SmartState blog

February 10, 2026

What is a watering hole cyberattack?

A watering hole attack is a targeted cyberattack where attackers compromise a legitimate website that a specific group of people frequently visits, rather than attacking their victims directly. The name came from nature: just like a predator waits at a watering hole to ambush animals that come to drink, attackers "wait" on a popular/trusted online resource and infect their victims when they arrive.How a watering hole attack typically. ...

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November 18, 2025

A SWIFT shift: what is ISO 20022 and how is it related to the blockchain industry?

On November 22, 2025, SWIFT, a key player in global financial payments with over 11,000 connected institutions, will transition from its coexistence period for payment instructions to fully adopting the ISO 20022 — a standard for unified financial messaging.And there is the crypto adoption twist: ISO 20022 is an open standard that can be used by both traditional financial institutions and blockchain industry players. The list of ISO ...

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September 4, 2025

Price oracle manipulation vulnerability in smart contracts

To build a competitive DeFi project developers need to add interactions with external price data sources - price oracles - for their project. However, recklessness in orchestration architecture development of the oracle interaction processes can lead to Price oracle manipulation vulnerability.What is a price oracleSmart contracts are self-executing programs that run without intermediaries, however, smart contracts need external data sources ...

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July 21, 2025

What is entropy illusion vulnerability?

Blockchain systems offer great opportunities for projects and devs, but like any other system, they have a number of certain limitations. One such limitation is determinism - the property of a system or process that its outcome is unambiguously predetermined by initial conditions, input data and rules (algorithm). Determinism is a necessity to maintain decentralized operation of the blockchain system: each node must produce the same result ...

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July 5, 2025

Understanding MEV attacks

One of the key drivers of blockchain protocol stability is MEV (Miner or, more modernly, Maximum Extractable Value) - the profit a miner or validator can make by reordering, including or excluding transactions in the blocks they mine.MEV attacks that aim to manipulate this profit-oriented mechanism are a fairly serious problem for networks. MEV attacks can manipulate markets, harm users, traders and liquidity providers, and destabilize the ...

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June 29, 2025

Frontend / supply chain attacks in crypto and what to do about it

When it comes to blockchain project security, what project areas do you consider first for protection? Most likely you thought of smart contracts and vault security. Probably this general awareness of blockchain security measures is what pushes cybercriminals to find new ways to compromise crypto projects and exploit crypto user behavior, some of the implementations of which we've seen most recently in 2025. Since many blockchain dev tools ...

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June 22, 2025

What are linters and how can they help in blockchain and crypto development

Code quality is one of the topics that many devs talk about, including (or perhaps especially) in blockchain and crypto development. However, not everyone can figure out what that 'quality' consists of and how to ensure it. Large companies or established teams can research best practices, implement and utilize their own standards. However, today's blockchain world is so agile, what if the team is small and the development timeline is short? ...

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June 9, 2025

IPFS and its Progressive Role in Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, and Web3

You may have heard about ENS on Ethereum or NFT metadata on Solana. These things are united by IPFS - InterPlanetary File System, a Web3 alternative to ‘classical’ internet. IPFS is a technology that organically fits into the principles of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and developing ecosystems of Web3. As a decentralized protocol, IPFS challenges traditional centralized models of the internet, offering a reliable alternative ...

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May 29, 2025

Bytecode decompilation: features and implementation in the blockchain industry

One of the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology is smart contracts - autonomous programs that provide automation and minimize human error. Contracts are written in high-level programming languages that are easy for the developer to understand. To work on the blockchain's virtual machine, a smart contract must undergo a compilation procedure - a 'translation' of the program from a high-level programming language to a low-level ...

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April 18, 2025

Understanding overflow and underflow vulnerabilities in smart contracts

As blockchain technology powers everything from DeFi platforms to NFT marketplaces, smart contracts have become the backbone of trustless systems. However, writing secure smart contracts is no small feat. Among the many vulnerabilities developers must guard against, overflow and underflow issues stand out as subtle yet potentially catastrophic ones. While these terms might sound like something from a computer science textbook, understanding ...

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