Analysis / EXPLAINER
One ticker. Several different risks.
A network, its native asset, and a product sold around it are different objects of analysis.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Research index / 132 entries
The ledger
Read the history. Inspect the mechanism. Follow the source.
Historical event dates and source dates are separate from the preparation date of this local edition.
132 entries
Custody / EXPLAINER
Custody is a separate question.
The network can keep operating while access to your assets fails. Begin with who can authorize a transfer.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
Chaum's blind signature let a bank sign what it could not read
Chaum's 1982 paper hides a note's content from its issuing bank, a privacy trick Bitcoin's design removes the issuer from entirely.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 1993 manifesto wanted anonymous cash years before Bitcoin
Eric Hughes's manifesto set selective disclosure as privacy's goal, a standard a public ledger only partly meets.
Event: 9 March 1993
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Hashcash charged computation, not currency, to stop spam
Adam Back's 1997 postage scheme priced a message in computing time, the mechanism Bitcoin's paper reused for a different job.
Event: 28 March 1997
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
Two pre-Bitcoin proposals left one problem unsolved
b-money and bit gold described most of digital cash's parts but not how strangers agree on one shared history.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The genesis block's message is proof, not a spendable coin
The coinbase text dates block zero to January 2009 and the reference client's own code makes its reward permanently unspendable.
Event: 3 January 2009
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The 2009 launch announcement made supply a code rule
Satoshi Nakamoto's release post states a 21 million coin cap, a schedule enforced by validation, not by trust in the author.
Event: 8 January 2009
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Block 170 shows what a Bitcoin transaction actually spends
The first person-to-person transaction consumed one prior output and created two, one of them ordinary change.
Event: 12 January 2009
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Lightning moves payments off-chain, not off Bitcoin's rules
The 2016 paper keeps the blockchain as the final enforcement layer and requires a channel participant to keep watching it.
Event: 14 January 2016
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Bitcoin / RESEARCH RECORD11
Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 2010 bug briefly created 184 billion bitcoin
An integer overflow let one transaction mint value past the 21 million cap until a same-day patch and reorganisation reversed it.
Event: 15 August 2010
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
BIP16 let a recipient set spending terms, not the sender
Pay-to-script-hash moved custody conditions like multisignature into the protocol itself, activating in April 2012.
Event: 1 April 2012
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
The difficulty target moves every 2016 blocks, not continuously
Bitcoin recalculates its target from observed block times every 2016 blocks, not from live hashrate.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
A Bitcoin balance is a sum of unspent outputs, not an account
The protocol keeps no account balances, only outputs a wallet sums, which is why change outputs exist.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
A confirmation count measures work, not final settlement
The developer guide ties confirmation thresholds to reorganisation risk, not to a declaration of finality.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
Each node's mempool is a private queue, not a shared record
Fee estimates predict recent blocks, so a stuck payment usually reflects pricing, not a broken ledger.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
BIP125 made an unconfirmed payment explicitly replaceable
The 2015 opt-in standard let senders replace pending transactions, unsettling zero-confirmation acceptance.
Event: 4 December 2015
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A light client verifies headers, not the rules themselves
BIP37's bloom filters let a lightweight wallet skip most data while trading away some privacy.
Event: 24 October 2012
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A bech32 address encodes a script, not an account number
BIP173 fixed Base58's error-detection gaps; BIP350 later fixed a checksum flaw in bech32 itself.
Event: 20 March 2017
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A timelock refuses to spend early, it cannot force spending
BIP65 and BIP112 let a script wait on a date or an output's age, useful for custody but not a full plan.
Event: 1 October 2014
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
PSBT lets one machine build and another sign, separately
BIP174 standardised a transfer format between construction and signing, moving risk to that transfer step.
Event: 12 July 2017
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD22
Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A reused address links payments a CoinJoin cannot unlink
The 2013 CoinJoin proposal breaks input-output linkage but never hid the network layer alone.
Event: 22 August 2013
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The first Bitcoin halving executed a rule, not a decision
Block 210,000 shows the coinbase subsidy fall from 50 to 25 bitcoin on a fixed schedule, without a vote, committee or announcement.
Event: 28 November 2012
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Three 2015 block size proposals exposed a missing process
BIP101, BIP102 and BIP103 proposed incompatible block size mechanisms within five weeks, showing no procedure existed to choose between them.
Event: 22 June 2015
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Segwit split signatures from transaction ids in 2017
BIP141 and BIP143 moved signatures out of the transaction id and fixed a quadratic verification cost, activating 24 August 2017.
