Technologies and Implications of Appchains

Web3.com Ventures Original Research Analysis

0xFishylosopher

Introduction

Ethereum is great — for most people at least. But one of the key problems of Ethereum and other public-facing blockchains is that there’s not that much customizability. Sure, you can write and deploy smart contracts, but as a single user or company, you can’t really do much about the consensus mechanisms, execution engines, and other underlying architecture. After all, you are

Catalyzing Education, Inspiration, and Iteration

Web3.com Ventures Original Research Analysis

0xFishylosopher

Introduction

Like many others, my mind was absolutely blown away by ChatGPT’s capabilities. Though I had played with GPT-3’s playground API before, and have written about newer image models such as DALLE 2 before, I was not prepared for the breadth, depth, and fluidity of GPT-3’s responses. From sonnets to Solidity, philosophy to physics, the quality of the content was simply stunnin

How zk-ASM may deliver a secure and trustless internet

Web3.com Ventures Original Research Analysis

0xFishylosopher

Note: This article is a fairly technically-dense piece, and assumes basic conceptual familiarity with zk-Proofs and/or zk-Rollups. A more general introduction to these principles can be found here.

Introduction

Zero Knowledge Proofs, in particular zk-SNARKs (Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge) is perhaps one of the most important technologies at the frontiers of W

DeFi Security

In October, the security of on-chain assets regained much attention since well-known protocols such as BNB Cross Chain Bridge, OmniX NFT Platform, and Team Finance were getting hacked. It seems that the endless hacking attacks in crypto have long been commonplace.

Early this year, Chainalysis published a research report about on-chain crimes, showing that crypto protocols have become a new playground for digital thieves. In the past year, $3.2B worth of cryptocurrencies were stol

Web3.com Ventures Original Research Analysis

0xFishylosopher

Introduction

The Sui blockchain is one of the major new L1 projects utilizing the Move language, and has gathered major media and capital attention in its technological developments [1]. Compared with many other new L1 blockchains, particularly with Aptos, Sui boasts a whole set of experimental designs, technological innovations, and unique tokenomics to provide a blockchain that “scales horizontally” with virtually unlimited upside

Web3.com Ventures Original Research Analysis

0xFishylosopher

Introduction

“zk-Rollups” has probably been the hottest Web 3 buzzword of the year. With zk-Sync’s v2.0 “baby alpha” mainnet launch in just the past few days, this excitement has reached its zenith [1]. But behind all these buzzwords, what do “zk-Rollups” really refer to? And where does zk-Sync come into play? In this article, I will endeavor to dive deep into the principles and practice of zk-Rollups, explicate the key technical ha

Web3.com Ventures Original Research Analysis

0xFishylosopher

Introduction

With Aptos’ recent mainnet launch and its token launch on Binance and other major centralized exchanges, there’s no better time to write an exploratory analysis of this long-hailed project. The orphaned child of Meta’s attempts at creating the Libra cryptocurrency, Aptos carries on Libra’s ideal of being the blockchain that will onboard the next million users in crypto.

The over-arching focus of Aptos is to deliver a s

What decentralized identity brings to Web3.0?

Introduction

In our daily life, we frequently interact with different identities such as email addresses, social media accounts, passports, and more. This data is generally stored in centralized servers and controlled by third-party companies, so owners of identities have no control over this information. What’s worse, if the organization bans the owner from accessing its services or the organization ceases to exist, the data stored will be elimina

NFT and IP

The NFT market has experienced a boom in the past year and reached its ATH monthly trading volume of $6B in January 2022.

NFT trading platforms like LooksRare and Magic Eden were developing rapidly and threatened the dominance of OpenSea. Nansen’s reports in April also indicated that the NFT market is growing more than the crypto market in the first quarter of 2022.

However, the market quickly turned over after Luna’s collapse and Celsius’s suspension. Liquid assets in the crypto m

Introduction

It has been over a decade since the whitepaper of Bitcoin was released, and we can see the impressive evolution of blockchain technology since then. However, the development of the on-chain economy and business implications is not keeping up with its technology.

