DeFi & Staking

Learn how decentralized finance(DeFi) works from liquidity pools and AMMs to staking, yield farming, and restaking protocols.

RPCs and Nodes (Clients, Reliability, Security)

Nodes, L1/L2, Rollups, DeFi & Staking, Smart Contracts /

RPCs and Nodes: Accessing the Chain Reliably and Safely Node types, JSON RPC patterns, reliability architectures, and production grade security practices for real dapps. TL;DR: Pick deliberately between public endpoints, hosted providers, and self run nodes (full or archival). Build resiliency with multi provider failover or quorum RPC. Build safety with chain checks, simulation, finalized […]

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Storage (IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin)

NFTs & Token Standards, DeFi & Staking, Smart Contracts /

Decentralized Storage: IPFS, Arweave, and Filecoin Content addressing, permanence versus leases, gateways, pinning, proofs, and production patterns for NFTs, dapps, analytics, and archives. TL;DR: IPFS is a content-addressed peer-to-peer layer that gives you CIDs and global retrieval; availability depends on pinning and gateways. Arweave offers “permanent” storage by funding long-term replication up front; content is

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Indexing and Querying (The Graph)

DeFi & Staking, Nodes, L1/L2, Rollups, Smart Contracts /

Indexing and Querying: The Graph, Subgraphs and GraphQL From raw on chain events to queryable APIs: subgraph schemas, mappings, indexing economics, and production grade query patterns. TL;DR: The Graph turns contract events and call results into a GraphQL API using a subgraph that declares a schema, a manifest of what to watch, and mapping functions

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Oracles (Chainlink, Pyth)

Blockchain Basics, DeFi & Staking, Smart Contracts /

Oracles: Bringing Real-World Data On-Chain (Chainlink and Pyth) Price feeds, verifiable randomness, automation, and cross-chain messaging, plus common failure modes and how to harden your contracts against them. TL;DR: Oracles bridge off-chain facts to on-chain programs. You will encounter two dominant patterns: push oracles (for example Chainlink aggregators that periodically post a price on chain)

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Homomorphic Encryption (HE): Compute on Encrypted Data

Smart Contracts, DeFi & Staking /

Homomorphic Encryption (HE): Compute on Encrypted Data Partially, somewhat, and fully homomorphic schemes, what they enable, how they work at a high level, and where HE fits next to zero-knowledge and blockchains. TL;DR: Homomorphic encryption lets you perform operations on ciphertexts so that, after decryption, you get the same result as if you had computed

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Multi-Party Computation (MPC): Threshold Keys and Private Compute

Smart Contracts, DeFi & Staking /

Multi-Party Computation (MPC): Threshold Signatures and Private Compute Split secrets, compute together. How MPC wallets and threshold signatures differ from multisig, what actually runs during signing, and how to operate these systems safely at scale. TL;DR: MPC lets a group jointly compute a function without revealing their individual inputs. For wallets, threshold signatures (TSS) produce

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Zero-Knowledge Proofs (zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs, Use Cases)

DeFi & Staking, Smart Contracts /

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK): Proving Facts Without Revealing Inputs Circuits and witnesses, proving and verification flows, zk-SNARKs versus zk-STARKs, recursion and aggregation, and how ZK powers privacy and scaling across Web3 today. TL;DR: A prover convinces a verifier that a statement is true without revealing the secret witness. In Web3, ZK enables privacy (shielded transfers and

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Hash Functions in Web3 (SHA-256, Keccak-256, Merkle Trees)

Smart Contracts, DeFi & Staking /

Hash Functions in Web3 (SHA-256, Keccak-256, Merkle Trees) Preimage resistance, collisions, avalanche, and how hashes secure blocks, addresses, storage, logs, and proofs across modern chains. TL;DR: A cryptographic hash maps arbitrary data to a fixed-size digest while resisting preimage, second-preimage, and collision attacks. Bitcoin standardizes on SHA-256 (often applied twice), while the EVM stack uses

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Interoperability Protocols (Polkadot, Cosmos/IBC, Wormhole)

DeFi & Staking, Smart Contracts /

Interoperability Protocols: Polkadot, Cosmos (IBC), and Wormhole From shared security and cross-consensus messaging to guardian-signed messages across heterogeneous chains. What each model guarantees, where it is strong, where it fails, and how to build safely on top. TL;DR: Interoperability stacks differ mainly in how they verify foreign state and who bears security. Polkadot couples chains

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Bridges and Cross-Chain Swaps (How Value Moves Between Chains)

DeFi & Staking, Smart Contracts /

Bridges and Cross-Chain Swaps: Lock and Mint, Burn and Redeem, Liquidity Routers How assets and messages travel between chains, what is actually verified, and how swap aggregators compose routes across bridges and DEXs while controlling risk, fees, and finality. TL;DR: Bridges come in two flavors: asset movement and message passing. Asset bridges use lock and

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