Blockchain on Blog of Christian Felde

The Third Door

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:23:51 +0100

The EU Parliament’s economic committee just reached a compromise on the digital euro, and the part that matters got almost none of the coverage. Fees and offline payments took the headlines. Underneath them, the French and German data authorities had forced privacy up the agenda, insisting the digital euro behave like cash. They are right to fight that. They are fighting it on far too small a field.

Because the digital euro the ECB is actually building is a capped, intermediated, offchain instrument that arrives around 2029. By then the question won’t be whether Europe has a digital euro. It’ll be whether anyone still needs one. The opportunity in front of the ECB right now is larger than the one it is planning for, it is buildable with technology that already exists, and everything standing in the way is a policy choice. None of it is cryptographic.

In Defense of CROPS

Thu, 21 May 2026 13:58:07 +0100

The Ethereum Foundation published its mandate, and a lot of people read it as a change of direction. It’s not. It reads that way because it’s the first time the Foundation has written down, in a single place, what Ethereum was always supposed to be. I support the mandate. And I think most of the surrounding noise is either missing the point or defending an arrangement that happened to be comfortable.

How big could EVE Frontier's economy get?

Tue, 19 May 2026 21:11:22 +0100

If you’ve been following CCP Games’ EVE Frontier development, you know it represents something genuinely different from EVE Online. Not just a new game, but a new economic model. Where EVE Online runs a closed economy that legally cannot connect to the broader world, Frontier puts player assets on a blockchain and actively encourages that connection. The in-game economy can plug into the wider crypto world.

EVE Frontier is still in early testing as I write this. But assume it eventually launches and grows. If it reaches the size of EVE Online in terms of player activity and scope, how big could its economy actually become in real, USD terms?

What the Aave crisis actually showed us

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:10:34 +0000

If you’ve been watching the rsETH situation unfold over the last week, you’ve probably seen the headlines. A $292M bridge exploit, $13B of TVL fleeing Aave, stablecoin pools pinned at 100% utilization for days, and a slow-motion governance scramble that’s still going on as I write this.

It’s tempting to file it as “another DeFi hack” and move on. I don’t think we should. This one is unusually instructive, not because the hack itself was novel (it wasn’t, bridges keep getting exploited, and as I’ve said before, I think bridging is an anti-pattern), but because of what the response showed us about how DeFi actually works under stress. We got to see something here that’s hard to see anywhere else.

Why TradFi Failed Blockchain

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:04:02 +0000

If you’re like me, having been involved in the blockchain and Ethereum space since around 2018, with a tilt towards TradFi and enterprise use cases, you’ve likely come across numerous private chain initiatives. And with few exceptions, they all missed the point.

These initiatives often started life as some R&D effort, looking at new tech and trying to map it to their existing culture and structures.

As such, blockchains were approached purely from their technical capabilities. And they found that blockchains were slow and complex, so instead of calling them blockchains they needed to be called DLTs, so that other distributed technology approaches could be included in the stack.

The Rise of the RST Stack (Rust, Solidity, TypeScript)

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:12:21 +0000

I’m old enough to remember when the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) was the go-to choice for building websites.

Things have changed since then. While PHP is still going strong (think WordPress and similar), many developers now prefer Node.js or other such JavaScript engines when building from scratch, thanks to their flexibility and vibrant ecosystem. TypeScript, and perhaps Postgres or even SQLite then follow. Linux is still a given, so much so we don’t even need to mention it in any acronym.

Risk free rate going technical

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 16:20:11 +0000

In finance we sometimes talk about a “risk free rate”. It’s a mythical investment with no risk, paying with 100% certainty according to some defined schedule. As any real investment with actual risks should compensate for those, real investments then must pay an appropriate risk premium above the risk free rate.

Often, investors will use government bonds as a “good enough” proxy for the risk free rate. If the government can practically print money to pay for their obligations, the risk of a default is seemingly low (at the cost of inflation). We of course know that governments sometimes default on their debts, yet it’s often the best proxy we’ve got.

Bridging is an anti-pattern

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 07:41:01 +0000

As soon as we started having multiple blockchains, be that numerous L1s or L2s, public or private, and any mix of these, the question of how they interact with each other was asked.

There are numerous types of interactions between blockchains, but a typical example is that of “the bridge”.

