Economic & Protocol-Level Attacks The vulnerabilities in Part 1 all had a root cause somewhere in the lines of code. The attacks in Part 2 succeed even when the code is perfect. Each function behaves exactly as specified — but an attacker manipulates the economic environment those functions operate in. Here we cover two: oracle…
10 Faces of Blockchain Security (Part 1) Smart Contract Code Vulnerabilities When a blockchain security incident hits the news, it gets compressed into a single line: “the code got hacked.” But in reality, blockchain failures span completely different layers — bugs in the code itself, flaws in economic design, limits of the consensus algorithm, and…
Part 4 of “Oracles in Practice” — a hands-on series for smart-contract engineers. Some facts have no market to average and no public feed to read: a model’s risk score, a proof-of-reserves attestation, the output of an off-chain computation. For these you fall back to the oldest trick in distributed systems — make several independent…
Part 3 of “Oracles in Practice” — a hands-on series for smart-contract engineers. With Chainlink the enemy was staleness. With an on-chain TWAP the enemy flips to manipulation — and the whole design is about making a single-block price shove economically pointless. Here’s how a Uniswap V3 TWAP oracle actually works, and the three footguns…
Part 2 of “Oracles in Practice” — a hands-on series for smart-contract engineers. Here’s the Chainlink integration you’ll find in a hundred tutorials: It compiles, it returns a number, and it is dangerous enough to lose a protocol. Let’s build the version you’d actually deploy, one check at a time, and understand why each line…
Part 1 of “Oracles in Practice” — a hands-on series for smart-contract engineers. Every contract in this series was compiled against OpenZeppelin 5.x and exercised on a real EVM. You already know the one-liner: smart contracts can’t call the outside world. This series is about what that actually forces you to do, where the bodies…
Part 4 of “The Oracle Problem” — a plain-language series on the hardest question in Web3. We’ve reached the end of the road, and it’s time for the honest part. Over three articles we’ve watched clever people spread trust across expert panels, time-averages, and quorums of witnesses (Part 3), all to shrink the oracle problem…
Part 3 of “The Oracle Problem” — a plain-language series on the hardest question in Web3. So far the news has been discouraging. A blockchain can’t see the outside world (Part 1), and AI can’t magically fix that (Part 2). Yet somehow, billions of dollars flow through systems that depend on outside data every day,…
Part 2 of “The Oracle Problem” — a plain-language series on the hardest question in Web3. In Part 1 we met the blockchain’s strange handicap: it’s a flawless machine sealed off from the outside world, forced to rely on messengers — oracles — to learn anything about reality. And those messengers can lie. By now…
Part 1 of “The Oracle Problem” — a plain-language series on the hardest question in Web3. Imagine a brilliant accountant locked inside a sealed, windowless room. Slide a question under the door and she’ll answer it flawlessly — as long as the answer can be worked out from the papers already inside the room. But…