If you’re someone who has done some digging around in crypto currencies, you’ve definitely come across Uniswap and their token UNI. It’s currently 10th in terms of total market cap among all crypto currencies, and the top token in the DeFi ecosystem. So what exactly is Uniswap?

Uniswap is a decentralized, permissionless exchange allowing users to trade any ERC-20 tokens. To understand what I just said, let’s look at how traditional exchanges ( like Binance, Kraken, Coinbase Pro etc.) work.

KYCs, Order Books and Market Makers

Gas is the unit that measures the amount of computational effort needed to execute specific operations on the Ethereum network.

The Halting Problem

There’s recently been an uproar in the energy debate regarding bitcoin mining. On one side, there’s the environmentalists ( somewhat misplaced ) claim that BTC mining is driving up non-renewable energy usage, and leads to lot of energy wastage. On the other hand are Bitcoin maximalists, who say that it is not ‘wastage’ but by design, a fundamental feature. The Proof of Work consensus algorithm, they say, is what allows Bitcoin to establish authenticity and security in trustless environments without needing any third party.

What is mining?

There’s no better way to learn something than getting your hands dirty doing it. We’ll be doing this on a mock environment(Ganache) on the local machine and not on the actual Ethereum blockchain, because deploying to the actual blockchain requires gas fees.

Truffle

Everyone has heard of bitcoin. Its name has become synonymous with crypto assets ( yes assets, not currency ), and often beginners will refer to both interchangeably. Yet the fact remains that Bitcoin provides little to no functionality in terms of custom programming logic that can be implemented on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.