In short, a bridge allows you to lock up a token native to a source blockchain, and then make it available on a target blockchain. It’s important that these tokens are native to the source blockchain, because if they are not they could in theory exist across many and hence don’t need a bridge to begin with.

Distinguished stablecoins

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 14:06:01 +0000

Stablecoins are on the up. If we look at stablepulse, at the time of writing, we’re at over 200B in circulating supply. Volumes are also up, both metrics at all time highs.

And while the big actors dominate, their models are by no means decentralized. There’s either an element of cash in a bank, or a link to other TradFi instruments. Or if not that, some other element of centralized control, at best through a DAO.

What about L3?

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:35:20 +0000

Like I mentioned on LinkedIn a couple of weeks back, Dencun/4844 was Ethereum’s broadband moment. The blob transactions enabled by that hardfork network upgrade enabled a new type of storage space for unstructured data.

Very soon after this change, we saw transaction prices on Layer 2s, like Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism drop significantly, often over 10x cheaper than prior to the upgrade. As Ethereum mainnet continues building on these new rails, additional transaction bandwidth will be unlocked, supporting further growth among the L2s.

Delta neutral yield

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 11:16:29 +0000

I’ve wanted to write a post on decentralized delta neutral yield strategies for a while, and with the Shapella fork behind us, it finally compelled me to get going.

If you don’t know, the Shapella fork enable staking withdrawals on Ethereum mainnet, and it makes the case for LSDs more compelling as their market dynamics have now been greatly improved.

What are LSDs? It’s short for Liquid Staking Derivatives and is a way to create derivatives on top of staked Ether. Hence, if you take Ether, stake it, you’re not just participating in the running of the Ethereum network, at the cost of capital lockups, but you’re also able to leverage this capital indirectly through LSDs in the broader DeFi ecosystem.

Towards a decentralized future

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 15:13:28 +0000

It’s obvious isn’t it? That we’re heading towards a decentralized future?

It might be that it’s just obvious to me, since I’m so deeply involved in this, but the signs are everywhere. From Meta and Twitter collapsing, to oil being replaced by renewables. This shift is aligning us for a new mega trend, one which has been underway in many areas for many years, but now, with improvements in technology, finally enable us to take it all the way.

We’re on the telnet stage of blockchain

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 11:53:29 +0000

Much is being discussed on Twitter and Reddit about the censoring of transactions on Ethereum. As can be seen on MEV Watch, around half of all blocks, as of right now, follow the OFAC recommendations, censoring transactions against Tornado Cash and similar.

It doesn’t take much imagination among Ethereum haters and Bitcoin maxis to declare this as proof of the failure of Ethereum, but is it really?

Instead, I believe we’re seeing two things play our here:

What Tornado Cash makes clear

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 16:01:25 +0000

I’ve been in the financial services sector since around 2008, and at some point I was directly involved in the technology used as part of a banks regulatory reporting requirements.

The amount of efforts needed in a bank to perform KYCs, AMLs, and trade reporting in general is immense. We might all like to hate on banks for their shitty service, lack of clarity and outdated technology, and while that’s fair criticism, they have at least a little bit of an excuse given the regulatory requirements put on them.

How much is ETH worth?

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 16:10:00 +0000

There has been much written, discussed and argued about what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether are worth. And there has been much nonsense, much superstition, and flawed analysis. Since we’re back in crypto winter, I feel it’s possible to write this without drowning in spam, spam by people trying to pump and dump some coin.

Let’s be clear on one thing first of all: There’s no lack of scarce assets. Just because Bitcoin is limited to a 21 million coin supply, does not imply any worth.

Mining NuPoW Crystal tokens

Sat, 07 May 2022 20:46:04 +0000

Not long ago I released the NuPoW Crystal tokens, an implementation of ERC-20 tokens utilizing the new Proof-of-Work algorithm called NuPoW for token minting. The contract has no admin, and there’s no premine on these tokens.

The core thing about NuPoW is that it limits the amount of energy used for mining NuPoW tokens through a collective mechanism of reward reduction managed by a chain length run measurement.

It might all sound a bit complicated, but its really not, all described in more detail in the NuPoW whitepaper.

