Web3 Development
Build and test Solidity contracts, connect wallets, and deploy applications on EVM networks. Start with the Solidity guide, then follow the testing and deployment articles.
27 articles
EIP-7702 vs ERC-4337: What the Chain Actually Shows
Account abstraction is about 2% of Ethereum blockspace by transaction count. I sampled mainnet and Base on 14 September 2026 with plain JSON-RPC calls: EIP-7702 type-4 transactions ran 0.8% of mainnet traffic, ERC-4337 EntryPoint calls 1.4%. On Base, EntryPoint calls outnumbered type-4 setcode transactions by roughly 12 to 1 — a comparison that flatters 4337, because setcode fires once per account and an EntryPoint call fires on every operation — and the old EntryPoint v0.6 still carries more Base traffic than the 7702-aware v0.8. The cumulative counters everyone quotes — 5.3 million authorizations, 1.28 billion UserOperations, 66.5 million accounts — are structurally inflated and are not user counts. This article reports the real traffic split, shows the exact RPC calls so you can reproduce the measurement yourself, and then gives a decision framework: when 7702 delegation is the right call, when a 4337 account with a paymaster is, and what each one actually costs you in gas and in infrastructure. Includes the paymaster number nobody quotes — $14.1 million of sponsored gas across roughly 1.01 billion sponsored operations, about 1.4 cents each.
Building an ERC-7683 Solver: Four Calls, Three Risks
ERC-7683 gives a cross-chain solver exactly four calls to implement: resolve, openFor, fill and settlement. Every intents explainer stops at the sentence 'the user signs what they want and solvers compete', which tells you nothing about what you actually have to build. This walks the real interface surface from the spec at erc7683.org — both order structs field by field, IOriginSettler, IDestinationSettler, and the ResolvedCrossChainOrder return that is the only place your liabilities are made explicit. Then it names the three risks the standard deliberately hands to the implementer and does not price: destination-chain reorg exposure in the window between your fill and your repayment, the finality gap between a two-second fill on Across and a six-day-eight-hour challenge window on Arbitrum, and cross-chain inventory rebalancing, which is the actual cost of running a solver and the reason solver sets stay small. It ends with the volume reality nobody pairs with the interface: CoW Protocol's monthly volume fell from $4.276B in January 2026 to $2.400B in July 2026. This is a maturing interface on a shrinking market.
Passkey Wallets That Work on Mainnet: Building on EIP-7951
Fusaka shipped a secp256r1 precompile on 3 December 2025 and the coverage was almost entirely PeerDAS and blob counts. EIP-7951 is the line item that matters to wallet developers: P-256 is the curve behind Apple Secure Enclave, Android Keystore and WebAuthn, and before Fusaka, verifying a passkey signature on L1 meant a roughly 300,000-gas Solidity verifier or a trusted relayer, while L2s already had the RIP-7212 precompile at about 3,450 gas. At the L1 base fee I measured on 14 September 2026 — 0.183 to 0.436 gwei — that verifier cost $0.14 to $0.33 per signature, 14.3 times the gas of the plain ETH transfer it was authorising. This is the practical build guide: the gas comparison across nine chains, the precompile call, what WebAuthn actually hands you and why it is not a raw signature, how to pair the precompile with EIP-7702 delegation or an ERC-4337 account, the EntryPoint version split I measured on mainnet and Base, and why recovery is the part that will break your product, not signing.
MEV and Restaking in 2026: What Actually Happened
No, Ethereum does not have a production encrypted mempool. The flagship attempt — Shutter and Primev's threshold-encrypted mempool for the PBS supply chain, announced December 2025 with mainnet to follow — is in maintenance mode by Primev's own documentation, its settlement explorer decommissioned. Meanwhile the story that proposer-builder separation and TEEs decentralised block building does not survive measurement: Titan built 55.78% of blocks over seven days and 62.87% over twenty-four hours on 14 September 2026, BuilderNet held 10.15%, and the top three relays took 88.3% of all relay payload deliveries between them. The second half of this piece covers the restaking unwind with the numbers the retrospectives get wrong, including the real EigenLayer slashing date — 17 April 2025, not April 2026 — and the real TVL curve from a $22.06B peak to $6.59B. Then the engineering question nobody asks: once slashing is real and enforceable, what is an AVS actually worth paying for? Every figure here is dated and sourced, and the reproduction steps are included.
