BlockShots: Blockchain Simplified

In the last episode, we touched on how rollups work. In this episode, we go a step further. Let’s understand what are Fraud and Validity proofs and how they are used in rollups. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.blockshots.net

In the episode 46 of Block Shots, we did a brief introduction of blockchain rollups. In this episode, we go a bit deeper into how rollups work and what components are involved in the block production and verification of rollup blocks. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcas...

You must have heard about the term Metaverse quite a bit in the last few months, ever since NFTs became famous. In this episode, let’s try to explore the most basic understanding of Metaverse and how does blockchain come into the picture. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit po...

You must have heard this phrase quite a few times — Not your keys, not your crypto. Let’s find out, in this episode, what it actually means and how it effects you and your crypto currency holdings. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.blockshots.net

Smart contracts are simply code stored and executed on a blockchain. But how do they work? What happens when a user sends a transaction to deploy or execute a smart contract? Let’s find out in this episode. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.blockshots.net

Most of us are fans of computer or online gaming. In this episode, we discuss how blockchains make gaming more fun and fulfilling. They also allow different revenue streams though novel economic models in the world of gaming. Let’s explore. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...

In this episode, the topic is Soul Bound Tokens. In the most basic sense, they are just non transferable NFTs. However, SBTs open up quite a few interesting use-case cases for blockchains. Listen to the episode to learn more about what are Soul Bound Tokens and how they could be used in several blockchain applications. Vitalik’s blog post about SBTs - https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulboun...

In this episode, we cover Directed Acyclic Graph or DAG. In blockchain, we have blocks as collection of transactions and the current block references the previous one, and a chain is formed. In DAG, we don’t have any blocks. Transactions directly reference previous transactions. The nodes verify the previous transactions by referencing them in new transactions. When a new transaction is submitted...

In this episode, we cover Inter-planetary File System (IPFS) and decentralized file storage protocols in general. We also take a slightly deeper look into how IPFS works. * NFT storage. Metadata storage of on-chain assets. * Distributed, cannot be controlled by single organization. * Censorship resistant. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss t...

In this episode, we cover Verifiable credentials. These are a standard to represent digital credentials that could be issued for an identity by an identity, and could be verified cryptographically. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.blockshots.net

We need a standard for representing identity on decentralized systems to use our decentralized identity across several applications.  Decentralized Identifiers or DIDs allow users and applications to represent and use identity related information in a reusable and app or platform agnostic manner. DIDs are described in a DID document. So, the main identifier is the DID, and the associated metadata...

Self-sovereign Identity paradigm refers to identities owned by people themselves without depending on centralized systems or organizations. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub are all centralized identity platforms. Identities created by these platforms are not exportable or usable across apps. Not in user’s control. Self-sovereign Identity (SSI) is about getting users the control on their identit...

In this episode, we cover Automated Market Makers or AMMs. Traditionally exchanges are based on order books. Buyers and sellers are matched with quantity and price in their orders. AMMs are different. They use a conversion formula for trades. They use decentralized liquidity pools for liquidity. Any user can send one asset and get another asset from AMM, as long as there is a liquidity pool with e...

In this episode, we discuss Front-running of transactions in blockchains. It is the most common type of MEV. We also touch on Back-running and Sandwich attacks. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.blockshots.net

In this episode, we cover Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) and how it works. Miners or Validators are responsible for selecting and including the transactions in a block. They are free to choose any transactions from the mempool. Miners can choose not to select certain transactions. They can also manipulate the order of transactions. This leads to MEV. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com This is a...

In this episode, we cover what makes Blockchains and decentralized systems censorship resistant. Centralized systems are owned or controlled by organizations. They could limit the usage of some actors depending on local laws. Decentralized systems are not controlled by any single party. They are made equal for everyone, based on the rules of the network. No local laws apply.  Users could send thei...

Blockchains are built for transparency and verifiability. Most of the data on a blockchain is publicly verifiable. For example, all transactions sent to bitcoin are public and anyone could query the balance of any account. Generally, this is not an issue because blockchain accounts are random strings and it is not easy to link an account to a human. This property of blockchains is also called pseu...

In the episode 3 of the podcast, I covered different kind of blockchain nodes and one of them is light client. In this episode, I’ll cover light clients in a bit more detail.  Light clients are special in the sense that they allow more decentralization. Unlike full nodes, light clients do not process all the transactions and blocks. They only synchronize block headers and are much light in terms o...

There are different blockchains built to serve different kind of users and use-cases. Bitcoin is for peer to peer transfer of currency while Ethereum is a smart contracts platform. Flow is for NFTs while ZCash is for private transactions. What if applications and users on these blockchains need to interact or integrate with each other? Imagine a use-case where a smart contract on Ethereum, on succ...

A block is a collection of transactions and some metadata. Let’s take a look at how a block is produced. Let’s just assume that according to the algorithm we already have the node (validator or miner) selected to produce the next block.  The first thing that this block producer node would do is to choose which block to build on. Remember blockchain is a chain of blocks. For each new block we need...

Rollups are layer 2 blockchain scalability solutions where the execution of transactions is moved off the main blockchain. Basically, the layer 1 chain is used for keeping the ledger state and providing consensus, while the off-chain layer 2 framework — rollup-is used to execute the transactions and submit the updated state to layer 1. This approach decouples the work to store the ledger state and...

Initially, there were only one kind of blockchain networks where ledger storage and execution of transactions both happened on-chain. These blockchains were not scalable because of the topics and reasons mentioned in some of the previous episodes. To achieve scalability and throughput, some solutions try to decouple or divide this work across on-chain and off-chain systems. Some solutions move the...

When we talk about blockchain scalability — which has been the theme for some of the current episodes — we must understand how the block gas limit plays an important role in the scalability discussion. In general, for any public smart contracts blockchain, it is important to measure and charge for the resource usage while executing smart contract logic. For this, we have gas. The concept of gas ma...

Since its beginning, the Ethereum network has been using the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. As we know, PoW consumes a lot of energy. Now the Ethereum network is moving to Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. The merge is when the switch from PoW to PoS is going to happen. Since the December of 2020, there has been a PoS network running in parallel, called the beacon chain. The existing PoW net...

When it comes to blockchains, we use the terms performance, scalability, transactions per second (TPS) many times interchangeably. But these are all very different things. I recently read an article on a16z crypto where all these terms were nicely explained and clarified. I encourage you to read this article. https://a16zcrypto.com/why-blockchain-performance-is-hard-to-measure/ In this episode of...