insights from a blockchain developer, researcher & investor
exploring emerging opportunities in decentralized finance
3 DIFFERENT WAYS I CAN HELP
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Bridging Assets With Stellar x Near Intents
Imagine being able to bridge and swap different assets across different chains with a single API call. That’s the promise of Near Intents who have just announced an integration with Stellar. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/moqWwcMppgY | Subscribe The recent launch of Near Intents for Stellar marks a major milestone in cross-chain interoperability,…
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The Alchemy Of Finance Summary – George Soros
George Soros challenges the foundational assumptions of modern financial theory in “The Alchemy of Finance,” presenting his revolutionary theory of reflexivity that fundamentally reframes how markets operate. Rather than accepting the efficient market hypothesis that dominates academic finance, Soros argues that financial markets are inherently unstable and driven by the bidirectional relationship between market participants’…
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Creating A Web3 Chat Room
Did you know that Chrome and other browsers have a built in speech-to-text API? I thought I could use this to create an online chat room using web3 serverless technology. The result… https://jamesbachini.github.io/Talking-Smart-Contracts The frontend is hosted on Github pages and the backend is just a permissionless, immutable smart contract hosted on Stellar, a decentralized…
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Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake
When Ethereum’s developers pressed the “Merge” button in September 2022, they cut the network’s electricity appetite by an estimated 99.95 percent overnight. The move rekindled a debate that refuses to die: is proof of work’s gargantuan energy bill a feature or a bug, and does proof of stake silently trade away the very decentralization crypto…
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The Inevitable Summary – Kevin Kelly
The Inevitable presents a compelling and deeply thought out vision of the future, grounded in the belief that certain technological trends are not merely likely but inescapable. Kevin Kelly, co founder of Wired magazine and a prominent futurist, argues that while we cannot predict the specific products or companies of tomorrow, we can forecast the…
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GPT5 on the next 10 years
The Next Decade, Rewired: Power, Compute, and the New Geography of Advantage (2025–2035) Date: August 2025 – full prompt at the end By 2035, the decisive constraint on growth will shift from capital and data to power and permission. AI will commoditize knowledge work faster than markets expect, but the bottlenecks and outsized returns will…
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IPFS vs Filecoin
The Developer’s Guide To Choosing Between IPFS And Filecoin A decade ago “decentralized storage” sounded like science fiction. Today the question has narrowed to a practical dilemma whispered in Discord channels and sprint retrospectives alike: IPFS vs Filecoin which should you build on? If uptime, censorship resistance, and predictable costs sit anywhere on your roadmap,…
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Stop Breaches Before They Start :: Inside The Stellar Security Audit Bank
A single unchecked line of smart contract code can vaporize trust and TVL faster than we can refresh the crypto twitter newsfeed. Yet securing a top tier audit often feels out of reach for developers bootstrapping their web3 projects. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/NatWTeVET9Q | Subscribe The Stellar Development Foundation’s Soroban Security Audit…
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Passing The Keys | Crypto Inheritance Planning
It is estimated that 26% of all Bitcoin will be lost forever by the first generation. You may have heard the story of James Howell who is still fighting a legal campaign to get a Welsh waste disposal ground excavated because he believes it holds his old laptop with nearly a billion dollars of Bitcoin…
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Principles Summary – Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio’s Principles is a hybrid manifesto, part memoir and part management guide, built on a foundational thesis: success whether in life or business is the result of identifying and consistently applying a set of fundamental principles. Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest and most successful hedge funds, distills decades of…
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The Bitcoin Standard Summary – Saifedean Ammous
The Bitcoin Standard presents a sweeping, interdisciplinary case for why Bitcoin is not merely a technological innovation or speculative asset, but a necessary evolution in the history of money. Saifedean Ammous argues that sound money money that is hard to produce and politically neutral is essential to the advancement of civilization. In his view, Bitcoin…
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How To Use Smart Contracts & Passkeys To Set Up Auth On A Web App
This tutorial dives into the creation of smart contract accounts and how this can be used as an identity platform also capable of payments James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/V2DwDzp43E8 | Subscribe The first step is to setup the passkey-kit demo which we will be using as a boilerplate. You can clone the repo…
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Web3 Social Media | The First Network Where You Keep The Likes
