Welcome to DeFi exec

Comparing chains for DeFi work is less about TPS bragging rights and more about how each network treats liquidity, state, and risk. With a sub-$1k budget, you need to know where your trades land, how quickly you can reuse capital, and what failure modes burn the fastest. This piece focuses on the conceptual trade-offs that matter before you write a single line of bot code.

Tracing a wallet is about more than spotting a couple of ERC-20 transfers. To understand whether funds are safe or where they went, you need a full timeline of external transactions, internal value moves, token transfers, and the contracts touched along the way. This walkthrough shows how I build that view with inexpensive tools that fit a sub-$1k wallet.

GMX v2 markets let you mint “GM” pool tokens that track a market’s inventory of collateral and outstanding perp PnL without borrowing or leverage. The result is synthetic exposure to assets like BTC or ETH where your token cannot be liquidated because it simply represents a slice of the pool’s balance sheet. I’m focusing on how the mechanism avoids liquidation risk for liquidity providers and how to keep that exposure sane.

I’m kicking off a beginner-friendly series focused on the unglamorous habits that keep funds safe. Approval hygiene is the first pillar because it’s the easiest way to lose tokens without ever signing a swap. I’m doing this from a practice wallet capped under $1k, so everything here is sized for small, realistic balances. This post covers what an approval really does, how allowances accumulate, and a lightweight routine for revoking the ones you don’t need.

Slippage looks clean in AMM formulas, but it turns chaotic when liquidity is thin or routes are fragmented. This post walks through the math traders cite, then compares it to what actually happens when you hit Uniswap v3, Curve, and Balancer with real orders.