Blockchain research group · UIT – VNU-HCM
Researching cross-chain interoperability
so independent chains can trust each other without trusting a middleman.
Merkle trees: summarize and prove block data at logarithmic cost.
Our last two posts covered zero-knowledge proofs and sandwich attacks. This one joins them into an open question we would love new members to explore: could a user get a short, checkable receipt that their trade was not sandwiched or unfairly ordered? We lay out why it matters, three ways in for different skill sets, the questions nobody has fully answered, and a first month of small steps.
Maximal extractable value (MEV) is the profit someone can make by choosing the order of transactions in a block. Its most common form, the sandwich attack, buys right before your swap and sells right after it. This post walks through one sandwich with real numbers, shows why your slippage setting is the attacker's budget, and compares the defences that work today.
A zero-knowledge proof lets you convince someone a statement is true while revealing nothing else. This post explains the idea with no maths first, then the three properties, SNARKs versus STARKs, and the four places ZK is already doing real work in blockchains: privacy, rollups, identity and, soon, Ethereum's own block validation.
Balancer V2, zkLend and Bunni were drained in 2025 by integer rounding that lost at most a unit or two per operation. Attackers shrank pools to a few wei, repeated the lossy step dozens of times in one transaction, and walked off with about $146M. Here is how, and how to design against it.
OWASP's 2026 list ranks the ten risks that cost smart contracts the most, built from 122 incidents and roughly $905M lost in 2025. Here is each risk in plain words, the real hack behind it, and the defence that would have stopped it.
An undergraduate‑level walk‑through of the Byzantine Generals Problem, the 3f+1 requirement for oral messages, and why this classic result underpins modern blockchain consensus.
By Blockchainist Desk
FinCEN has officially withdrawn long-pending surveillance proposals concerning self-custodial wallets and crypto mixing, removing years of compliance uncertainty.
By Blockchainist Desk
Look up any of 2,381 computer science conferences and 40,085 journals: CORE and CCF ranks, quartiles, impact factors and similar venues.
Members share paper reviews, protocol explainers and incident write-ups here. Sign in, write your post, and an admin reviews it before it goes live.
