DEV Community: Temiloluwa Akintade

Why I Built RivETH: A Bare-Metal Toolkit for Ethereum Devs

Temiloluwa Akintade — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:36:41 +0000

As a Web3 developer, the "hell loop" of writing code, compiling, and testing is where we spend 90% of our time...

...for many, that loop is broken.

We either rely on isolated web-based IDEs, which feels disconnected from our local VS Code environment, or we spend hours writing boilerplate frontend code just to test a single onlyOwner function in a local Hardhat node.

I wanted something faster. Something that lived in my IDE but gave me the visual power of a dashboard. So, I built RivETH.

The Problem: The "Context-Switch" Tax
When you’re deep in Solidity, every time you have to leave your editor to copy-paste an ABI into a frontend or configure a complex deployment script, you lose momentum.

Existing tools often fall into two camps:

Too Heavy: Full-blown frameworks that require their own learning curve.
Too Manual: Using the terminal for everything, which makes visualizing contract state a nightmare.

The Solution: RivETH

RivETH is a lightweight, open-source Ethereum smart contract development toolkit that runs locally and in your browser. It doesn't use heavy frameworks and complex tooling. It’s built on the "Holy Trinity": HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JavaScript; plus a bit of ethers.js from NodeJS.

How it Works (The Bare-Metal Flow)

RivETH bridges the gap between your terminal and your browser using a simple, high-performance workflow:

Write: You write your Solidity in VS Code.
Compile: You run a simple make [FileName] command in your terminal. This generates the artifacts.
Load: RivETH uses the Fetch API to grab that ABI and Bytecode directly from your project files (served via the VS Code Live Server extension).

Interact: RivETH dynamically maps your ABI to a UI.

Key Features That Change the Game

Smart Constructor Mapping

Deployment shouldn't be a guessing game. RivETH provides a single, smart input field for your constructor. It uses the data types from your ABI as placeholders.

Need to pass an array? Just use ["0xAbc","0xDef"].
Multiple parameters? Just use a comma and a space: "MyToken", 18.

Dedicated Function UI

Once deployed, RivETH generates individual buttons and input fields for every function parameter in your contract. The functions are just a button click away from being called. Also, the transaction logs are updated whenever state-changing functions are called and they can be looked into for gas costs cand calldata.

Integrated Hardhat Wallet

RivETH connects to your Hardhat node and gives you a dropdown of all 20 pre-funded accounts. You can see their balances in real-time and swap signers with one click.

Terminal Debug Logs in Hardhat node

While you interact with your contract in the browser, the local Hardhat node runs in the background and can give a "trace" when errors come up.

ETH converter

While this might be seen as a simple feature, RivETH provides a dedicated ETH converter to help the developer quickly convert between WEI and ETH.

Why "Bare-Metal" Matters
By avoiding heavy frontend frameworks, RivETH is incredibly snappy. It doesn't need to "rebuild" or "hot-reload" a massive JS bundle. You just hit Load, and it instantly fetches the latest local artifacts.

It’s a tool built for developers who want to stay close to the metal and focus on what matters: writing badass smart contracts.

Get Started
If you’re tired of the friction in your local dev environment, give RivETH a spin. It takes a few seconds to set up:

# Download and unzip in one go
curl -L -O https://github.com --output RivETH.zip && unzip RivETH.zip -d temp && mv temp/RivETH-main/* . && rm -rf temp RivETH.zip

# install dependencies and use offline!
cd RivETH
npm insall
Check out the full documentation here: temi-tade.github.io/RivETHDocs/docs

I’m looking to grow the community and would love to see what you build with it. Drop a star on GitHub and let’s make Ethereum development faster for everyone.

End Notes

While RivETH is great for testing your contract visually, which is fantastic for development mode, further testing should still be done with advanced tools like foundry for production-grade contracts.

Issue #8: Smart Contracts

Temiloluwa Akintade — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:50:35 +0000

A Blockchain revolution...

If you are conversant with the web3 ecosystem, chances are that you would have interacted with a decentralized App (dApp), you have a crypto wallet, own some tokens and have probably even made crypto transfers.

All of the aforementioned functionalities are made possible through Smart Contracts. What are the Smart Contracts?

Smart Contracts are rules that live on the Blockchain, these rules govern interactions with the Blockchain and are enforced by code.

As I have explained in previous issues, the Blockchain is a Decentralized network where data is shared across multiple nodes, each node holds a "ledger" that keeps track of the data and changes to it, each page (block) in this ledger is cryptographically linked to it's previous block, forming a "chain of blocks".

