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The CORE Pipeline In Part 1 we showed why a forged cross-chain message is unprofitable when the cost of corruption (stake at risk, reputation at risk, and chance of being caught) dominates the value at risk. Part 2 turns that idea into a working system that a protocol can run on a schedule: it sets stakes, fees, and watcher bounties; it proves ...

A practical deep dive into game theory, correlation, and mechanism design for LayerZero (split), CCIP (quorums), and Across (optimistic) Most bridges don’t fail because the cryptography breaks—they fail because the economics make cheating profitable for a small, correlated group at the same time. If we want to reason clearly about LayerZero’s s...

Introduction In my previous article on game-theoretic vulnerabilities in shMONAD bandwidth allocation, I showed how bandwidth staking can create a high-stakes, non-cooperative congestion game where strategic timing (e.g., flash-commit bursts) distorts access to RPC throughput. This follow-up blog on Monad looks at a different chokepoint—price d...

Overview Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) isn’t inherently bad; the way it’s competed for is. When extractors rush, spam, and reorder to capture value, they impose costs on everyone else, worse prices for takers, adverse selection for LPs, congestion and failed transactions for bystanders, and a latency arms race that wastes real resources. A Pi...

Abstract Blockchain transaction fee markets have long been plagued by volatile fees, rampant overpayment, and under-utilized block capacity. Legacy first-price auctions force users into a painful guessing game, while EIP-1559’s base-fee mechanism, though an improvement, introduces algorithmic oscillations and is vulnerable to miner exploits. Thi...

Introduction Imagine you’re running a high-frequency trading system that relies on guaranteed RPC throughput. One morning, a flash-commit bot stakes a massive amount of shMON just before the next snapshot, locks up most of the bandwidth for 10 seconds, and your trades miss the market. What happened? shMONAD is an innovative Liquid Staking Toke...

In mid-2025, a widely reported nine-figure loss on Hyperliquid was read less as a failure than as a stress-test passed: a single on-chain venue absorbed institutional-scale taker flow without halting or dislocating, signaling that CEX-grade liquidity and performance had arrived on-chain. The episode—and Hyperliquid’s rapid growth that followed—e...

WIP - WORK IN PROGRESS Overview Over the past eighteen months a new class of tokens—yield‑bearing stablecoins (YBSs)—has grown from proof‑of‑concept into a $5.8 billion funding channel for both decentralized and traditional credit markets. Unlike legacy stablecoins whose utility derives solely from price stability, YBSs attach a cash‑flow eng...