Igor Igamberdiev

The still relatively young DeFi sector is certainly attractive to investors because it can generate revenue in a permissionless way while keeping the operating costs very low.  The vast majority of revenue is still distributed to the supply-side, like lenders or liquidity providers. In the same vein, centralized exchanges incentivize market makers with reduced fees […]

Along with the launch of the first DeFi protocols, on-chain arbitrage opportunities began to emerge. The number of such opportunities only increased due to the poor UX of first DEXs and high market volatility, when traders did not have time to cancel limit orders. Flash Boys 2.0 authors researched on-chain arbitrage in detail and concluded […]

Currently, the cryptocurrency market is fragmented between many blockchains. The inter-blockchain era in projects such as Cosmos (Stargate release) or Polkadot (Rococo parachains testnet) has not arrived yet. And even after its start, communication will primarily be only between compatible blockchains. The largest projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum will need to wait for special […]

The Summer of DeFi offered lots of profit opportunities which resulted in an all-time high average gas price on Ethereum. However, this situation could not last forever, and APYs began to decline from five-digit to double-digit. One of the reasons for the drop in profitability was more frequent rug pulls and hacks of smart contracts. […]

The Block Research previously looked at how governance works in Maker, Compound, and three DeFi protocols, Curve, Uniswap, 1inch, which decided to distribute part of their tokens retroactively. Each of the Defi protocols, except for Uniswap, uses its own governance framework. Moreover, currently all, except for 1inch, also support off-chain governance. Having a public forum […]

The Block Research, in its recent piece, looked at how the decentralized governance works in the two oldest lending protocols, MakerDAO and Compound. Currently, decentralized governance is still relatively passive and shows signs of centralization, although Compound has made specific steps in the right direction. Following Compound’s success, many other protocols have launched governance tokens […]

In recent research, The Block Research described the governance process in one of the longest-lived DAOs: MakerDAO. The analysis found that participation in MakerDAO’s governance is relatively centralized and passive. MakerDAO’s governance framework is unpopular due to its complexity, the need to lock tokens, and the lack of a delegation function. The ability to transfer […]

Bitcoin was created as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and therefore has (by design) limited functionality. However, one of the critical building blocks of Bitcoin is the Nakamoto consensus. This algorithm created a trustless environment for implementing Nick Szabo’s idea of smart contracts. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) became one of the key areas of application […]

With the launch of Ethereum, the world received a decentralized computer that can solve any computational problem if there is enough gas in the block. However, to solve any problem, data storage is also needed. Without data storage, for example, blockchains will be unable to fully support and host social networking apps and other data-heavy […]

This research piece examines the initial phase of Eth2 and explores what's to come for Ethereum's big upgrade.