Smart Contracts are programmes on the Blockchain, the code is stored across nodes and to change this code, you'd have to change it across a majority of the nodes to change the terms of the contract. This makes smart Contracts tamper proof, the terms of the contract cannot be changed, once deployed.

Smart contracts are trustless, this means that you do not have to "trust" the other party in an agreement, you just have to trust the code, the same code will always produce the same result under the same circumstances, the same cannot be said about humans.

Take a look at this analogy, you and 3 of your friends run a grocery store, and you all agree to split the yearly proceeds 80/20, 80% is shared equally among the four of you while 20% is reinvested into the business.

You need a bank account, and one of you is appointed to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), he is in charge of finance, acts as the signatory to the joint account and he splits the 80/20 revenue pro rata. In this case, you all "trust" him not to screw you over and you are trusting the bank to always manage your funds and not freeze your account.

If he does not act honestly, he could forge the yearly revenue and present reduced revenues and go home with much more at the end of the year without your knowlege. The bank also could block access to your funds for some reason or deduct ridiculous amount of "charges" as per a joint account, we all have kind of been there before.

Smart contracts can tackle both these problems at once by being a trustless third party between your business and your funds. A smart contract can be built and configured to split the revenue at the end of the year 80/20, keep 20% and distribute 80% equally among the four business owners. Also, the funds in the contract are secure because all four of you can be "signatories", meaning that only one person does not have the sole power to move funds, at least 2-3 people need to sign a transaction before funds are moved. Furthermore, there is no no bank to act as the bridge or "manager" of your funds.

Interestingly, the contract is publicly available, and anyone with an internetconnected device can see it and ehatever happens within it, no one is oblivious to what is happening in the system.

See how smart contracts create a decentralized, self-executing and trustless system? That is the power behind DeFi protocols, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and many blockchain applications. No need to trust a party or system, you trust the code that powers it.

Smart contracts are written with programming languages, popular ones being Solidity, Vyper, Rust. Solidity is popular within the Ethereum ecosystem and I will be starting a YouTube series soon on building smart contracts with solidity.

Issue #7: Blockchain security and attacks

Temiloluwa Akintade — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:48:16 +0000

Been a while in the series innit?

In the last issue, we discussed consensus algorithms and how they secure the Blockchain. In this issue, we will go over the possible attacks in the Blockchain ecosystem and how they can be mitigated. Let's get started, shall we?

First off, it should be noted that a good number of web3/Blockchain attacks that have happened in recent times are not due to the Blockchain itself, but rather the protocols (applications) built on top of the Blockchain.

Just like every system built with technology, the Blockchain could be open to attacks from hackers, a famous one being the infamous DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) hack that happened on the Ethereum network around 2016 due to a bug in the DAO protocol's code; over $10 million dollar worth of Ethereum was stolen in this attack.

The aforementioned attack is regarded as a Reentrancy attack. An attack where a malicious smart contract makes a call to an external contract (e.g. to withdraw funds for a user), the funds are withdrawn and before the external contract updates its balances, the malicious contract makes another call to withdraw the user's balance (that has not been updated from the previous withdrawal), this goes on until the external contract is drained by the malicious contract. This attack can be prevented by following the CEI (Checks-Effects-Interactions) pattern or by using reentrancy guards.

Another attack is the 51% attack, this attack is feasible in Blockchain networks with a few nodes. In this attack, malicious actor has a majority of the nodes (>=51%) on the Blockchain, therefore he is technically in control, he can reverse transactions, perform double spending and can even fork a new chain since the Blockchain follows the majority rule. However, this is not feasible in networks with a huge number of nodes like Ethereum and Bitcoin due to the financial and computational overhead costs to carry out this attack. The 51% attack is a specific type of Sybil attack - an attack where a person creates multiple fake identities to gain control of the network.

Another classic Blockchain attack is the Replay attack, where a previous transaction is maliciously resent to the network, this can lead to issues like double spending. However, this has been mitigated by adding a nonce (a number that can be used only once) to transactions, trying to resend a transaction with the same nonce is not possible as the Blockchain nodes will see that the number has been used in a prior transaction. A Chain ID has also been added to prevent replay attacks across different chains.

Lastly, in the scope of this article, there are inflation and front running attacks, these attacks are common in DeFi protocols. It involves a user jumping ahead of a pending transaction (for example, a token swap) and executing their own trade/swap at a more favourable price which would affect the pending transaction and cause it to be executed at a higher price, meaning both users execute the same transaction but one pays more. This can be prevented by using slippage tolerance, this would cause the transaction to revert/fail if the trade would be unfavourable.