Event: 24 August 2017
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Users set a segwit deadline that miners had to answer
BIP148 set a flag day for economic nodes to enforce segwit; BIP91's lower miner threshold arrived first and the two converged.
Event: 1 August 2017
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The 2017 Bitcoin Cash split required engineered incompatibility
The UAHF specification split one shared ledger into two rule sets on 1 August 2017 and required a dedicated replay-protection fix.
Event: 1 August 2017
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Taproot let cooperating signers look like a single key
BIP340 and BIP341 let Schnorr-based cooperation resemble a single-key spend, activating 14 November 2021 at block 709,632.
Event: 14 November 2021
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Ordinals number satoshis by convention, not by consensus
The ord documentation shows inscriptions validated as ordinary transactions, with numbering assigned by an off-chain indexer.
Event: 20 January 2023
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 2024 halving and a token launch shared one block
Block 840,000 carried a scheduled subsidy halving and a coordinated Runes protocol launch, which the record treats as two separate facts.
Event: 20 April 2024
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Bitcoin Core's 2025 policy change was not a consensus change
Bitcoin Core 30.0 raised a relay-policy default, not a consensus rule, and Bitcoin Knots shows the alternative-implementation option at work.
Event: 10 October 2025
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
A draft BIP treats exposed public keys as the risk
BIP360's draft addresses public keys exposed by spending, following NIST's August 2024 approval of post-quantum FIPS standards.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD33
Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A Silk Road seizure shows custody is control of keys
Federal filings on the Silk Road case record how prosecutors took custody of bitcoin and what happened to the network afterward.
Event: 2 October 2013
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
FinCEN's 2013 guidance split virtual currency users from businesses
The first US federal guidance on virtual currency defined which roles must register as money transmitters.
Event: 18 March 2013
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
IRS Notice 2014-21 made every bitcoin payment a taxable event
The 2014 notice treated virtual currency as property, so spending it can trigger a reportable gain or loss.
Event: 25 March 2014
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 2015 CFTC order first classified bitcoin as a commodity
The Coinflip settlement order found bitcoin and virtual currencies are commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act.
Event: 17 September 2015
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
CME's 2017 bitcoin futures were self-certified, not approved
A CFTC statement on CME and Cboe's bitcoin futures explains self-certification and the risks it did not remove.
Event: 1 December 2017
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 2020 treasury purchase made MicroStrategy stock a bitcoin proxy
MicroStrategy's SEC filing and Tesla's 10-K disclose how corporate treasury bitcoin creates custody and impairment risk.
Event: 11 August 2020
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
El Salvador's 2021 law made bitcoin legal tender by statute
The Bitcoin Law required merchants to accept bitcoin; the IMF's review found adoption stayed low.
Event: 8 June 2021
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
IMF financing ended bitcoin's mandatory status in El Salvador
IMF documents record a 2025 law change making bitcoin acceptance voluntary as a condition of a lending deal.
Event: 30 January 2025
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Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 2024 SEC order approved bitcoin ETFs, not bitcoin itself
The SEC's omnibus order let spot bitcoin ETPs trade while the chair's statement explicitly disclaimed endorsement.
Event: 10 January 2024
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A court found the SEC's Grayscale denial arbitrary in 2023
The D.C. Circuit vacated the SEC's Grayscale denial for not explaining its different treatment of similar products.
Event: 29 August 2023
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A Satoshi identity claim failed a documentary test in court
A UK court found Craig Wright fabricated the evidence behind his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto and referred the case for possible prosecution.
Event: 20 May 2024
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
MtGox's 2014 collapse was a company failure, not a protocol one
MtGox's own February 2014 filing disclosed missing bitcoins and opened a rehabilitation case that took a decade to begin repaying creditors.
Event: 28 February 2014
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A public ledger let a 2016 theft be traced six years later
DOJ and ICE records trace 119,754 bitcoin stolen from Bitfinex in 2016 to a 2022 arrest and a multibillion-dollar seizure.
Event: 8 February 2022
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A regulator's review found the cold-storage claims were false
The OSC found Quadriga's founder secretly traded against clients and that customer coins were not held where the exchange said they were.
Event: 5 February 2019
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A shared library's deletion froze wallets it did not own
A single deleted contract library disabled every Parity multi-signature wallet deployed after July 2017, freezing the ether inside them.
Event: 6 November 2017
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A bankruptcy court read the terms and the coins were not yours
A judge found Celsius's Terms of Use gave the company title to Earn account coins, leaving depositors as unsecured creditors.
