Solana enters mid-2026 as a network in the middle of a rebuild. It now runs on two competing validator clients, its consensus engine is being replaced from the ground up, and its finality is on track to fall from 12.8…
A smart contract is a program stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when specific conditions are met. Nobody approves it, nobody processes it, and nobody can quietly change their mind halfway through. If the conditions written into the code…
A Web3 development platform is the managed infrastructure and set of APIs that let you connect an app to a blockchain without building and running the backend yourself. Instead of maintaining your own servers to read balances, send transactions, and…
Decentralized finance — DeFi — is a set of financial services like lending, borrowing, trading, and earning interest, implemented through open blockchain protocols rather than banks. Smart contracts enforce the rules and settle transactions, while companies, foundations, and community governance…
You can send a real Bitcoin transaction from a Python script in about five lines of code. The harder part — the part that separates copying a snippet from building something that survives production — is understanding what those five…
Nodes store and verify different subsets of network data depending on the protocol, client, and configuration. On Ethereum, three setups come up most often: a full node keeps current state and validates new blocks, an archive node adds retained historical…
A pruned node is a fully validating node that downloads and verifies the entire chain, then deletes the old block data it no longer needs. It keeps the current state and a small buffer of recent blocks, so it can…
A DEX — short for decentralized exchange — is a marketplace where you swap one cryptocurrency for another straight from your own wallet, with no company holding your money in the middle. Instead of an order desk run by a…
If you build on Sui, you’re already on a clock. JSON-RPC — the interface nearly every blockchain app has relied on for years — is being switched off, and gRPC is what takes its place. That’s bigger than one chain,…
One morning in September 2020, hundreds of thousands of people opened their wallets to find 400 UNI tokens they never asked for. It was a gift from Uniswap — worth roughly $1,200 that day, and about $16,800 for anyone who…