Imagine opening your favourite social app knowing that every photo, comment, and connection you create is yours, stored in a wallet only you can access, portable to any future platform, and even capable of earning you revenue instead of Meta’s shareholders. That future is no longer science fiction; it is the central promise of Web3…
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The Growing Demand For Fractional CTO’s | Why Every Startup Wants a Fractional C-Suite
Could your next role be a part-time role as a fractional CTO? Or are you looking to hire a technical lead but don’t want to commit to a full time employee? Startups are under immense pressure to move fast, innovate constantly, and do it all without burning through capital. But there’s a growing secret weapon…
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Lessons From Building A Stellar Options Contract
In this tutorial I’ll be going through everything I learned while creating a Soroban smart contract for a call option. There are some interesting code snippets and gotcha’s for Soroban developers below but let’s start with the basics, Options 101. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z8FHVllP_D0 | Subscribe What Are DeFi Options? Financial options…
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Your First Rust Smart Contract Using Stellar
In this tutorial we are going to deploy your first rust based smart contract using Stellar Soroban. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/P8RuX7Ymu5Q | Subscribe ✨ Hello World Rust Smart Contract Let’s start by heading over to soropg.com Copy and paste this code into the editor Replace James with whatever you want to write…
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Life 3.0 Summary – Max Tegmark
Max Tegmark proposes a provocative and methodical exploration of humanity’s future in the age of artificial general intelligence. The book’s core thesis is that artificial intelligence will fundamentally transform life on Earth, and the direction of this transformation depends on choices we make today technological, philosophical, and governance related. Tegmark divides the evolution of life…
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How Coinbase Commerce Lets Merchants Keep More Revenue And Reach A Global Market
Imagine waking up to a dashboard that shows overnight sales from three continents, settled in Bitcoin, USDC, and Ether. Each payment final, fraud proof, and already in your private wallet. No chargebacks. No rolling reserves. No credit card processing fees. That promise, more than any headline about blockchain, is why thousands of entrepreneurs are adding…
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Decentralized Identity Systems
A few summers back I watched an Ethereum based microlending protocol bleed 78% of its liquidity in 48 hours, not because its code failed but because it could not tell real borrowers from bots. If an economy cannot distinguish one human from another, the promise of web3 and decentralized finance stays hypothetical. Today I want…
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Storing User Data with Rust Structs and Enums
In Soroban we model contract state with Rust types. For example, the SoroMarket contract defines a Rust struct for each user’s bets and an enum for the market outcome. Here is a simplified version of the code: Here Outcome holds the global state of the contract as a single enum variable and Bets is a…
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NFT Royalties | New OpenZeppelin Library For Stellar
In this tutorial we are going to dive into the new NFT token extension for royalties on Stellar. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/17AGbMMBEz8 | Subscribe NFT royalties provide a mechanism for ensuring that creators continue to benefit from secondary sales of their work. With the latest release of OpenZeppelin’s NFT extensions for Soroban…
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The Personal MBA Summary – Josh Kaufman
At its core, The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman argues that traditional business school education is neither necessary nor cost effective for acquiring practical business knowledge. Instead, individuals can attain a comprehensive and high quality business education through focused self study, deliberate practice, and real world application. Kaufman presents a self education framework and an…
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Ledger vs Trezor Hardware Wallets
How I Found the Best Hardware Wallet After Testing Both Market Leaders (And Why Most People Pick Wrong) Hardware wallets represent the gold standard for cryptocurrency security, yet most investors make their choice based on marketing rather than meaningful analysis. After five years of testing both Ledger and Trezor devices across different use cases, I’ve…
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Hello World In Solidity
Your first smart contract deployment represents a fundamental shift in how you think about software. Unlike traditional applications that run on centralized servers, smart contracts execute on a distributed network of thousands of computers worldwide. Once deployed, your code becomes permanent, transparent, and permissionless. This immutability creates both opportunity and responsibility. Smart contracts have facilitated…
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Crossing The Chasm Summary by Geoffrey Moore
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm presents a seminal roadmap for technology startups seeking to scale beyond early adopters and into mass markets. The central thesis of the book is that there is a dangerous and often underestimated gap, “the chasm“, between early adopters of a new technology and the mainstream market. Startups that fail to…