For the tech and some ERC-20s

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 13:56:49 +0000

I work in ‘web3’. What’s ‘web3’ ? It’s complicated, and something I can talk about for hours. In short, it involves removing intermediaries/gatekeepers and putting the user in the center through technology empowerment.

So what is it I do? Well, mainly I focus on the technology, and related strategy work. How can you make use of Web3 technology to enable Web3 business? We’re still early days, with much technology still needed, and much understanding still missing.

It’s not about the rock

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 09:20:44 +0000

A few days ago someone allegedly paid $1.3 million for a rock. It’s not even a real rock, or a picture of a real rock. And the underlying rock contract doesn’t even follow the NFT standard, as that was established in 2018, after this contract was deployed.

But it’s not about the rock, and we’re now in some crazy bubble with lots of internal transactions to make it look like someone paid this much for something. If I’ve got $1.3 millions worth of ETH, and I sell this rock to myself, you know..

Don’t use blockchain

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 18:19:21 +0000

Rarely do you find technology with so much hype as blockchain, where the best architectural advice is to avoid using it. Or, said with less hyperbole, to correctly minimize your direct dependency on blockchain.

Why is that?

Imagine software where thousands of processes all need to look at and verify the same state change. And imagine too that they all need to store a copy of the same information to ensure the state change is correct.

When does it stop being a stablecoin?

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 10:33:00 +0000

In “traditional finance”, we’ve got something called a derivative. In short, a derivative derives it’s value based on some underlying asset.

In the “new finance” world of blockchain and DeFi, we’ve got something called a stablecoin, where the price of the coin is pegged to some underlying asset.

So a stablecoin is just a derivative then, no? Usually people think of coins pegged to the USD when they hear stablecoin, but it doesn’t need to be. It could be pegged to anything, just like a derivative could use any underlying asset and definition on top.

A different take on blockchain with encrypted functions

Wed, 19 May 2021 21:36:15 +0000

While blockchain remains highly volatile, both as a technology and as assets tied to them, I’d like to take a step back and review the approach.

What is a blockchain? It’s a linked list of events, linked together through some cryptographic hashing mechanism, that forever ties one block to another. And such a blockchain is helpful because it removes the need for a third-party to orchestrate the process.

This construct is sequential in nature, and hence practically single threaded. While there are many very nice attributes tied to something which is single threaded, like the ease of reasoning on its current state, there’s also a lot of drawbacks. And while I think we’d all like to keep the benefits of having one smart contract call another, hence allowing for “DeFi Legos” and similar, it doesn’t allow us to solve for the scaling issues.

Stablebomb

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 10:42:53 +0000

For a while I’ve wanted to write something about stablecoins, these tokens on the blockchains, that are backed by some underlying asset.

Usually we associate stablecoins with those backed by a currency, like USD or Euros. But it doesn’t need to be backed by currency, it can be backed by commodities, stocks, bonds, etc.

This gives you the benefit of having a token you can easily exchange, transfer and utilize in smart contracts, and also having it backed by more than just pure human emotions and speculation.

Flash loans

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 08:55:39 +0000

What would you do if you could borrow a near unlimited amount of money, only need to pay the interest, and not need to provide any collateral?

Sure, we have something like that with credit cards, at an outrageous interest rate, and with fairly small credit limits. But what if I’d give you this non-collateralized loan for just 0.09%?

Sure, you’d think, I’m happy to rip you off. But here’s the thing, you can’t rip me off, and I’m not scamming you.

Blockchain: Big but small

Tue, 05 May 2020 15:17:17 +0000

Consider Amazon, the e-commerce bits of the company. While it might have started out as an online bookshop, it evolved into a generalized online marketplace.

So what was critical in the success of Amazon?

The internet would probably be a good answer to that question, among many other things. But how much of the overall software and business development efforts at Amazon do you think relate to core internet activities? Sure, it’s got a big online presence, which will require a lot of internet hardware, internet people and teams, ops, etc..

Art on the blockchain

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 15:17:46 +0000

Many years ago, in my late teens, I used to attend The Gathering. It’s a fantastic combination of people, passion, dedication and fun mixed together for a few days each Easter.

If you’re not familiar with computer culture this whole thing might seem very alien, and, for many, somewhat a waste of time. But for those of us whom are familiar with this domain, and especially those of us who had some experience with the demoscene, it brings back a feeling of accomplishment.