The Merkle
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The Retail Onramp Effect: How Robinhood Overtook Established Layer 2s in Just Six Weeks
Six weeks. That's how long it took a retail brokerage app to overtake every established Ethereum Layer 2 in the one metric that actually measures economic weight: fees paid back to Ethereum itself. Base, Optimism, Arbitrum's own ecosystem chains, all of them now sit behind a network that didn't even exist before July. I've watched a lot of L2 launches come a…
NFTs Are Roaring Back And So Is The Man Zachxbt Investigated Years Ago
When I saw this thread circulating during NFT season, my first reaction wasn't shock, it was déjà vu. It comes back, and somehow so does every familiar name from the last cycle, the good, the bad, and apparently the previously investigated.This time it's Cole Villemain, better known online as ColeThereum, a Pudgy Penguins co-founder who was pushed out of his…
Replays, Master Keys, and Silent Prompts: Unpacking the Hidden Infrastructural Flaws Behind FIDO2
I've spent the last few years telling friends and family the same thing: switch to passkeys, they can't be phished. That advice wasn't wrong exactly, but reading through this new research left me a little humbled. Three separate teams just showed that you don't need to break FIDO2's cryptography to beat it. You just need to find the messy human infrastructur…
How Taunt Tapes, Flex Wars, and Doctored Wallets Exposed a $5M Crypto "Caller"
Tiffany Milanovich apparently never got the memo on an old rule in crime: the moment you start showing off, you start leaving evidence. While allegedly draining victims of millions in crypto, she wasn't hiding in the shadows, she was posting the receipts herself, recording her own taunts, and flexing stolen funds like trophies. Now, on-chain investigator Zac…
Cookie.fun Built A Real-Time Attention Index For Crypto, Here's Where It Still Falls Short
Every crypto cycle produces a new asset class nobody quite has the tools to measure properly, and Cookie.fun has built its entire business around quantifying the latest one: attention itself.The platform doesn't trade tokens, doesn't run a marketplace, and doesn't do anything you'd typically associate with a crypto platform's front page. What it does is trac…
Cloudflare Kitesurf Review: Features, Setup Guide, And How It Compares To Chromium
Every browser you've ever used, until Cloudflare's latest release, was designed around a fundamental assumption: a human is going to look at it. Tabs, themes, smooth scrolling, pixel-perfect rendering, all of it exists because eyes and hands are on the other end. Cloudflare just threw that entire assumption out the window.The company spent twelve weeks build…