DeFi Education
45K+ subscribers
Leading paid crypto newsletter covering the key protocols, companies, and onchain trends serious investors and operators need to understand.…
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Crypto & DeFi
DeFi education, yield farming, on-chain code and degen research. 5 publications, newest posts first.
Publications
Degen Code
7K+ subscribers
A deeply autistic exploration of Ethereum and building automated trading bots with Python, Rust, and AI.
DeFi Yield Farming & NFTs
1K+ subscribers
Generating passive income in Decentralized Finance
BowTiedPickle's Pickle Jar
Hundreds of subscribers
Protect your bags, and get hired in crypto.
Recent content on Bowtied Devil
Latest in Crypto & DeFi
Is Balancer Worth More Dead or Alive?
Welcome Avatar! In the tradfi world, when a company goes bust you try to do almost anything to restructure its obligations and keep it operating. That’s why you may see headlines about big companies going “bankrupt” only to seem…
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DeFi Roundup (Aug 30 - Sep 12, 2026)
Welcome Avatar! To the latest edition of DeFi Roundup, where we save you time by filtering the market and separating the signal from the noise. You don’t have to spend all week scrolling Crypto Twitter to stay current. Market…
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Token Insiders: Heads They Win, Tails You Lose
Welcome Avatar! The advent of blockchains brought a level of transparency the financial markets have yet to see. However, they also provide pseudonymity and global, uninterrupted 24/7 accessibility. The recent launch of $LAPTOP…
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The Trenches Are Back, But There’s a Catch
Welcome Avatar! The most degenerate part of crypto just had its most active week since the launch of the TRUMP memecoin in 2025. You don’t need to run to buy a memecoin but you do need recognize that the trenches are a useful…
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September 2026 Q&A Part 1
Welcome Avatar! It’s now time for our bi-weekly Q&A! We’ll be taking your questions on everything DeFi - technology, security, protocols, airdrops/farming, app tokens, and “how-to”. Please aim to get your questions in within 48…
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Robinhood Chain: 5 Trades to Watch
Welcome Avatar! In Tuesday’s post we laid out why capital was flowing into Robinhood Chain (“RHC”). RHC is the highest earning blockchain by daily fees right now at $4.6 million in 24H. Today we’ll dive into specific projects and…
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How To Improve Performance With Telemetry
Performance matters and I’m not afraid to say it! degenbot was a pure Python package for many years. I love Python but it’s not a high performance language, so I mostly focused on speeding up the slowest parts where I could while…
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Robinhood Chain and How to Win Onchain Hype Cycles
In just two months after launch Robinhood Chain (“RHC”) has gone from basically zero to ~$735M TVL. In the last 24 hours RHC generated more chain fees than Solana, Base and Ethereum. Since our post on RHC in July there has been a…
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DeFi Roundup (Aug 16 - Aug 29, 2026)
Welcome Avatar! To the latest edition of DeFi Roundup, where we save you time by filtering the market and separating the signal from the noise. You don’t have to spend all week scrolling Crypto Twitter to stay current. Market…
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A Note on Conviction
Welcome Avatar! This post is for the people who slowly checked out over the last 16 months and are ready to clock back in. If you stuck around - well done! For everyone else, the evidence for crypto has only gotten stronger. It’s…
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Should You Chase This Crypto Rally?
