A modular blockchain hands off one or more of its core jobs — execution, settlement, consensus, or data availability — to a separate specialized chain instead of doing everything itself. A monolithic blockchain keeps all four of those jobs on…
MEV — maximal extractable value — is the extra profit someone can pull out of a blockchain by choosing which transactions go into a block and in what order, beyond the normal block reward and gas fees. An MEV attack…
A fraud proof lets anyone catch and reverse a bad transaction after it’s already been assumed correct. A validity proof checks the math before anything is assumed at all. Both exist to answer the same question for a very different…
Calldata is the read-only area where an external function’s arguments sit while a Solidity transaction runs — the raw call data attached to the transaction itself, and the cheapest of Solidity’s three data locations. It’s the one you should reach…
AI tools for blockchain development fall into two distinct categories: tools that write, generate, or audit code, and the infrastructure that connects those tools to live chain data for agentic workflows — where an AI agent checks a wallet balance…
The web3 stack is the set of tools a developer combines to build an app that reads and writes to a blockchain: a network to build on, a way to connect to it, smart contracts, a wallet for users, and…
A cross-chain bridge is a protocol that lets you move a token or a piece of data from one blockchain to another, even though the two networks weren’t built to talk to each other. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Smart…
Alpenglow is a consensus upgrade for Solana that replaces the network’s two aging components — Proof of History and Tower BFT — with a pair of new protocols called Votor and Rotor. The Solana Alpenglow upgrade cuts the time it…
A permissioned blockchain restricts who can join the network, validate transactions, or see certain data — an administrator decides who gets in. A permissionless blockchain does the opposite: anyone can download the software, run a node, and start validating, with…
Candy Machine v2 is a Metaplex smart contract that lets creators launch and sell an NFT collection on Solana in a controlled, fair way, instead of dumping every token into one wallet at once. It manages the mint: taking payment,…