Event: 4 January 2023
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A listed exchange disclosed that custody is not a promise
Coinbase's own quarterly filing warned custodial crypto could become bankruptcy estate property, leaving customers as unsecured creditors.
Event: 10 May 2022
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
An exchange balance turned out to be a claim on a company
SEC and DOJ records describe customer deposits diverted from FTX to Alameda Research, ending in bankruptcy and a 25-year sentence.
Event: 11 November 2022
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The largest exchange admitted compliance failures at scale
Treasury and CFTC settlements record Binance's guilty plea to anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations in a $4.3 billion resolution.
Event: 21 November 2023
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 14 February 2022
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Custody / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Bybit theft altered what signers saw, not the cryptography
An FBI notice and Safe's own statement date a $1.5 billion theft to a compromised signing interface, not a broken key.
Event: 21 February 2025
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 23 March 2022
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Custody / EXPLAINER
A Merkle-tree reserve proof shows assets, not liabilities
Kraken's and Binance's own proof-of-reserves pages describe what a Merkle-tree check verifies, and where each stops short of solvency.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / EXPLAINER
A stablecoin attestation is not an audit
Circle and Tether both describe attestations against a named standard, and neither claims to have delivered a full financial audit of reserves.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 23 February 2021
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 10 March 2023
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Custody / EXPLAINER
A wrapped bitcoin is a claim on a custodian, not bitcoin
WBTC's own site names the custodial and merchant structure that a holder of the token is actually relying on.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / EXPLAINER
A phone number is an authentication factor a carrier holds
An FBI advisory and a new FCC rule date how far SIM-swap losses grew and what carriers must now do about it.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / EXPLAINER
Reported crypto fraud losses cluster in investment schemes
The FBI's 2023 report ties most reported cryptocurrency losses to confidence-based investment fraud, not protocol failures.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / EXPLAINER
A signature quorum changes what one theft or loss can do
Bitcoin's own developer guide and two BIPs define what an m-of-n threshold enforces, and what it leaves to the people holding the keys.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 22 July 2014
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 30 July 2015
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 19 November 2015
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 17 June 2016
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 25 July 2017
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 4 September 2017
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Staff guidance made decentralisation a fact question
The 2019 framework lists Howey factors for digital assets but states plainly that it binds no one.
Event: 3 April 2019
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 24 January 2018
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 18 December 2017
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 12 March 2020
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 2 November 2018
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Analysis / EXPLAINER
Impermanent loss is a cost a pool imposes on its providers
Uniswap's own documentation gives the formula for divergence loss and shows why a yield figure must beat it, not just add to it.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 15 June 2020
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 11 March 2021
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 16 September 2020
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Analysis / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 5 August 2021
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 12 April 2023
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 13 March 2024
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 7 May 2025
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 1 August 2020
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 8 August 2022
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Crypto / RESEARCH RECORD93
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 18 April 2011
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Crypto / RESEARCH RECORD94
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 1 August 2013
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 1 May 2022
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
A court split one token's sales into securities and non-securities
The 2023 Ripple order shows Howey turning on the buyer's contract and knowledge, not on the asset sold.
Event: 13 July 2023
3 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 31 May 2023
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Crypto / RESEARCH RECORD98
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 18 July 2025
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
FATF's travel rule binds exchanges, not self-hosted wallets
The 2019 guidance and its 2021 update require providers to pass sender and receiver data, a rule with no reach into peer-to-peer transfers.
Event: 1 June 2019
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Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 23 May 2024
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Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
A Bitcoin energy estimate is a model, not a meter reading
Cambridge's methodology infers hardware and electricity assumptions from hashrate, which is why it publishes a range, not one number.
Mechanism & risk
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Analysis / FROM THE ARCHIVE
New York's BitLicense made custody a licensed activity
The 2015 regulation covers custody explicitly, and the department's own surrender list shows the licence is a floor, not a guarantee.
Event: 24 June 2015
3 min readRead entry ↗
Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Bitcoin paper solved an ordering problem
What the 2008 proposal actually assembled, and what its security argument assumes.
Event: 31 October 2008
3 min readRead entry ↗
Bitcoin / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The 2013 Bitcoin split exposed a compatibility limit
BIP50 records how valid-looking software versions disagreed and why coordination mattered.
Event: 11 March 2013
3 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
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.
Event: 20 July 2016
2 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Merge changed how Ethereum agrees
The 2022 upgrade replaced mining with validators while preserving existing application state.
