Ivan Kruse
# Writer and editor of Crypto Under the Hood
Has been running nodes since 2016. Explains the technical side without talking down.
What Ivan Kruse covers here
Everything published on Crypto Under the Hood is written by one person, and the scope is deliberately narrow: consensus and blocks, node operation, MEV and ordering, reading on-chain data. Articles stay inside it rather than chasing whatever is trending.
How the writing is checked
Figures carry the date they were taken. Claims that can be verified link to a primary source rather than to another article summarising it. Where something is genuinely uncertain, the article says so instead of rounding the uncertainty away.
Corrections are published with a note saying what changed and when. If you find an error, the contact page is the fastest route.
Published on this site
- What Happens During a Chain Split
- Client Diversity and Why It Is the Risk Nobody Watches
- What Happens in a Deep Reorg
- Reading a Transaction Trace
- Reading Smart Contract Code Without Being a Developer
- What Running Infrastructure Teaches You
- State Growth: The Problem Nobody Has Solved
- Upgrade Patterns for Contracts
- Light Clients and Why They Matter More Than They Sound
- Signatures: How the Network Knows It Was You
- Transaction Ordering Fairness
- Events and Logs: Where Most Contract Data Actually Lives
- What a Merkle Tree Actually Does
- Contract Storage and Why It Is Expensive
- The Cost of Verifying Everything
- How a Transaction Gets Into a Block, Step by Step
- Randomness on Chain
- Slashing Conditions in Detail
- Reading a Block Explorer Like an Analyst
- Zero Knowledge Proofs Without Mathematics
- Why Block Propagation Time Matters
- Reorgs: How a Confirmed Transaction Can Un-Happen
- Hash Functions and Why They Matter
- Precompiles and Why They Exist
- Why Decentralized Is a Spectrum, Not a Checkbox
- The Role of RPC Providers
- Nonces, Replay and Ordering
- Block Size, Block Time, Finality: The Three Numbers That Matter
- Data Availability Sampling
- How Explorers Index Chains
- Gas Refunds and Storage Economics
- Finality Gadgets
- MEV Explained: Who Takes Your Money and How
- Pruning and Archive Nodes
- Checkpoints and Weak Subjectivity
- What a Validator Actually Runs
- Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, Without the Tribalism
- What a Node Actually Stores
- Peer Discovery and Networking
- Running a Node: What It Costs and What You Get
- The Role of the Sequencer
- How Wallets Derive Addresses
- How Signatures Are Aggregated
- What the Mempool Is, and Why It Decides Your Fee
- Account Abstraction: What Changes When a Wallet Is a Contract