In conclusion, while the Blockchain is somewhat very secure and tamper-proof, users should take caution when interacting with Blockchain protocols. DO NOT share your private keys/secret recovery phrases and only sign transactions you trust.

Till the next issue, stay frosty.

Issue #6: Blockchain Consensus Algorithms

Temiloluwa Akintade — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:45:31 +0000

In the last issue, we discussed how cryptography helps secure the Blockchain with regards to the Cryptographic linkage of blocks. Think of a block as a page in a book (ledger), in which a page is Cryptographically linked to it's previous and next pages.

In this issue, we will discuss, from a high level, how the different nodes on the Blockchain agree on the state of the Blockchain without the need for a central authority.

Let's get started, shall we?

All nodes in the Blockchain hold a copy of the Blockchain state (data on the Blockchain) and quite often, this state has to be updated. Conventionally, in systems like traditional banking, a central authority (the bank) can update its ledger easily because there is only one copy of it. This is pretty fast and efficient but the trade off is security and censorship.

There is a single point of failure, attacking the ledger can spell doom for the bank, and the bank literally holds control over everyone's funds and can freeze them whenever they want. This is not the kind of world we'd want to live in, but unfortunately here we are. Imagine keeping "your" money in someone's control, does it really make it yours?

On the Blockchain, this is solved by decentralization - distributing the ledger among all the nodes on the network, but how do the nodes know when to update their respective ledgers and how do they know that the data to be added is valid and not malicious (e.g. in cases of double spending).

That's where consensus algorithms come in. Consensus Algorithms are ways in which the nodes on the Blockchain agree on the state of the Blockchain without the need of a central authority. Two major applications of consensus algorithms are Proof of Work (PoW) which is used by the Bitcoin network and Proof of Stake (PoS) which is used by the Ethereum network.

In PoW, nodes are called miners and for a block to be added to the Blockchain, a miner picks up a transaction from the mempool (remember this?), it validates the transaction by doing computational work (for example it hashes the transaction data and computes a number that satisfies the hash, this is just a reference, it is quite more nuanced than this).

The first miner to validate the block gets the block reward (which is a small amount of tokens paid by the sender of transactions). Ever heard of gas fess? Yeah, that's it. The miner broadcasts the mined block to the network and the remaining miners can now validate it, if valid they can add it to their copy of the Blockchain and the block becomes a permanent part of the Blockchain.

In PoS, it quite different, validators (the nodes, just like miners in PoW), stake an amount of tokens, say ETH. The higher your stake, the higher the likelihood of getting selected as the validator of the block, just like saying "Hey, here are some tokens, allow me validate this block". Rather than doing computational work, tokens serve as proof that the block has been validated and it can be broadcast and added to the Blockchain. Validators also get part of the gas fees as rewards.

This is a pretty high level explanation, if you want to get into the guts of consensus algorithms, there are a ton of resources online. This article is to just give an insight and a broad overview, weldone on making it this far.

Now that we have touched consensus algorithms, what possible attacks could be possible on the Blockchain and how are they effectively prevented?

Catch you in the next issue!

Issue #5: Blockchain Cryptography (part 2)

Temiloluwa Akintade — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 18:28:08 +0000

In the last issue, we discussed cryptography and how it is used on the Blockchain to approve transactions.

In this issue, we will talk about how Cryptography secures the Blockchain. Let's get started, shall we?

The Blockchain can be thought of as a Decentralized distributed ledger that every participant (node) has, this ledger is used to store information and every node has an identical copy of it. This ledger is a hypothetical "chain of blocks" in which each block is linked to a previous one, Cryptographically.

To update this ledger, a new transaction that contains data is created and is added to a block. Transactions are picked from a region called the mempool (a reserved area for transactions that have not been added to the Blockchain), a node picks a transaction and validates the data it contains.

A transaction is created when data (amount to send, sender's address, recipient's address, nonce, gas fees etc.) is hashed to produce a unique transaction hash and it is signed with a private key to produce a unique digital signature. The transaction is then added to a block, a block can contain more than one transaction, all with different hashes and signatures, the different transaction hashes are combined to produce the block hash.

