Back to Chapters Chapter 03

The Degen Era

Security Intuition, MEV Reality, and UX Discipline

After Dehidden, I didn't take the next "normal step". I went deep into execution mechanics.

This phase was not a single project. It was a cycle: build → break → trace → rebuild.

Bots & Tooling

I spent time building bots and tooling: snipers, MEV experiments, honeypot detection, transaction sandboxing, gas behavior inspection. The goal wasn't "profit". The goal was learning: understanding how contracts behave when the environment is adversarial and timing matters.

Web3Rescue

When wallets are compromised, you don't have time for clean architecture. You need a flow that actually works under mempool pressure. Web3Rescue came directly from this thinking.

View on Devfolio

CryptoWave: UX First

The second anchor from this era was CryptoWave, an NFC-based stablecoin payment demo that intentionally made the user experience simple (tap → pay → done), while the underlying system handled interoperability via CCIP and LayerZero.

💳 CryptoWave Contracts

NFC-based stablecoin payments with cross-chain interoperability under the hood. Simple UX, complex infrastructure.

View Contracts on GitHub
CryptoWave also sharpened a UX belief I still follow: when UX is done right, the underlying protocol complexity should be invisible.

What This Era Taught Me

This era gave me what books rarely do: intuition about how incentives break systems, how contracts get exploited, and how execution details (timing, simulation, settlement paths) decide outcomes.