Welcome Avatar! Almost every question in our recent Q&A boiled down to some version of “ should I buy now?” BTC is up roughly 25% in a week. ETH and SOL have moved ~30%. After months of weak sentiment people are worried about…
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August 2026 Q&A Part 2
Welcome Avatar! It’s now time for our bi-weekly Q&A! We’ll be taking your questions on everything DeFi - technology, security, protocols, airdrops/farming, app tokens, and “how-to”. Please aim to get your questions in within 48…
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VVV wants to be the Hyperliquid of AI
Welcome Avatar! On Tuesday we looked at what happens when both equity and tokens are part of the same project. Today we’ll talk about how to actually ascribe value to the token. Some things to understand before we get into…
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Rewrite It in Rust: Simulation
The most painful part of high-volume searching is simulation. Before every value capture can occur, you must run it against your best view of the chain state. The boundary between your efficient searcher and the generalized…
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Rewrite It in Rust: Pool State & Path Solver
This entry builds on the theoretical concepts explored in the Numerical Optimization series. If you didn’t read those, shame on you! But for your convenience, here they are again: Liquidity Pool Structure A given liquidity pool…
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Rewrite It in Rust: RPC Provider
We have already established a long term goal: build a Rust core driven by a thin Python shell. Communication with the blockchain is done via Remote Procedure Call (RPC) exposed by a node directly, or through some gateway service.…
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Rewrite It in Rust: Pathfinding
I love graphs and I’m not afraid to admit it. They are an ideal data structure for arbitrage pathfinding and optimization for certain multi-market problems. I primarily use NetworkX for working with graphs. It’s easy to use, but…
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Rewrite It in Rust: Bot Module
The architectural rewrite has allowed me to revisit some design decisions that have been bugging me. I started developing degenbot to speed up my day-to-day bot building. Those bots were focused on calculating cyclic arbitrage…
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Rewrite It in Rust: Architecture
Last year I wrote a short Rust series (Parts I , II , III , IV ) surveying the basics of the language. I was particularly excited about the ability to integrate Rust directly into degenbot , which was pure Python at its core and…
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Optimizing Smart Contracts With Autoresearch
I’ve been using AutoResearch (AR) to improve smart contracts. I don’t see AR discussed often enough, and I think it suffers from a branding problem. The name suggests it is a tool for finding obscure info, digging into scientific…
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Numerical Optimization — Part V: Closed-Form Solutions
In Part IV , while deriving analytical gradients for the Newtonian methods benchmark, we paused on the simple case of two V2 pools with the same token pair. The profit function P ( x ) and its derivative dP/dx both had clean…
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Numerical Optimization — Part IV: Newtonian Methods
The derivative-free methods covered in Parts II and III treat the objective function as a black box, probing inputs and observing outputs without requiring knowledge of the internal structure. This flexibility is valuable, but it…
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Numerical Optimization — Part III: Derivative-Free Methods (Multivariate)
Part II covered derivative-free methods for the simple arbitrage problem: two pools holding the same token pair, optimizing for maximum profit from a single trade. Now we’ll turn our attention to a complex arbitrage problem:…
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Numerical Optimization — Part II: Derivative-Free Methods
Part I outlined the structure of our optimization effort before concluding with a simple benchmark of SciPy’s minimize_scalar methods. To understand how I landed on Brent as the default solver in degenbot , we need to understand…
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Practice Safe DEX
It’s bull season again on the blockchain. Green candles are in the air, hype is on the timeline, and the screams of dying short sellers make sweet music in your ears. This post is for those who are participating in the…
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Choosing a Smart Contract Development Environment
Any programming work you do is done in the context of a development environment or framework. This consists of the tooling you need to compile, run, test, and finally deploy your code. Developing Ethereum smart contracts is the…
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LizardOS Beta Review
Let’s face it, the longer you survive in crypto the bigger your threat profile gets. Not only has my crypto bag been growing, but I’m now a DeFi developer, and have a much larger public presence. Crypto thieves have been growing…
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Call an ambulance, but not for me
There have recently been two high-profile cases of protocols recovering a large chunk of their stolen funds by counter-attacking the hacker which stole them. Platypus Finance was hit by a bungled attack that left funds locked in…