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Scaffold Stellar | A Boilerplate For Stellar Developers
If a single command could spin up a Stellar contract, connect it to a React front end, hot reload every edit, and hand you push button deployment to Stellar testnet, would you finally ship that web3 idea? Scaffold Stellar from Aha Labs promises exactly that. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/7wKD3d9w5d0 | Subscribe Stellar’s…
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Maths For Developers | 6 Essential Techniques Every Developer Needs
The harsh reality is that most developers are self taught with a surface level understanding of the mathematical foundations that power their code. We learn syntax, frameworks, and design patterns, but we often miss the elegant mathematical principles that make our algorithms efficient and our solutions robust. This gap costs us time, creates bugs, and…
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How I Installed Ollama To Run AI Models Locally
Ever wondered if you could ditch the cloud and run powerful AI models on your own laptop or server? I thought it sounded impossible until I installed Ollama. In just a few hours, I had Llama3.2 up and running locally. I’ll walk you through exactly how I did it, the trade offs I discovered (spoiler:…
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Founders at Work Summary | Stories of Startups Early Days by Jessica Livingston
Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work offers an intimate, behind the scenes chronicle of the early stages of iconic tech startups through in depth interviews with over 30 influential founders, including Steve Wozniak (Apple), Paul Graham (Viaweb/Y Combinator), Caterina Fake (Flickr), and Max Levchin (PayPal). The core thesis is that successful startups are not born from…
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Creating A Wrapped Stablecoin
In this tutorial I will be creating a SEP41 wrapped stablecoin using a Stellar smart contract. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/jfjKg86GEwY | Subscribe I’ll be using the soropg.com online IDE along with the latest libraries from OpenZeppelin. Note that all code in this tutorial is open source on github here: https://github.com/jamesbachini/Soroban-Stablecoin/ Let’s dive…
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Pre Audit Checklist For DeFi/Web3 Projects
Here’s a Pre Audit & Bug Bounty Checklist for DeFi Protocols and Web3 Projects, adapted from best practices and structured for easy use across projects preparing for third party audits or launching a bug bounty program. Use this checklist to prepare your protocol for a formal audit and/or bug bounty launch. Completing these tasks will…
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How The Next Decade Will Reshape Civilization
Twenty two percent. That was the interest rate on a six month commercial paper the morning my brother tried to refinance his mortgage. He walked out of the bank without a cent and with a look in his eyes I had never seen: the dull astonishment of a man who finally understands the rules have…
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System Trading Bot Design Breakdown
In this post I’m going to breakdown the different parts of a system trading bot that I built to execute trend following and mean reversion strategies. There’s a short video here if you prefer a quick walkthrough: https://youtube.com/shorts/3tWl4ETbqTw Building a robust and profitable system trading bot requires careful planning, solid architecture, and a deep understanding…
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5 Tips For Migrating Solidity Code To Rust Soroban
Here are five tips for developers migrating from Solidity to Soroban. 1. Embrace .env In Solidity, global variables like msg.sender, msg.value, and msg.data provide transaction context. Soroban replaces these with the Env object, a powerful interface to the contract’s execution environment. Env gives you access to contract data, ledger details, authentication, and more, making it…
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The Stellar 2025 Roadmap
The Stellar Development Foundation has released it’s roadmap for 2025 and if you’re a developer or a user in the Stellar ecosystem, here is what you should know. The focus has shifted to scaling what works and making the whole system more usable, accessible, and ready for decentralized finance and web3 adoption. “After a decade…
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Stellar Soroban Alerts With OpenZeppelin Monitor
In this tutorial we will be setting up the OpenZeppelin monitor and creating a custom monitor to get alerts on large USDC transfers and send them to a Telegram chat. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/9ebmeGu1LmE | Subscribe To follow along you’ll need Rust installed. Let’s start by forking and building the repository: The…
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Pine Script v6 For Tradingview: How I Created An Indicator To Find Bitcoin/Microstrategy Divergences
Pine Script v6 has just been released and whether you have never created a TradingView indicator before or you are a Pinemaster, there’s something in here for everyone. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/6XOTQ4OP-dE | Subscribe Let’s start by exploring the upgrade and new features, then we’ll jump into writing some code using the…
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3 Conversation Starter Prompts To Turn ChatGPT In To A Life Coach
