Ethereum

Notes on building on Ethereum. My main chain for DeFi protocols and smart contract work.

Why Ethereum

The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is the most battle-tested smart contract runtime. Every major DeFi protocol lives here. The tooling (Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js, OpenZeppelin) is mature and well-documented.

Tradeoffs:

• Gas fees are high on mainnet — most projects deploy on L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Lisk)
• Slower finality than Solana
• But: best liquidity, most developers, most audited patterns

My Ethereum Projects

EVM Chains I Deploy On

The beauty of EVM-compatible chains is that the same Solidity code and ethers.js frontend works across all of them. Just change the RPC URL and contract address via environment variables.

Dev Toolchain

# Smart contracts
npm install --save-dev hardhat @nomicfoundation/hardhat-toolbox
# or
curl -L https://foundry.paradigm.xyz | bash && foundryup

# OpenZeppelin (audited contract library)
npm install @openzeppelin/contracts

# Frontend
npm install ethers

Project Structure

my-dapp/
├── contracts/
│   ├── Token.sol
│   ├── Swap.sol
│   └── interfaces/
│       └── ISwap.sol
├── scripts/
│   └── deploy.js
├── test/
│   └── Token.test.js
├── hardhat.config.js
└── frontend/
    ├── app/
    └── lib/
        ├── contracts.ts    → ABI + address constants
        └── wagmi.ts        → wallet config

Quick Hardhat Setup

// hardhat.config.js
require("@nomicfoundation/hardhat-toolbox");
require("dotenv").config();

module.exports = {
  solidity: "0.8.20",
  networks: {
    sepolia: {
      url: process.env.SEPOLIA_RPC_URL,
      accounts: [process.env.PRIVATE_KEY],
    },
    lisk: {
      url: "https://rpc.api.lisk.com",
      accounts: [process.env.PRIVATE_KEY],
    },
  },
};

npx hardhat compile
npx hardhat test
npx hardhat run scripts/deploy.js --network sepolia

Last updated: September 2026.