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Let There Be Discord
I leveled up my smart contract security skills quite rapidly once I began learning seriously, and a lot of that was due to having a killer peer group. Serious friends and skilled mentors save you an unbelievable amount of time…
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Analyzing a Real-Life Protocol
Analyzing and understanding protocols is the reason I initially picked up Solidity. Smart contracts are the laws that govern your existence on the blockchain, and you should know how to read them. Dissecting protocols is a…
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Writing Secure Contracts
The biggest hurdle in learning smart contract development is gaining awareness of patterns. What to do, and what not to do. A design decision which seems innocuous can have dire implications when it’s put on-chain. Subscribe now…
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Minting Millions
To date, I’ve done the smart contracts for five NFT launches, each with wildly varying degrees of success. I’m proud to say the contracts worked well for all the launches, irrespective of how the project turned out. Going from…
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Find Bugs, Get Paid
The most exciting job in crypto is the whitehat hacker. It’s you vs. the bad guys, alone in the dark forest, with billions at stake. Whitehats pull some crazy stunts, like reverse engineering an attack so they can rescue funds…
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Crypto Dev Employment Paths
What does it mean when your bright-eyed younger cousin says he “wants to work in web3”? For that matter, what do viable employment paths even look look like for a crypto developer? I’ve slung a lot of smart contracts by this…
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The Ethereum Killers
What are the things that could actually kill Ethereum? It doesn’t seem like it will be any of its current competitors. No, dear reader, the existential risks to Ethereum are much more subtle than Charles Hoskinson and the Haskell…
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Replay Attacks And You
If the Merge occurs successfully, there will be a fork between the Proof-of-Stake chain and the Proof-of-Work chain. See my previous post to learn why. Subscribe now The PoW chain will probably not be long for this world, as the…
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Bull Market Recap, 2022 Thoughts, Bayesian Thinking & Other Rambling Thoughts
Hello Left Curvers, Hang in there! War in Ukraine, Crypto & Global Stock markets down, and the prospect of stagflation on the horizon plus a few other nasty things (e.g., food shortages) being openly discussed in public – turns…
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Arbitrum SZN
Hello Lefties! In this post we are going to cover the Arbitrum ecosystem in light of recent events, clear catalysts are developing on Arbitrum signaling it is becoming the main Optimistic rollup for Ethereum. Look at the top…
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Curve.Fi (Part Two): Entering the UNI / SUSHI Fray
Note that all content contained herein is not financial advice, please perform diligence and your own research before making an investment decision in CRV Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays, we at LCC hope that 2021 has been a…
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An Overview on Cosmos
Greetings fellow Lefties, today we have a guest post from BowTiedPigeon . This post will be about Cosmos, and why applications specific blockchains are revolutionizing the token economy. A lot is going on behind the scenes, so…
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Art of whale watching
Greetings anons! With the emergence of blockchain technology, we received a high number of requests and have also noticed a growing trend in blockchain voyeurism so we decided to cover the art of whale watching. An automated…
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Curve.Fi (Part One): Masterclass in Tokenomic Design
Welcome anons, free posts are over for a while. It’s time to dig into the good stuff. We thank our paid subscribers for their patronage, it’s been a great ride so far and cannot wait for the future. For our first paid post, we…
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What is Yield Farming: Degen vs Quality
Hello anons and friends! We want to take a brief moment to thank you for your subscriptions thus far, the initial launch has far exceeded our own expectations and the amount of collective brainpower in the discord (paid subs…
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TO LP OR NOT TO LP
Greetings Lefties, As we've shared in our previous Substack, we believe yield farming to be the superior way of participating in DeFi. In TardFi, Liquidity Providing (LP) is done by market makers like Flow Traders and Virtu with…
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Inaugural Issue from Far Out the Left Curve
Welcome Anons! We are glad to have you here, if you found this substack congratulations you’re already ahead of the curve. If you’re late to crypto or having trouble understanding the byzantine DeFi protocols, yield farms, & NFT…
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Encrypted Storage on Shared VPS
My Virtual Private Server tutorial was fairly extensive, but it left out something important: information security! I think it’s wise to revisit the topic now, since security and encryption are critical in any application…
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