A node picks up a transaction, confirms that its data is correct and adds it to a block, this process of validating the data in the block requires computational work, like solving a math puzzle, this process is called mining. The node then broadcasts the mined block to the rest of the Blockchain network, the nodes confirm that the block was mined and is valid before adding it to their copy of the Blockchain and updating the Blockchain state.

The newly mined block is then added to the Blockchain, the hash of the new block is linked to the hash of the previous one which is linked to the hash of its previous one, this goes on and on, till the beginning of the chain, where the first block is called the Genesis block.

Linking blocks to their predecessors secures the Blockchain such that a change to the last block on the chain changes it's hash but the other nodes still have the initial hash, the Blockchain follows the superior number rule and to re-mine these blocks on other nodes is almost impossible as it takes a lot of computational power to achieve that.

Also changing any block within the chain, changes it's hash, this invalidates any blocks after it, these blocks will need to be re-mined on that node and other nodes and again, this will incur a lot of computational cost.

This way, the Blockchain creates a tamper-proof record of data without the need of a central entity.

How do the nodes agree on the state of the Blockchain, how do they agree on what is valid and what is not? That is where consensus algorithms come in and we have subtly discussed one here. Watch out for the next issue!

Issue #4: Blockchain Cryptography

Temiloluwa Akintade — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:39:17 +0000

In the last issue, we talked about how Blockchain technology is applied in real-world scenarios, we touched Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and the advantages it holds against Traditional Finance (TradFi), and decentralized agreements (smart contracts) and how they are more secure than traditional agreements.

In this issue, we will go into what confers this security we have so much talked about in the Blockchain. What actually makes the Blockchain tick? What makes DeFi and smart contracts run securely on the Blockchain - cryptography. Let's get started, shall we?

Cryptography, you might have heard it somewhere or somehow. Not to be confused with cryptocurrency - cryptography is the technology that powers cryptocurrency.

Cryptography on a high level, basically involves encrypting or obscuring a message in such a way that a third party cannot make sense of it.

In cryptography, an input (a message/data) is encrypted to form an output (hash), this hash is then verified to ensure integrity if the initial message. With cryptography, messages can be transmitted from one source to another while maintaining the integrity as any change to the message would change the hash.

There are two major forms of encryption used for encrypting data: Symmetry and Asymmetric key cryptography. In symmetric key cryptography, the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the data, while in asymmetric key cryptography, a pair of keys (public and private key) are used to encrypt and decrypt the data.

As you may have guessed, symmetric key cryptography is less secure but faster as a single key is used. It is especially used for encrypting large amounts of data but the issue comes when ones needs to securely share the secret key between the sending and receiving parties.

In asymmetric key cryptography, a pair of distinct keys are used to encrypt data, the public and private keys are not random, they are linked such that, the private key can only decrypt a message encrypted with a corresponding public key. This is especially useful for secrecy, if you want to send Bob a message, you use his public key (which is publicly available) to encrypt the message and when Bob receives the message, he uses his private key (which only him should have) to decrypt the message.

For authentication purposes, like on the Blockchain, the private key is used to encrypt (sign - the terminology used in web3) a transaction (that contains data like message, receiving address, amount, nonce, sending address and so on) to produce a digital signature, this authorizes the sender as the one with the private key that can generate that signature, the signature is then broadcast to the Blockchain and the nodes verify with the sender's public key or an address derived from it that the key/address was produced from a private key that generated that signature.

That is why you are always instructed to secure your private keys, because anyone with the private key can approve transactions and move funds on your behalf. You might also have heard of a secret recovery phrase (12/18/24 word phrase) in crypto wallets and that you must secure it, as a matter of fact, the private key is even derived from the secret phrase! The words are transformed into bits and matched to the official wordlist that contains 2048 words.

The flow is: Secret phrase -> master key (master seed) -> private key -> public key -> wallet address.

You can watch the video in my demo in the Peerlist post to see it in action: https://peerlist.io/scroll/post/ACTHLKLLMLOBGGRK61PJM67ALKENO9

From this, if an attacker has your private key, he only has access to one of your accounts, if they have your seed phrase, they have access to all your accounts. This is because the process is deterministic and the same seed phrase would always generate the same keys and addresses. One of the properties of a cryptographic hash is that it is deterministic, more on this in the next issue.

Whoosh! Of you made it this far, big ups to you, this is just one of the applications of cryptography on the Blockchain - authentication. In the nest issue, we will talk about another application.

See you in the next issue!

Issue #3: Blockchain Real-world applications.

Temiloluwa Akintade — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:46:21 +0000

From DeFi to smart contracts to NFTs, the Blockchain has gained ground in a lot of real-world scenarios.