Over the last few months I’ve had more deep and meaningful conversations with large language models than I have with friends and family IRL. While that might not be a great thing I’ve found it very valuable and want to share some of the prompts I’ve used to get these conversations started. 1. Design The…
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Creating OpenZeppelin Soroban NFT’s
In this tutorial we will be creating a NFT contract on Stellar Soroban using the libraries from OpenZeppelin James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/xA1HfckPqFs | Subscribe To follow along you’ll need a couple of pieces of software:- The full source code for this project is available on Github:https://github.com/jamesbachini/OZ-Stellar-NFT The code is based on the…
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Creating Landing Pages Using Web3 Backends
In this tutorial we will be demonstrating how web3 technology can be used to store data on-chain rather than in a database when building a landing page. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/3iPqLtjL_9k | Subscribe We will be using a simple Soroban smart contract to store a counter which increases each time a transaction…
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Building A Stellar Web Wallet With Blend
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how I built a web based wallet that can create Stellar addresses and deposit any funds to Blend Capital. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/GbAy9f93eyE | Subscribe Blend is an overcollateralized lending protocol that enables lenders to earn yield on their deposits. The source code for…
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Stellar Anchor Platform Tutorial
Anchors serve as bridges between traditional finance and blockchain technology. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/57iZMxAr_1Y | Subscribe They enable users to move money seamlessly between their bank accounts and the Stellar network. Without Anchors, integrating traditional financial systems with blockchain would be significantly more complex. Anchors make decentralized finance more accessible by providing…
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3 Reasons Why Bitcoin Outperforming Everything Else In Crypto?
Over the last year, since the release of the ETF’s Bitcoin has outperformed the rest of the crypto market on a risk adjusted basis. This has led to more maximalism and less attention to DeFi and Web3. There are negative opinions on why alts are failing to compete, whether it’s the Ethereum Foundation’s management or…
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Building a SEP41 Token on Stellar Soroban with OpenZeppelin
OpenZeppelin has just launched the first few contract libraries for the Soroban ecosystem. Let’s take a look and build out a token using their fungible token module. James On YouTube Watch On YouTube: https://youtu.be/2Ak_nHyfrEU | Subscribe Deploying a Fungible Token on Soroban Prerequisites Ensure you have the following installed: You’ll also need some testnet tokens…
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Ethereum Pectra Upgrade Imminent
The upcoming Pectra upgrade, scheduled for March 2025, aims to make ethereum more efficient and lay the ground work for further scaling and development. Pectra is a significant update that merges two planned upgrades, Prague and Electra, into one comprehensive overhaul. This combined effort is designed to streamline improvements and accelerate Ethereum’s evolution. Account Abstraction…
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Vibe Coding
What Is Vibe Coding? An Introduction To Next Gen AI Development Is vibe coding an overhyped trend or a real threat to your job security? Vibe coding is an AI first approach to software development. Instead of meticulously structuring code, debugging line by line, and sweating over syntax, developers now interact with AI models like…
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Ark’s Big Ideas For 2025 Summary
Always a Cathie Wood fan so here’s a condensed version of the research report at:https://www.ark-invest.com/big-ideas-2025 Multiomics, Genomics, and AI-Driven Drug Discovery Robotics and Automation Aerospace and Reusable Rockets Energy and Infrastructure Overarching Themes and Takeaways
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DeepSeek vs ChatGPT | Is The Future Of AI Open-Source & Chinese?
Let’s start with how these AIs are trained. ChatGPT goes through pre-training, learning from an enormous amount of text scraped from the internet, the model then completes supervised fine-tuning for better instruction following, and then reinforcement learning with human feedback. Basically, it’s learning what we like and don’t like, improving its responses for all kinds…
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10 Worst Web Hacks
The 18th annual “Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques of 2024” highlighted web security research through community nominations and expert panel voting. From 121 initial nominations, 103 qualified entries were evaluated, culminating in the selection of the most innovative web security findings. Confusion Attacks in Apache HTTP Server Researchers found ways to make the Apache web…
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Deploying An NFT Using Stellar Soroban
Today I’m going to show you how I deployed a simple NFT contract to Soroban, Stellar’s smart contract platform. Whether you’re an artist, a developer, or just curious about blockchain, this tutorial will guide you through the process step-by-step. Let’s get started. You’ll need a few things to get started:- James On YouTube Watch On…
