On-chain programs: Solidity, VMs, design patterns, upgradeability, and verification.
A1 generates working exploits against 63% of real-world DeFi contracts. The attack costs ~$6k to break even; a comprehensive audit costs $60k. That 10× gap is the new threat model for every team deploying on a public chain.
Every zkSNARK bottoms out in a pairing check. Before Pectra you had BN254 at ~100-bit security. EIP-2537 added BLS12-381 at 128 bits, and its pairings are cheaper: 32,600k+37,700 vs 34,000k+45,000 gas. G2 MUL dropped from millions to 22,500 gas.
ERC-7683 gives users cross-chain swaps in 8 seconds by converting bridge latency into a solver capital float problem. The 4–7 bps spread is a rental rate on cross-chain inventory — here's the lifecycle, the capital math, and what AI agents pay to move capital across chains.
EIP-7702, live in Pectra, lets an EOA borrow smart contract code for one transaction — no migration, no bundler. For AI agents: atomic batching closes the approve-to-swap MEV window, and session key delegation bounds the blast radius of a compromised agent without touching the master key.
ERC-4337 lets AI agents transact without holding ETH — but the alt-mempool has its own fee market, bundler economics, and MEV surface every builder must understand.
Foundry forks freeze five properties of the Ethereum execution environment that are live, adversarial, and expensive in production: basefee, oracle prices, blockhash entropy, MEV competition, and TWAP accumulation. Each one silently misleads AI agents through testing.
CoW Protocol's batch auction design makes front-running structurally impossible — and that matters enormously for AI agents executing DeFi strategies at machine speed.
PREVRANDAO costs roughly $88 per bit to bias. Chainlink VRF costs $2.43 per request. Here's how to choose the right randomness source for AI agents making on-chain decisions — and what breaks when you choose wrong.
Most DeFi protocols are upgradeable, and most on-chain AI agents don't know it. Here's how proxy architecture invalidates agent assumptions — and a tiered defense framework to build around it.
A 15× spike on a $17M pool shifts its 30-minute v2 TWAP by 9.3% in one block. The arithmetic-mean accumulator is far weaker than v3's geometric tick accumulator. Covers the manipulation cost formula, the Inverse Finance case study, and minimum safe pool depth.
Uniswap v4 hooks make every liquidity pool programmable. Here's how the 14-bit permission bitmap works, what fires during a swap, and where AI agents fit into dynamic fee architecture.
Probabilistic classifiers miss 30–40 % of policy violations. Lean 4 theorem provers and SMT solvers make certain guardrail tiers mathematically certain — here's how the four-layer policy stack works.