Posts

💡 Why it's not the best product that wins, but the one that touches the most people Intro You might think that the best product wins, right? That’s what most of us would like to believe. After all, if you put in the hard work, pour your soul into crafting the most innovative, efficient, and user-friendly technology, you should reap the rewards. But here’s the kicker: in the real world, the best product doesn’t always win. Instead, it’s the product that touches the most people, grabs the most attention, and gets adopted by the masses that ends up dominating the market. And all of this boils down to one simple truth: distribution is everything. ...

Introduction Ensuring the integrity and authenticity of AI models in decentralized or adversarial environments is a significant challenge. Users need confidence that the models they interact with are genuine and unaltered. Traditional methods like watermarking provide some solutions but come with notable drawbacks. This article explores alternative approaches, including statistical uniqueness, to authenticate AI models effectively. We’ll start by exploring the watermarking technique and its limitations, then dive into how statistical uniqueness offers a more reliable approach for decentralized AI model authentication. Finally, we’ll look at potential cost optimizations and consider how this method could be applied to hardware authentication. ...

Intro We are starting to see a new approach, a new type of blockchain network, that mimics what an existing network does and is, but they don’t do it exactly as the original one. This new approach has a few characteristics that define it. It mirrors an existing chain but changes the original rules. Mirroring the existing chain is done by replaying the transactions just as they are, but changing the original rules makes them incompatible with the original chain. This creates room for new features to flourish but also some interesting problems, which we will explore in this article. ...

A new chapter is being written with the introduction of Transient Storage, courtesy of EIP-1153 . This upgrade promises to revolutionize the temporary storage and management of data within transactions, stirring quite a debate in the community. It aims to optimize gas costs and enhance the efficiency of smart contracts. Yet, for all its potential, it’s easy to misuse, leading to costly mistakes. Who This Article Is For If you’re a developer familiar with Solidity and keen on Ethereum’s latest, this article is for you. Whether you’re looking to optimize smart contracts or explore new features, we’ll dive into how Transient Storage opens up new possibilities. ...

Introduction In the blockchain ecosystem, there’s an ongoing quest for a foundational shift that will pave the way for the next wave of user adoption. This involves a deep reevaluation and reinvention of how on-chain transactions are executed, centralizing around the innovative concept of Intents. Humans desire outcomes, while the “how” is a side effect that must be solved to fulfill their wishes. It is more natural to think about the desired side effect instead of defining all the necessary steps to get there. Intents specify the desired outcome without detailing the exact execution path. ...

💡 Ethereum Staking Scenarios: What the Future Might Hold Motivation The proposed change aims to slow down the growth in the number of validators, providing time to implement essential adjustments. Preliminary tests indicate that the validator client software starts to falter when handling around 2.1 million validators. Given that the current validator count is over 800,000, as indicated by beaconcha.in , there’s an urgent need to address this issue. ...

You will understand how to trick a block explorer into displaying different byte code of your choosing, other than the one deployed on the chain. This is important because a user can be tricked by a hacker to think they interact with a good contract, when actually the user interacts with malicious contract. It is indeed the same contract address, but the byte code is not the one reported by the block explorer. ...

This is going to be a series about some of the techniques I implemented when designing Karl , a free tool that finds exploitable code in live smart contracts. When I monitor the Ethereum blockchain for vulnerable contracts, I need a way to determine if the vulnerabilities I find are the real thing, or merely a scattering of false positives and honeypots. I’ve been able to mitigate this possibility by testing for vulnerabilities in a virtual copy of the blockchain. ...