TOPIC / 43 RECORDS
Crypto systems
Tokens, smart contracts, bridges and stablecoins. Ask which mechanism creates a capability—and which intermediary or administrator can change the outcome.
Build the foundation
- Crypto
ERC-20 standardised transfer, not a token's worth
EIP-20 fixed six functions and two events for tokens; it says nothing about a token's value or legitimacy.
- Crypto
A bridge carries more than an asset
Cross-chain convenience adds a verification path, contracts, and sometimes an operator to the risk ledger.
- Crypto
A rollup's safety depends on who controls its sequencer and keys
Ethereum's security reaches a rollup only as far as its fraud proofs, sequencer and upgrade keys pass it through.
- Analysis
A governance vote is not a claim on a protocol's revenue
Uniswap and Compound's own governance documentation, read against the SEC's Howey framework, show what a vote actually grants and what it does not.
Explore the topic
- Crypto / NEW PRACTICAL GUIDE
Test a rollup exit route on paper before funds depend on it
Map the canonical withdrawal, proof delay, gas requirements and fallback path instead of assuming a fast bridge is the exit.
- Crypto
An interest account was ruled an unregistered security
An SEC order found BlockFi's interest accounts were securities and fined the company $100 million for the unregistered offering.
- Crypto
The Ronin bridge theft showed a bridge is a custodian
Treasury's record of the $620 million Ronin theft, read against Ethereum's own bridge documentation, treats a validator-secured bridge as custody.
- Crypto
Two regulators found Tether's reserves did not always match claims
The NYAG settlement and a separate CFTC order each date periods when Tether's stated reserves fell short of its public claims.
- Crypto
A bank failure showed where a stablecoin keeps its cash
Circle's own disclosure and the federal regulators' joint statement date how $3.3 billion of USDC's reserves became briefly inaccessible.
- Crypto
The Ethereum whitepaper proposed a general state machine
The 2014-published text generalised Bitcoin's ledger into a gas-metered virtual machine, not an audited system.
- Crypto
Ethereum's 2014 sale funded a network that did not exist
The 42-day sale's own terms called ether a product with no guaranteed value and no voting rights.
- Crypto
Frontier launched Ethereum as a warned, unfinished network
The 30 July 2015 genesis block shipped with a throttled gas limit and explicit warnings of bugs.
- Crypto
ERC-20 standardised transfer, not a token's worth
EIP-20 fixed six functions and two events for tokens; it says nothing about a token's value or legitimacy.
- Crypto
The DAO exploit sent ether before updating a balance
A recursive call drained about 3.6 million ether on 17 June 2016 before the contract's bookkeeping caught up.
- Crypto
The SEC found DAO tokens met the Howey test
The 25 July 2017 report applied the investment-contract test to a $150 million offering and issued no charges.
- Crypto
China's 2017 notice banned token sales, not the code
Seven agencies ordered ICOs stopped and refunded on 4 September 2017, targeting institutions rather than protocols.
- Crypto
ERC-721 tracks which address owns which identifier
The 2018 standard guarantees a unique token ID and its owner, not the file that identifier represents.
- Crypto
An NFT holds a pointer, not the picture
The token stores an identifier and a URI; what that URI resolves to is a separate, checkable question.
- Crypto
Dai launched backed by over-collateralised loans, not deposits
MakerDAO's own whitepaper and a company retrospective date Single-Collateral Dai's launch to 18 December 2017 and detail its collateral mechanism.
- Crypto
The March 2020 crash cleared Maker auctions at zero Dai
MakerDAO's own postmortem records how network congestion let liquidation auctions clear near zero and forced an MKR debt auction.
- Crypto
Uniswap's 2018 launch replaced the order book with a formula
A November 2018 launch and its own documentation show how a constant-product formula quotes price and what a liquidity provider actually holds.
- Crypto
Compound paid users in a governance token it had just created
A founder's own announcement and a governance record show how COMP's distribution began and why its yield depends on COMP's own value.
- Crypto
A flash loan must be repaid before its transaction ends
EIP-3156 and Aave's own account of its launch show why atomicity removed the capital requirement from testing a protocol's weak points.
