Igor Igamberdiev

In 2020, Ethereum, due to The Summer of DeFi, experienced unusual user activity, which revealed itself in the incredible growth of on-chain volumes. For the popularity of the blockchain and the industry in general, this growth is undoubtedly a good sign. In particular, the increased demand for transactions led to high gas prices and the […]

Almost thirteen years have passed since the launch of Bitcoin during which hundreds of other blockchains have appeared. Smart contract platforms have been the most successful, hosting multi-billion dollar ecosystems. These platforms can be divided into two categories: EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible and incompatible. EVM compatibility is crucial for the rapid development of ecosystems, […]

Over the past year, DeFi protocols have succeeded in achieving adoption and have attracted tens of billions of dollars in TVL. At the moment, smart contract platforms are steadily moving towards reaching $100B TVL. Naturally, this indicator correlates with market movement and is associated with an increase in the price of cryptoassets. However, the number […]

The Block Research previously looked at the emergence of the first DeFi exploits and their heyday last fall in The Summer of DeFi. However, even the total losses as a result of previous attacks pale in comparison with May 2021. In just one month, DeFi protocols lost a record $210M, $80M more than what was […]

The growing popularity of DeFi has led to tens or even hundreds of thousands of unique addresses interacting with the largest protocols. The new users that arrived were, most of the time, evenly distributed, except for some events that increased interest in specific projects. These include significant protocol updates (like Maker MCD) and token distributions […]

Unlike Bitcoin, there are two fundamentally different types of accounts on Ethereum – externally owned (EOA) and contracts. The difference between the two is that EOA is controlled by a private key, while contracts are controlled by code. In fact, contracts are autonomous agents that execute code when someone interacts with them. At the moment, […]

Previously, The Block Research looked at how DeFi attacks occur in general and then gave specific examples of attacks in the first six months from their inception. Half a year was enough for attackers to steal more than $30M from users of Ethereum DeFi protocols in ten attacks. The current part of this recap is […]

In the first part of this report, The Block Research gave a general overview of how DeFi attacks happen and how the following investigation process looks. In a year and a half since the first well-known exploit, $330M+ was stolen, and although the amount seems incredibly large, the situation could be much worse. The list […]

DeFi projects aim to create a decentralized economy without intermediaries. All value transfers occur using open source smart contracts, without third parties or closed source code. Since the beginning of 2020, over $46 billion in assets have been deposited into Ethereum DeFi protocols. By comparison, this value is larger than Barclays’s capitalization with more than […]

The NFT market came out of stagnation at the end of last year and peaked with $200M+ weekly volume. Now the lion’s share of the volume falls on Ethereum NFT projects, primarily CryptoPunks. However, this indicator reached its heights primarily due to the record volumes of NBA TopShot on the Flow blockchain. More recently, the […]

One of the essential differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin is a Turing complete virtual machine or EVM. This machine turns the blockchain into a decentralized computing platform and is responsible for the state transition. Any transaction in Ethereum leads to a change in the current state. For example, transferring one ETH to a new wallet […]

For more than half a year, the volume of Ethereum DEXs has consistently been more than 5% of centralized exchanges volume. This figure would have likely been much higher if it were not for the bull market, in which users started actively trading altcoins not on Ethereum. In any case, volume growth on DEXs may […]

Modern blockchains like Ethereum are suitable for transferring value in a native coin form and running small applications – smart contracts. In terms of improving user experience, blockchains have the following challenges that need to be solved: scalability (reduction of transaction costs) interoperability (decentralized transfer of information and value between multiple blockchains) decentralized storage (optimized […]

Ethereum and its smart contracts have led to rethinking of what finance should look like. For example, the vast majority of popular DeFi protocols use pools as a liquidity source. Smart contracts allow anyone to become a liquidity provider (LP) on a decentralized exchange or a lender on a lending protocol by adding their assets […]

The vast majority of financial instruments in the crypto are adopted from traditional finance, and leveraged tokens are no exception. Let’s take a quick look at the transformation of investors’ desire to reduce risks into what we mean by these tokens. It is no secret that risk diversification benefits investors in the long term. Only […]

Decentralization of finance is primarily associated with the ability to use smart contracts on blockchains. However, smart contracts by themselves are not capable of supporting protocols’ operation. They do not have access to information from the outside world and also, at least on Ethereum, cannot initiate transactions. For these reasons, DeFi needs keepers who will […]

Data is the new oil, which is a huge advantage for prominent technology companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and others. Before the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, people hardly understood how much influence can be gained by analyzing their data on social media. As time goes, technological progress will allow algorithms to extract even more information […]

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 […]