Designing a well-functioning tokenomics is the most important part of any on-chain protocol, as it defines the pattern of a cryptocurrency’s issuance and supplies within the system. We can find many famous projects that ri

DeFi is one of the most revolutionized applications of blockchain technology.

The development of conventional financial instruments in the past decade was increasing the number of services that investors can choose from, which provides more financial autonomy for investors. However, the governance rights of investors were barely improved, and the value of their assets was determined by the institutions.

A paradigm shift started when decentralized finance first boomed in 2020. DeFi, as a combin

The major change after the merge of Ethereum is its consensus network will switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. Compared to PoW, PoS is more energy-efficient and it increases the scalability of Ethereum.

For each Proof-of-Stake network, there will be validators who are responsible for checking the validity of new blocks propagated over the network, and creating and propagating new blocks themselves.

In Ethereum 2.0, to become a validator, users must deposit at least 32 ETH into the sma

DAO, as an emerging crypto vertical, has gained great progress and development in recent years. As of now (21 Jun 2022), there have been 1085 DAOs with more than 3 million members according to the data of deepdao.io. To enable these organizations to flourish, a vibrant tooling and infrastructure stack has been created, driving a thriving DAO ecosystem. These projects provide communities or projects with different templates, frameworks and tools to pool resources and launch their first DAO. They

TLDR

While the future of Web3 game is promising, there have been signs of defects in the token financing of many companies and projects. Equity investment or mixed investment may be a possible solution, but concerted efforts is also irreplaceable for a fair market environment.

Market Status and Forecast

In the second half of 2021, the concept of Web3 games/metaverse began to emerge, and its superior short-term profitability conquered the capital and traditional game developers. More and more

The DeFi lending platforms offer crypto loans in a trustless manner and allow users to enlist the crypto coins they have in the DeFi lending platforms for lending purposes. With this decentralized platform, a borrower can directly take a loan, called DeFi P2P lending. Moreover, the lending protocol even allows the lender to earn interest.

Why we need DeFi Lending

Getting profits from assets while still maintaining exposure to the upside of the assets.

A long-term crypto hodler who doesn’t wan

The fascination of the crypto world lies in that it uses blockchain technology to disrupt the traditional marketplace that people are used to — DeFi for finance, NFT for art, and DAO for traditional corporations.

DAO refers to Decentralized Autonomous Organization, with uniform rules for automated execution, transparent and not controlled by a centralized organization, where stakeholders can express their interests.

These features of DAO can solve various problems faced by investment funds in

Definition

DAO, short for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program. It is controlled and supervised by the originator, shareholders or token holders and is not influenced by a central authority. A DAO keeps itself running through smart contracts and encodes transactions and rules on the blockchain, achieving openness, fairness, uninterruptibility and autonomous operation.

In contrast to traditional organizations, the actions a

Timeline

On May 8th 2022, the CISO of Polygon Network, Mudit Gupta tweeted about serial token movements that caused the $UST to lose its peg slightly down to $0.985 on Saturday.

He also mentioned the suspicious timing of a transaction that bridged $84M worth of $UST to Ethereum and dumped it right after the LFG’s $UST removal, which may have triggered the market sell-off.

While the $UST once recovered back to $1 on Sunday, it dropped all the way to $0.88 on May 9th 2022.

Such a huge decline

The flaw of IPFS

When it comes to decentralized data storage, the InterPlanetary File System, known as IPFS, is a project that cannot be bypassed.

As one of the most notable decentralized storage projects, IPFS uses the data structure of the Merkle DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), a modification based on the Merkle Tree. With this data structure, IPFS implements content addressing and fragment downloading of files.

Specifically speaking, IPFS assigns a unique hash value to each file, similar to

Modular blockchain paradigm

In physics, coupling is the phenomenon whereby two forms of motion affect each other through interaction. Decoupling, on the other hand, is the mathematical separation of two forms of motion to deal with the problem.

In the field of programming, the idea of modularity is very similar: a software design technique called modular programming, emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everythi