- Crypto
A lending contract reading a pool's spot price can be misled
Uniswap's own documentation shows why a spot price is manipulable and what a time-weighted average changes about the cost of moving it.
- Crypto
Christie's sold a token whose chain record points to a file
Christie's own record of the sale and the NFT standard it relied on show what the auctioned lot actually transferred on chain.
- Crypto
A fork paid Uniswap's providers to move their liquidity
Official posts from Sushi and Uniswap show how rented liquidity moved in 2020 and why the incumbent answered with a token of its own.
- Crypto
EIP-1559 replaced Ethereum's fee auction with a burned base fee
The London upgrade set a protocol-computed base fee that is destroyed each block, which changed fee predictability but not fee levels.
- Crypto
Shapella made staked ether withdrawable for the first time
The April 2023 upgrade let validators exit and stakers withdraw, turning a one-way deposit into a position with an exit queue.
- Crypto
Dencun gave rollups cheaper, temporary data space on Ethereum
Blob transactions from EIP-4844 cut the cost of posting rollup data, at the price of that data expiring after about 18 days.
- Crypto
A rollup's safety depends on who controls its sequencer and keys
Ethereum's security reaches a rollup only as far as its fraud proofs, sequencer and upgrade keys pass it through.
- Crypto
Pectra let accounts delegate to code and validators hold more
The May 2025 upgrade let ordinary accounts run contract logic and raised the effective staking cap, with a new risk behind each.
- Crypto
A liquid staking token is a claim, not the staked ether itself
Tokens such as stETH track a pool's accounting of staked ether and its rewards, and can trade away from that claim's value.
- Crypto
Whoever orders a block's transactions can profit from the order
MEV lets block producers and searchers extract value from transaction ordering, usually seen by the trader only as a worse price.
- Crypto
A validator's deposit is the actual security in proof of stake
Slashing punishes provable misconduct while inactivity leaks only drain absent validators, and treating the two as one penalty misreads the system.
- Crypto
Ethereum Classic was reorganised three times by rented hashpower
August 2020's repeated reorgs showed that a minority proof-of-work chain's security is relative to what hashpower can be rented.
- Crypto
Tornado Cash's contracts were sanctioned, then ruled not property
OFAC designated Tornado Cash in 2022; the Fifth Circuit held in 2024 that its immutable contracts were not property under the sanctions statute.
- Crypto
Namecoin forked Bitcoin's code to register names, not money
The 2011 announcement thread shows a name registry secured by merged mining, and what that registry does not verify.
- Crypto
The Mastercoin sale exchanged bitcoin for a protocol not yet built
The 2013 Exodus Address campaign shows buyers funding a specification, with the software still to come.
- Crypto
Terra's algorithm turned a stablecoin run into a token collapse
The SEC's complaint records a peg with no asset reserve, and why the May 2022 failure was a design outcome, not a hack.
- Crypto
MiCA licenses crypto intermediaries, not crypto-assets
The EU regulation's phased dates and explicit exclusions show what its licence covers and what it deliberately leaves out.
- Crypto
The GENIUS Act treats a stablecoin like a narrow bank deposit
The 2025 statute defines payment stablecoins, restricts issuers and reserves, and defers most detail to rulemaking.
- Crypto
The approved ether ETFs explicitly excluded staking
The SEC's May 2024 order says the products hold unstaked ether, and what that costs a holder compared with staking directly.
- Crypto
The DAO fork was a governance decision in code
The 2016 intervention changed account state, and the debate exposed the limits of simple immutability slogans.
- Crypto
The Merge changed how Ethereum agrees
The 2022 upgrade replaced mining with validators while preserving existing application state.
- Crypto
A bridge carries more than an asset
Cross-chain convenience adds a verification path, contracts, and sometimes an operator to the risk ledger.
- Crypto
A stablecoin price is not a redemption right
USDC's issuer terms show why market trading and direct conversion into dollars are separate questions.
- Crypto
Concentrated liquidity moves the work to the provider
Uniswap v3 made capital more targeted, while asking providers to understand range and inventory risk.