Breaking down how fungible and non-fungible tokens work in Solana. — Understanding Solana tokens can be quite difficult if you come from an Ethereum background. In Ethereum, fungible tokens use the ERC20 standard, and non-fungible tokens use the ERC721 standard. Each ERC20 token has its own smart contract, and each NFT collection has its own ERC721 (or ERC1155) contract. …

I’m currently learning Solana dev. For each important topic, I plan on writing a new blog post. Don’t expect these to be particularly organized, linear, or comprehensive! They’re mostly for me. A short definition Here’s what Solana’s terminology page says: Program derived account An account whose owner is a program and thus is…

I’m currently learning Solana dev. For each important topic, I plan on writing a new blog post. Don’t expect these to be particularly organized, linear, or comprehensive! They’re mostly for me. What’s an account? Solana’s docs give the following definition for an account: Account A record in the Solana ledger that either holds…

I’m currently learning Solana dev. For each important topic, I plan on writing a new blog post. Don’t expect these to be particularly organized, linear, or comprehensive! They’re mostly for me. What’s a transaction? Solana’s docs give the following definitions for a transaction and an instruction: Transaction: One or more instructions signed by…

An investigation of MekaVerse, Cool Cats, Pudgy Penguins, and more. — In this post, we’ll look into how popular NFT collections store their metadata. If stored incorrectly, an NFT’s metadata (e.g. image) may be changed or deleted at any time. How NFT metadata works There are two parts to an NFT collection like MekaVerse or Cool Cats. There’s the smart contract, which is some…

A complete overview of the Ethereum Yellow Paper, explained in an understandable way. — There are lots of different descriptions of Ethereum floating around on the internet. It’s a world computer, a game-changing technology, and the foundation for our digital future. These descriptions sound nice, but they don’t help us understand what Ethereum is, much less how it works. That’s where this post comes…

Alternatively, how arbundles works! See https://github.com/arcticmatt/arweave-simple-examples for the full code examples The Problem We covered the basics of how to use Arweave to store and access NFT metadata in part 1. Here, we’ll dive deeper into how to address this warning that the documentation provides: N.B. We strongly advise that you check…

See https://github.com/arcticmatt/arweave-simple-examples for the full code examples Part 2 is live! I strongly advise you read it after reading this post, since it goes over a more robust solution for storing data on Arweave. Why Arweave? First, let’s address a simple question: why use Arweave to store NFT metadata? …

This took me a while to figure out, so figured I’d write an article about it. Flow of Funds Stripe’s documentation has a good diagram of the flow of funds, which gives a nice high level overview of how things work. It just needs one minor change to be more comprehensive: In the…