Nakatoli

On security audits in blockchain

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:01 +1100

I’ve seen an extensive amount of discussions recently (past few weeks especially) surrounding the effectiveness of security audits and whether they are worth the investment or should be done at all. Having worked directly in this area, I’d love to share my own perspective and thoughts on why I find them valuable, but also why people should understand their inherent limitations and unavoidable compromises.

The very fresh Balancer V2 hack has brought more conversations around the effectiveness of security reviews, especially since there have been reviews of this code by notable security firms. This isn’t the first time that community has questioned the effectiveness of security reviews.

My learning from August 2025 Blockchain Events

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:01 +1100

I had the pleasure of attending a few conferences and side events over August in San Francisco and New York. There was a lot to absorb, and many conversations to have had.

This piece will be a small summary and my main takeaways of the conferences and talks. For a detailed summary, see my next post.

While this might not be the full coverage of the events, if there’s any interest in some of these topics, I would highly recommend taking a look at the YouTube videos of the recordings, or, reading the documentation/papers.

The long summary of August talks

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:01 +1100

I’ve been lucky to attend a few conferences over the start of August and I wanted to write some notes over my takeaways.

I had the chance to attend 3 main conferences, and a few side events:

Peer to Peer in blockchain networks and why they are useful

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:01 +1100

I’m always so fascinated by the peer-to-peer (or p2p) networks that power the various blockchain ecosystems. Unknown nodes come together, communicate, and push enough data to decide on a global state.

This was part of the reason that I started diving into the world of consensus for my phd/research. In future, I’m keen to dive into the worlds of consensus! So keep your eyes posted.

But for now, let’s start with the networking - so that we can send messages to each other.

$(whoami)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 01:01:01 +1100

Hello there!

I’m Chris, just an ordinary person. I’m a huge fan of distributed systems, networking, security and majorly into the underlying aspects of blockchains. I’ve got a passion for digesting complex problems to make them understandable by any audience, and had a keen interest on being an educator.

In my early years, I focused a lot on the frontend and poking around the entire web stack (getting into that good ol’ LAMP stack early on). Now, although I still quite enjoy the joys of frontend, I’ve come to love Rust and a lot of the networking problems surrounding gossip and information dispersion in a open, permissionless system with dynamic participants.

Init

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 23:53:26 +1100

Hello!

Finally, I got a chance to set up a blog.

I’ve been meaning to really get on top of this for a while now, but I think the major delay is that I keep prioritising other parts of work/life.

I decided to take the plunge, and this time - here it is with hugo!

Why Hugo?

Well, it’s been a bit of a mental debate, I wanted something that I could publish markdown files, have the ability to write drafts, and something that supports all the cool latex, code, etc. - but at the same time, I wanted to find something that was easy to set up.