Curriculum·Sophomore·S205
On-Chain and Fundamental Data
Three Arrows Capital, June 2022. As the fund collapsed, its positions were, in S-RM's phrase, in theory publicly viewable on the blockchain, and people outside it were reading them in real time.
Lesson 1 opens on
The six days nobody looked at the Ronin bridge
5 million USDC, around $625M, from the Ronin bridge in two transactions, using four compromised validator keys plus a fifth signature obtained through an allowlist entry that had outlived its purpose. Every one of those withdrawals settled on a public ledger and was queryable from the moment it confirmed. The breach was not discovered until 29 March, after a user reported being unable to withdraw 5,000 ETH from the bridge.
The lessons
- S205-01The explorer as an analyst toolQuery an address, a contract and a token from an explorer and extract the four facts an analyst needsabout 30 min · opens on The six days nobody looked at the Ronin bridge
- S205-02The data stackTrace a number from a dashboard back through the layers that produced itabout 30 min · opens on The billion dollars that moved because a definition changed
- S205-03Metrics that carry signalApply the cost test to any metric, and rank a dashboard by how expensive each number is to fakeabout 30 min · opens on LayerZero's sybil identification, May 2024
- S205-04Following the moneyCluster addresses from funding, timing and behavior, and label the output as inferenceabout 31 min · opens on How the LastPass losses were connected
- S205-05Building a thesis from dataWrite a thesis as a claim with named metrics that would falsify itabout 30 min · opens on Anchor's yield, computable from published figures
Labs
S205-L
Build a one-page data dashboard for a single protocol and write a 500-word thesis with three named metrics that would prove it wrong.