Quantus Network: What Actually Shipped
Quantus Network's mainnet started at block 0 on 9 September 2026 from GitHub tag v1.0.0-gm, with genesis hash 0xfb5487c0 and runtime spec_version 152. Nearly every article about it is a rewrite of the same press release. This one is written from the runtime source. The Cargo.toml compiles two ML-DSA parameter sets, not the one the docs claim, and the HD wallet crate is built with ml-dsa-65 only, which makes wallet-derived keys NIST Category 3 rather than Category 5. A transparent transaction is roughly 7 KB because ML-DSA has no public-key recovery, so the 2,592-byte public key rides along with the 4,627-byte signature in every extrinsic. The headline throughput figure does not reconcile with the chain's own block constants. Poseidon2 was not chosen for quantum resistance, and the docs say so plainly. 27% of supply was minted at genesis to insiders. The docs audits page lists four engagements with reports pending while the whitepaper lists seven with links, and the docs page is the stale one. Every number here carries its source and its measurement date.
Quantum-Resistant Blockchains Compared
Most quantum-resistant blockchain comparisons rank projects by marketing claim. This one ranks them on the five properties that decide whether a user's funds are actually exposed: which signature scheme, which NIST security category, whether post-quantum signing covers every transaction from genesis or is opt-in, what it costs in bytes and throughput, and what has shipped against what has been announced. Quantus launched a proof-of-work mainnet on 9 September 2026 where every signature is ML-DSA from block 0. QRL has had hash-based signatures on mainnet since June 2018 but its successor chain has no mainnet date. Algorand shipped native Falcon-1024 accounts in August 2026, and user funds still default to Ed25519. Ethereum's largest exposures are 37 million ETH behind BLS and 15 million ETH behind KZG, neither of which any wallet upgrade can fix, and its own L1 target is 2029. Bitcoin has two draft BIPs and no activation path. Every figure carries its source and the date it was measured.
Web3 Development Cost: How Much Does It Really Cost in 2026
Honest breakdown of Web3 development costs in 2026. From smart contracts to full-stack dApps, DeFi protocols to NFT platforms — real dollar ranges from a developer who builds them.
The Graph Protocol: Indexing Blockchain Data for dApps
A practical guide to indexing on-chain data with The Graph Protocol — from subgraph definition and schema design to event handlers, deployment on Subgraph Studio, and querying with GraphQL. Covers hosted vs decentralized network, performance optimization, and real patterns from production DeFi and NFT indexing.
ERC-721A: Gas-Efficient NFT Minting at Scale
A deep dive into ERC-721A — the gas-optimized NFT standard that makes batch minting dramatically cheaper than standard ERC-721. Real gas benchmarks, implementation guide with Merkle tree whitelists, delayed reveal mechanics, and common pitfalls from production drops I have shipped.
Building a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) with Solidity
A complete guide to building a Uniswap V2 style automated market maker (AMM) DEX from scratch — factory, pair, and router contracts in Solidity. Covers constant product formula, liquidity provision, swap execution, fee collection, slippage protection, and comprehensive Foundry testing. Security-first approach based on real DeFi client work.
Token Vesting Contracts: Implementation Guide
A complete guide to building token vesting contracts in Solidity — cliff vesting, linear vesting, multi-beneficiary schedules, and revocable vs irrevocable designs. Covers OpenZeppelin VestingWallet, custom extensions, Foundry testing, and frontend integration with wagmi. Based on real token launch work.
How to Build a Multi-Sig Wallet Smart Contract
A complete guide to building a production-grade multi-signature wallet smart contract in Solidity — from architecture and approval flows to execution logic and owner management. Includes a full working contract, Foundry test scenarios, and honest guidance on when to use Gnosis Safe instead of rolling your own.
wagmi and viem: The Modern Web3 Frontend Stack
A hands-on guide to building Web3 frontends with wagmi and viem — why I switched from ethers.js, how to set up wallet connections with RainbowKit, read and write contract data with full type safety, handle multi-chain configurations, and the real patterns I use on every client dApp. Based on production projects shipping on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism.
