The machinery behind the coinshttps://cryptounderthehood.com/https://cryptounderthehood.com/chain-splits/https://cryptounderthehood.com/chain-splits/When part of the network refuses an upgrade, two chains exist and every holder owns coins on both. The mechanics are stranger than the summaries suggest.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/client-diversity/https://cryptounderthehood.com/client-diversity/A network running mostly one software implementation has a single point of failure that no amount of node distribution fixes.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/deep-reorgs/https://cryptounderthehood.com/deep-reorgs/Shallow reorganisations are routine. Deep ones have occurred on smaller chains and the consequences are specific.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/reading-a-transaction-trace/https://cryptounderthehood.com/reading-a-transaction-trace/A trace shows every internal call a transaction made. It answers the question of what actually happened when the summary does not.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/reading-contract-code/https://cryptounderthehood.com/reading-contract-code/You do not need to write Solidity to check the four things that matter. Each one is findable by searching the source for a keyword.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/what-infrastructure-teaches/https://cryptounderthehood.com/what-infrastructure-teaches/Ten years of operating nodes has changed what I think matters about these systems, mostly in the direction of caring less about the parts people argue about.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/state-growth/https://cryptounderthehood.com/state-growth/Every account and contract adds permanently to what nodes must store. Storage grows, node operators leave, and validation concentrates.Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/upgrade-patterns/https://cryptounderthehood.com/upgrade-patterns/Deployed code is immutable, so upgradeability is achieved by indirection. The patterns determine who can change what and how fast.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/light-clients/https://cryptounderthehood.com/light-clients/Verifying a chain without downloading it. The difference between checking and asking is the difference between a wallet you trust and one you verify.Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/signatures/https://cryptounderthehood.com/signatures/No password is sent anywhere. The mechanism that proves authorisation without revealing the secret, and where it goes wrong in practice.Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/transaction-ordering-fairness/https://cryptounderthehood.com/transaction-ordering-fairness/Someone must decide the order. Every proposal to make that decision fair runs into the same constraints.Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/events-and-logs/https://cryptounderthehood.com/events-and-logs/Contracts emit events rather than storing data, because storage is expensive. That choice determines what is easy to query and what is not.Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/merkle-trees/https://cryptounderthehood.com/merkle-trees/The structure that lets you verify one transaction is in a block without downloading the block. It is simpler than the name suggests.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/contract-storage-layout/https://cryptounderthehood.com/contract-storage-layout/Writing to persistent storage is the most costly common operation. The pricing explains a great deal about how contracts are written.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/cost-of-verifying-everything/https://cryptounderthehood.com/cost-of-verifying-everything/Every full node re-executes every transaction. That duplication is the entire point and it is also the reason these systems are slow.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/how-transactions-get-into-a-block/https://cryptounderthehood.com/how-transactions-get-into-a-block/From pressing confirm to permanent inclusion, there are seven distinct stages. Most failures happen at one of three of them.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/randomness-on-chain/https://cryptounderthehood.com/randomness-on-chain/A deterministic system cannot produce randomness by itself. How networks approximate it and where the approximations fail.Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/slashing-conditions/https://cryptounderthehood.com/slashing-conditions/What actually gets a validator penalised, how severe each penalty is, and why the distinction between inactivity and misbehaviour matters.Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/reading-a-block-explorer/https://cryptounderthehood.com/reading-a-block-explorer/Everything about a transaction is public. Knowing which fields matter turns an explorer from a status checker into an investigative tool.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/zero-knowledge-without-mathematics/https://cryptounderthehood.com/zero-knowledge-without-mathematics/Proving a statement is true without revealing why. What the property buys, where it is used, and what it costs.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/block-propagation-time/https://cryptounderthehood.com/block-propagation-time/A block must reach every node before the next one is produced. That constraint bounds block size, block time and effectively the throughput of any chain.Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/reorgs/https://cryptounderthehood.com/reorgs/A block that was part of the chain can be discarded. Understanding when and why explains every confirmation requirement you have encountered.Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/hash-functions/https://cryptounderthehood.com/hash-functions/One operation underlies addresses, block linking, proofs and mining. Four properties explain what it is used for.