L1

L1 Details

Child pages

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Avalanche
• Flow
• Aptos
• BSC
• Cosmos
• NEAR
• Oasis
• Polkadot
• Polygon
• Solana
• Terra
• Sui

Overviews

• Blockchain onboarding matrix - some notable bridges, wallets, apps, etc for each blockchain

Historical / academic background

Cryptography

• Awesome cryptography papers
  • a curated list of papers on various cryptographic techniques
• Cryptographic hash function
  • the mechanism behind generating a hash
• Digital signature
  • how signing works. key ideas: asymmetric (public key) cryptography, hard to compute but easy to verify.
• Merkle tree
  • important data structure optimizing the storage of hashes in a blockchain

Distributed consensus

• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Castro and Liskov, 1999)
  • a seminal algorithm for state machine replication / transaction ordering in a distributed system with up to 1/3 malicious nodes
• Distributed Systems
  • excellent 101-level lecture notes. presumes some comfort with math notation, particularly predicate logic. distributed systems concepts can help answer questions like "why is Solana's "Proof of History" an innovation?"
• CAP Theorem
  • fundamental trade-off between staying consistent vs. staying available when there's a network partition, i.e. nodes can't communicate
• FLP Result
  • why distributed consensus is not guaranteed when a node goes down. in practice, this is solved by relaxing the constraints of their model
• Proof of useful work
  • using collective computing power to search for prime number chains. an academic application but interesting concept
• HotStuff BFT
  • an iteration on PBFT attempting to optimize for variable network delays

Bonus

• P vs. NP - deep theoretical question on the very nature of computation: whether easy to verify implies (=>) easy to solve
• Elliptic curve cryptography - in-depth blog post with plenty of diagrams on how elliptic curve cryptography works