Upgradeable Smart Contracts: Proxy Patterns Explained
A deep dive into upgradeable smart contract patterns — Transparent Proxy, UUPS, and Beacon Proxy — with real Solidity code, storage layout rules, and honest guidance on when upgradeability adds risk instead of value. Based on production deployments for clients who need post-deployment flexibility.
Building a Staking Protocol with Reward Distribution
A complete guide to building a gas-efficient staking protocol with reward distribution using the reward index pattern. Covers Solidity implementation, compound staking, multi-token rewards, security considerations, and Foundry testing — based on real DeFi client work.
The Complete Guide to OpenZeppelin Contracts
OpenZeppelin Contracts is the library I install before writing a single line of Solidity. This guide covers every contract family I use in production: ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155 token standards, AccessControl for role-based permissions, ReentrancyGuard for security, Governor for on-chain governance, and the UUPS proxy pattern for upgradeability. You will learn how to extend OpenZeppelin contracts properly, when to override versus compose, and the exact patterns I follow across mainnet deployments on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base. Practical Solidity code, no theory padding.
Web3 Authentication: Wallet-Based Login for Modern Apps
A practical guide to implementing wallet-based authentication using wagmi, RainbowKit, and Sign-In with Ethereum (SIWE). Covers session management, backend verification, multi-chain support, and the UX patterns that actually get users through the login flow without confusion.
Understanding Ethereum Virtual Machine: A Developer's Guide
A developer's deep dive into the Ethereum Virtual Machine — how bytecode executes, stack-based computation works, gas metering prices every operation, and storage layout affects your contract costs. Written from hands-on Solidity experience, not textbook theory.
How to Build an NFT Marketplace from Scratch
A full-stack guide to building an NFT marketplace — from a Solidity marketplace contract with listing, buying, and bidding logic to royalty enforcement with ERC-2981, a React frontend with wagmi, and IPFS metadata storage. Security-first approach based on real client builds.
Deploying Smart Contracts on Arbitrum: Step-by-Step
A practical step-by-step guide to deploying Solidity smart contracts on Arbitrum using Foundry. Covers testnet and mainnet deployment, contract verification, gas cost comparison with Ethereum, and key differences you need to know before going live.
Building a DAO Governance System with Solidity and React
A complete guide to building a production DAO governance system — from OpenZeppelin Governor contracts and timelock execution to a React frontend with wagmi. Based on real governance contracts I have deployed for clients.
Foundry vs Hardhat in 2026: Which Framework Should You Use
A hands-on comparison of Foundry and Hardhat for Solidity development in 2026. Speed benchmarks, testing approaches, fuzz testing, and when to pick each framework.
Smart Contract Gas Optimization: 30 Techniques That Work
30 proven gas optimization techniques for Solidity smart contracts with before/after code examples and real gas savings numbers. From storage packing to assembly tricks, based on production deployments on Ethereum and L2s.
Building Cross-Chain Applications with Layer 2 Networks
A practical guide to building cross-chain applications across Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and zkSync — covering architecture patterns, bridge integration, multi-chain contract deployment, and frontend orchestration with wagmi. Based on real production deployments.
ERC-20 Token Development: From Concept to Mainnet
A practical guide to building, testing, and deploying ERC-20 tokens using Solidity, OpenZeppelin, and Foundry. Real contract code, real deployment steps, real mistakes to avoid.
Solidity Smart Contract Development: The Complete 2026 Guide
Solidity smart contract development in 2026 requires Solidity 0.8.24+, Foundry for testing, and OpenZeppelin for battle-tested standards. This guide covers the full workflow I use in production: project setup with forge init, writing secure contracts using Checks-Effects-Interactions, fuzz testing with Foundry, and deploying to Ethereum L2s like Arbitrum and Base. You will learn storage slot packing for gas optimization, the reentrancy guard pattern, access control with role-based permissions, and how to structure upgradeable contracts using the UUPS proxy pattern. Every pattern here is battle-tested across mainnet deployments.
How to Build a Production DeFi Protocol from Scratch
A practical walkthrough of building a production-ready DeFi protocol — from architecture decisions and Solidity smart contracts to security patterns and mainnet deployment. Based on real experience building DeFi components for clients.