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/precompiles/https://cryptounderthehood.com/precompiles/Some operations are too expensive to run as contract code, so they are implemented natively. The list is short and tells you what the chain considers important.Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/decentralized-is-a-spectrum/https://cryptounderthehood.com/decentralized-is-a-spectrum/Five independent axes, each measurable. A network can score well on some and badly on others, and most marketing quotes only the favourable ones.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/rpc-providers/https://cryptounderthehood.com/rpc-providers/Most wallets talk to a handful of companies rather than to the network. What that means for privacy, reliability and censorship.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/nonces-and-replay/https://cryptounderthehood.com/nonces-and-replay/A counter that guarantees transactions execute once and in order. It is also the cause of a specific and confusing class of stuck transaction.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/block-size-time-finality/https://cryptounderthehood.com/block-size-time-finality/Most chain comparisons quote transactions per second. These three parameters explain what that figure actually means and what it costs.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/data-availability-sampling/https://cryptounderthehood.com/data-availability-sampling/Checking that data exists without downloading it. The technique that makes rollup scaling work without every node storing everything.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/how-explorers-index-chains/https://cryptounderthehood.com/how-explorers-index-chains/A block explorer is a database built from chain data. Knowing how it is constructed explains what it can answer and where it can be wrong.Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/gas-refunds-and-storage-economics/https://cryptounderthehood.com/gas-refunds-and-storage-economics/Clearing storage used to earn a refund large enough to create a market in it. The constraints introduced since explain the current design.Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/finality-gadgets/https://cryptounderthehood.com/finality-gadgets/The component that turns probabilistic confirmation into an explicit guarantee. What it promises and what it costs.Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/mev-explained/https://cryptounderthehood.com/mev-explained/Transaction ordering has value. The people who capture it are sophisticated, and the defences available to ordinary users are narrower than the explanations suggest.Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/pruning-and-archive-nodes/https://cryptounderthehood.com/pruning-and-archive-nodes/Discarding history is safe and discarding state is not. The asymmetry determines what a node can do after pruning.Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/weak-subjectivity/https://cryptounderthehood.com/weak-subjectivity/A new proof-of-stake node cannot determine the correct chain from the protocol alone. What it needs instead and why that is acceptable.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/validator-operations/https://cryptounderthehood.com/validator-operations/The software stack, the operational requirements and the failure modes. Considerably more mundane than the discussion of consensus suggests.Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/pow-vs-pos/https://cryptounderthehood.com/pow-vs-pos/Two answers to the same question. Each buys security with a different resource, and each has a failure mode the other does not.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/what-a-node-stores/https://cryptounderthehood.com/what-a-node-stores/State, history and indexes are three different things with very different sizes. The distinction explains most of the confusion about node requirements.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/peer-discovery/https://cryptounderthehood.com/peer-discovery/Before a node can validate anything, it has to find other nodes. The mechanism is simple, adversarial, and rarely discussed.Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/running-a-node/https://cryptounderthehood.com/running-a-node/Hardware, bandwidth, time, and what you actually gain. I have run one since 2016 and the honest answer is narrower than the advocacy suggests.Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/the-role-of-the-sequencer/https://cryptounderthehood.com/the-role-of-the-sequencer/On most rollups today, one operator decides transaction order. What that means, what it cannot do, and what happens when it stops.Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/how-wallets-derive-addresses/https://cryptounderthehood.com/how-wallets-derive-addresses/One seed phrase produces unlimited addresses through a defined path. Understanding the derivation explains several recovery problems.Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/signature-aggregation/https://cryptounderthehood.com/signature-aggregation/Combining thousands of signatures into one is what makes large validator sets practical. The mechanism and what it costs.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/what-the-mempool-is/https://cryptounderthehood.com/what-the-mempool-is/The waiting room between broadcasting a transaction and it being included in a block. Almost everything about fees follows from what happens there.Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cryptounderthehood.com/account-abstraction/https://cryptounderthehood.com/account-abstraction/Smart contract accounts allow recovery, spending limits and gas paid in other tokens. The trade-offs are worth understanding before switching.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT