seat at the airport. Under the carrier’s new policy, a refund is still possible but no longer…