Event: 15 September 2022
2 min readRead entry ↗
Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
A halving changes the mining budget
Bitcoin's declining subsidy makes the fee market a central long-run security question.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / EXPLAINER
A bridge carries more than an asset
Cross-chain convenience adds a verification path, contracts, and sometimes an operator to the risk ledger.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / EXPLAINER
A wallet backup is a recovery plan
A seed can simplify key recovery, but only if the actual wallet, settings, and secrets are understood.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / EXPLAINER
A stablecoin price is not a redemption right
USDC's issuer terms show why market trading and direct conversion into dollars are separate questions.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / FROM THE ARCHIVE
Concentrated liquidity moves the work to the provider
Uniswap v3 made capital more targeted, while asking providers to understand range and inventory risk.
Event: 5 May 2021
3 min readRead entry ↗
Analysis / EXPLAINER
An AI service is not a case for its token
A payment protocol can be useful without proving that an attached asset is necessary or valuable.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD113
Custody / EXPLAINER
A watch-only wallet removes spending power, not privacy risk
A practical workflow for monitoring cold storage without handing every address and balance to an avoidable observer.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD114
Custody / EXPLAINER
Rehearse wallet recovery without turning the seed into a test input
A recovery drill should prove the backup while keeping its most dangerous secret off ordinary computers and websites.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD115
Custody / EXPLAINER
A seed backup may recover keys and still miss the wallet
Output descriptors preserve the script, path and account context that makes a set of keys usable across wallet software.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD116
Custody / EXPLAINER
Verify a receive address on the screen that holds the keys
Copying an address from a wallet app is not the same as proving that the signing device controls it.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD117
Custody / EXPLAINER
An exchange withdrawal needs an asset, a network and a destination
Matching the ticker and address is not enough when an exchange offers several settlement networks for one asset.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / RESEARCH RECORD118
Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
Triage a stuck Bitcoin transaction before paying to change it
The useful first move is classification: confirmed, conflicted, absent, replaceable or constrained by a dependent transaction.
Mechanism & risk
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Bitcoin / RESEARCH RECORD119
Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
A Lightning balance can be real and still face the wrong direction
Troubleshoot failed sends and receives by separating outbound liquidity, inbound liquidity, routing and invoice state.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Bitcoin / RESEARCH RECORD120
Bitcoin / EXPLAINER
Plan a Bitcoin node sync around verification and future use
Storage mode, indexes, wallet history and software provenance are decisions to make before the first long download.
Mechanism & risk
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Custody / RESEARCH RECORD121
Custody / EXPLAINER
An inheritance plan should locate the secret without becoming it
Separate legal authority, operating instructions and spending credentials so one lost envelope or curious reader cannot do everything.
Mechanism & risk
4 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD122
Custody / EXPLAINER
Treat a hardware-wallet update as a provenance decision
Version numbers matter less than source, model compatibility, signed release evidence and a verified recovery path.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Analysis / RESEARCH RECORD123
Analysis / EXPLAINER
Read a block-explorer transaction without trusting its labels
A practical workflow for separating chain data, decoded guesses and explorer-added identity claims.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD124
Custody / EXPLAINER
Review a token allowance before signing it
Identify the spender, ceiling, duration and revocation path before an approval becomes durable authority.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Analysis / RESEARCH RECORD125
Analysis / EXPLAINER
Trace a proxy contract to its implementation and admin
Follow standard storage slots, upgrade events and control contracts instead of treating verified proxy code as the whole system.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Analysis / RESEARCH RECORD126
Analysis / EXPLAINER
Compare circulating supply with unlock disclosures
Build a dated supply reconciliation instead of treating one dashboard number as a complete float calculation.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Analysis / RESEARCH RECORD127
Analysis / EXPLAINER
Trace protocol revenue to token-holder entitlement
Follow each fee from payer to controller to see whether token holders receive cash, discretion or only a vote.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD128
Custody / EXPLAINER
Read a security audit for scope, version and exclusions
Match a report to deployed code and unresolved findings before treating the audit badge as relevant evidence.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD129
Custody / EXPLAINER
Evaluate a bug-bounty disclosure policy without exploiting anything
Judge scope, authorization, reporting and payout terms from published policy evidence—without probing live systems.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD130
Custody / EXPLAINER
Distinguish native and bridged stablecoin contracts
Use chain, contract and redemption path to tell look-alike stablecoins apart before a transfer.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Crypto / RESEARCH RECORD131
Crypto / EXPLAINER
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.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
Custody / RESEARCH RECORD132
Custody / EXPLAINER
Set payment budgets and authorization controls for an AI agent
Put deterministic limits between model output and wallet execution, then design revocation and reconciliation before funding.
Mechanism & risk
3 min readRead entry ↗
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