In the last issue, we discussed the features of the Blockchain which can be summarized into Decentralization, Immutability (security) and Transparency (pseudonymity).

In this issue, let us take a look at how these features are used to apply Blockchain technology in real life. Let's get started, shall we?

We will be looking at two major standpoints, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Decentralized agreements (smart contracts).

Decentralized Finance (DeFi):

You might have heard of it; crypto, tokens, BTC, ETH, SOL among so much more. Decentralized Finance is simply running a financial system on a Decentralized entity, the Blockchain. How does it different from Traditional Finance (TradFi).

In DeFi, you are in control, no intermediary between you and a receiving party when making transactions. No central body can freeze your funds or reject transactions because they want to. You funds are secure in a wallet controlled by a private key that you should never reveal to any one. Hence the saying "not your keys, not your coins". When making transactions, funds are sent directly from your wallet to a receiving wallet, it is a peer-to-peer system.

In contrast, TradFi involves the conventional banking model where a central body (the bank) manages your funds. They can freeze your funds without your permission or if the bank goes insolvent, your funds are gone. Funds that are controlled by a third-party party are not really yours, are they?

That is what the DeFi aims to solve, giving the power back to the owners.

Examples of DeFi are tokens like:

Native tokens (Tokens used within a particular Blockchain network, e.g. BTC on Bitcoin, ETH on Ethereum, MATIC on Polygon, etc.
ERC20 tokens: Tokens that follow the ERC20 standard.
Governance tokens: Used in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

and many more...

2 Decentralized Agreements (smart contracts):

Picture this, you are saving with your friends for an event you planned to hold at the end of the year, just to have a good time with your friends.

You all agreed to save the money with one person, you trusted this person because you are friends with them and you expect them to keep their own part of the bargain.

It is almost the end of the year, and you tried to reach out to the person holding the funds and SIKE! He lost the money or spent it or even ran away with a year worth of savings from about four or five people. You cannot reach him neither can you find the money. What do you do? You are lost and pained.

That is what smart contracts solve, smart contracts are simply agreements in form of code that run on the Blockchain. They are decentralized (not controlled by one person), immutable (once deployed, cannot be changed), and transparent (anyone with the contract address can view the terms I. the contract).

With smart contracts, you do not have to trust a body or any person, all the terms are baked I to code and cannot be altered once deployed. You can be assured of outcomes as long as the requirements are met. It is a trust-minimized system.

With smart contracts, you and your friends can send money to the contract, yes, smart contract can hold funds too!

By the end of the year, each person can withdraw what he has saved and everyone has a good time. No hassle.

Those are some of the real-world applications of the Blockchain. I hope you enjoyed the read.

In the next issue, we will talk about fundamental concepts that make the Blockchain work. See you in the next!

Foundrlist: A product hunt alternative for real builders and products .

Temiloluwa Akintade — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:01:41 +0000

Introducing foundrlist, a product hunt alternative where builders can launch and promote their products.

Ever wanted to get organic growth and traction for your product and you start to get bot spam emails after your launch? Say no more. I raise you foundrlist.me, a platform where real builders launch real products and convert views into users.

Not just founders or builders enjoy foundrlist, users can also discover a plethora of products and tools across multiple categories.

With foundrlist, quit yapping, start building and using.

Get started: https://foundrlist.me

Issue #2: Blockchain features

Temiloluwa Akintade — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 10:27:50 +0000

Decentralization, transparency, permissionless and pseudonymity.

In the previous issue, we got to understand buzz words like web3 and the blockchain and a little bit of how nuanced they are from each other. In this issue, we will cover, from a high level the features of a blockchain and what makes them so interesting, let's get started, shall we?

The features of a blockchain are inherent characteristics of a blockchain that are derived from its internal architecture. Think simply, a blockchain is a distributed ledger technology in which transactions (think data) are stored across nodes (participants in the blockchain network) and each node has an identical copy of this data. What feature does this confer on the blockchain then?

Decentralization:

Decentralization, simply put, is a phenomenon where data is distributed among multiple servers. In contrast to centralization, where it is a single-server model and data is stored in a central server. Centralization offers speed because there is no need to check and verify data against another server but the trade off here is security and fault tolerance. In centralized systems, there is a single point of attack or failure.

An attacker needs to take down a server to compromise the network or the server being down means the entire system is down.

