cryptonist

Section

Explainers

6 articles

A printed circuit board photographed flat, its traces and mounted components in rows

Foundational pieces for readers who want the mechanism rather than the headline. Each one takes a claim that gets made loosely and asks what holds it up: what keeps a stablecoin at its peg, what a token's supply schedule actually binds, what is left under a meme coin's price, whether a mining contract or a phone app can pay, whether a transfer on a public ledger can be traced to a name. The common one-line answer to each quietly drops the part that matters, and these pieces set it out. The mechanisms move slowly, so where a fact does change, the piece carries a review date and says what it was true of.