On the other hand, a decentralized system offers better security and fault tolerance because an attacker needs to take down a majority of the nodes to take over the system and while this is possible in theory, it is practically not a feasible thing to do because of the way the internal architecture of the blockchain, one of which is cryptography - we will discuss this in a future issue.

A decentralized system is also fault tolerant because the downtime of a node or some nodes does not spell the end of the system, as long as there is still a running node.

Transparency:

This feature of the blockchain is that its records can be seen by anyone with an internet-connected device. Ever heard of "Blockchain explorers"? The tools that allow you view transactions within a blockchain network Just imagine you could monitor transactions a company you have invested in are being made, cool right?. This is particularly useful for things like cyrptocurrencies, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), smart contracts among others. We will go into these in a future issue.

Pseudonymity and Permissionless:

These features also make the blockchain very interesting. On the blockchain, data is not typically stored as in conventional systems, one common way of identification on the blockchain is through addresses (0x00...). Think of addresses as locations on the blockchain that can only be generated once (in most cases). This is what cryptocurrency wallets use to track funds, an amount of tokens, which are basically integers are mapped to an address, not an account number, not a name. So an address could own 10 bitcoins and you would not even be able to know who, because when setting up your wallet (e.g. MetaMask), you are not asked for a name or address, you are simply provided with a seed phrase and a private key that you will use to control the wallet.

This means that anyone around the world can have access to funds irrespective of race, gender, location or age as long as they are connected to the internet.

In short, the blockchain is permissionless because there is no central body to provide restriction.

Whoosh, that was a lot, I hope you have learnt something new. In the next issue, we will go over how these features apply to real-world scenarios using two standpoints: finance and agreements.

See you in the next issue!

RivETH: A local Ethereum Smart Contract development toolkit

Temiloluwa Akintade — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 05:38:38 +0000

RivETH is an open source Ethereum smart contract development toolkit that allows smart contract developers to quickly prototype, compile, deploy and interact with Ethereum smart contracts right out of the box and in the browser.

I built it to solve an issue I have with my development environment. I have am issue with my laptop, I cannot fully run smart contracts in vscode and foundry does not work locally. I use foundry online through the Google cloud shell editor, which costs a lot of data sometimes.

I needed a way to build, deploy and interact with smart contracts locally and then test them with foundry once I am done.

I built RivETH with HTML/CSS/JS and ethers.js, you can compile smart contracts in the terminal and load them into the browser with the contract name, then you can deploy and interact with it using all its functions.

You can find installation and set up instructions on the GitHub. Do not forget to eave a star of you find it useful.

RivETH is also open source, all of its source code is publicly available and contributions are so much welcome to make it better.

My submission for DEV Education Track

Temiloluwa Akintade — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:19:36 +0000

This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio.

What I Built

I built, efIQo, a study tool that allows learners create, share and study with custom and AI-powered flashcards and quizzes. I created it without prompts, as it is something I have been working on before I got to know about the DEV Education Track. However, I used the Gemini API for AI functionality and Google firebase for storage and authentication.

Demo

Click here to try it out.

My Experience

I learnt about structuring data before sending calls to the Gemini API and authentication using firebase. Yes, I was quite surprise with what I could achieve.

Issue #1: What is the Blockchain?

Temiloluwa Akintade — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 06:42:23 +0000

Blockchain, web3, crypto. Terms that a lot of people use to refer to the same thing but they are quite different from each other while still being related.

I decided to start a series on web3, Blockchain on particular, I am so much interested in this field and I am still learning, I want to share the little I know, so we can grow together. Most of what I will be sharing are middle-level to high level stuff, I just want those interested to have an idea of the concepts, you can always go further to learn more, without further ado, let's get started, shall we?

Think of web3 as the decentralized internet, the same internet that your favorite websites and apps run on but with a twist. Rather than big tech companies running the show and "keeping" your data, you are in control.

The Blockchain on the other hand, is the technology that powers web3, it is a decentralized ledger of connected computers (nodes) that store information where each node as its own copy of the ledger. It is "decentralized", meaning there is no single node that serves as the single source of truth for the entire Blockchain, the source of truth is that a majority of the nodes on the network have the same updated ledger.

The ledger is a record that stores the state (fancy term for data) on the Blockchain, transactions can modify the state of the Blockchain. Anytime a transaction is sent, a node verifies that it is valid and adds it to its own copy of the Blockchain and then broadcasts it to other nodes on the network to add it to their respective copies, more on this in a future lesson.

This way, a Blockchain is decentralized, permissionless and transparent. We will cover these concepts in next issue. Anticipate.