CLANKER//LABS
ABOUT
AN UNDERGROUND FACILITY FOR ON-CHAIN EXPERIMENTS. MOST OF THEM STILL WORK.
ClankerLabs is an experimental on-chain research studio that keeps its work in a fictional underground facility you can walk around. Every room is a laboratory, every machine is something we actually built or actually broke, and one door at the end of the corridor is sealed.
RESEARCH AREAS
- Chain mechanics
- How networks actually keep time, order things, and decide something has finished. Most of the work here is building a machine that behaves the way a chain behaves, then noticing that the machine is easier to argue with than the documentation.
- Protocol behaviour
- What happens to a working system when one of its assumptions is removed on purpose. We build the narrow, unreasonable version of a design, put it somewhere real, and record where it goes wrong. It goes wrong one layer above the thing we changed, almost every time.
- Wrapper studies
- Tokenized real-world assets, examined as paperwork rather than as instruments. Three structures that look identical in a wallet give you three completely different things to hold. That difference is the whole subject.
- Autonomous agents
- Small units with a budget, one instruction, and no supervision, observed at population scale. The same finding keeps coming back: an objective is not an intent, and a unit that reads an instruction literally enough is hard to tell from one that is attacking you.
- Settlement pathology
- Where value gets stuck on the way between two systems that each believe they are finished. We build deliberately long routes so the failure has somewhere to happen, and then we let it stall rather than retrying, because a retry destroys the evidence.
- Failure archaeology
- Reading our own logs back. Every experiment here is filed with the log that was written while it ran, including the entries that were wrong at the time. FAILED SUCCESSFULLY is a real status in our system and roughly a fifth of the work ends up under it.
- Containment
- ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████. ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████.
NETWORKS TESTED
- Ethereum · A general-purpose settlement layer with twelve-second slots. Half this floor is timed off it, including the machines that would rather not be. brand
- Base · An OP Stack layer 2 with two-second blocks that also streams sub-block preconfirmations, so it appears to answer before it has finished. brand
- Solana · A single-shard layer 1 whose consensus is being replaced under it. It keeps time with a clock that runs whether or not anything is loaded. brand
- Arbitrum · A layer 2 running two virtual machines at once: the EVM, and a WASM machine bolted alongside it that is faster at everything the EVM is slow at. brand
- Optimism · The OP Stack chain the rest of the stack came from. Output leaves the press finished and then waits about a week for anyone to object. brand
- Hyperliquid · A layer 1 whose order book is a consensus-level operation rather than a contract call, running two block sizes on one chain. brand
- Monad · An EVM layer 1 that executes transactions in parallel and re-executes the ones that turn out to have collided on state. brand
- Sui · An object-model layer 1 where anything with one owner takes a fast path and anything shared has to queue for consensus. brand
- Avalanche · A layer 1 whose consensus repeatedly asks a small random sample of validators what they prefer, until the whole set has agreed. brand
- MegaETH · A layer 2 with roughly ten-millisecond blocks and the sequencer, prover and full-node roles pulled apart onto separate machines. brand
CONNECTED SYSTEMS
- Uniswap · Immutable contracts that let anyone open a pool and route orders against it algorithmically, with hooks that run custom logic at points in a pool's lifecycle. brand
- Aave · A pooled, over-collateralised lending market: supplied assets sit in shared pools, borrowers post collateral, and positions are liquidated when the health factor breaches. brand
- Morpho · Modular lending: minimal immutable markets with one collateral, one loan asset, one oracle and one liquidation threshold, with curated vaults allocating across them. brand
- Chainlink · A decentralised oracle network: independent node operators fetch, aggregate and cryptographically sign off-chain data, then write it on-chain. brand
- Pyth Network · A first-party oracle: publishers post their own prices on-chain with a confidence interval, and consumers pull the latest signed update on demand rather than being pushed one on a heartbeat. brand
- EigenLayer · Restaking: stakers opt in to have already-staked ETH additionally slashable by third-party services, so a new network can rent economic security instead of bootstrapping a validator set. brand
- Lido · Liquid staking: ETH goes in, gets routed across a curated set of node operators, and comes back as stETH, a rebasing receipt token that stays transferable and usable as collateral. brand
- Hyperliquid · A purpose-built layer 1 running a fully on-chain central limit order book, where orders, cancels, matches and liquidations are consensus-level operations rather than contract calls. brand
- Ethena · A synthetic dollar: spot collateral is held against an equal-size short perpetual position, and USDe is issued against the resulting delta-neutral book. brand
- Across · Intents-based bridging: a user signs an intent, a competitive network of relayers fronts the funds on the destination chain out of their own inventory, and they are reimbursed later from a shared pool. brand
- Safe · Programmable smart-contract accounts: a contract that holds assets and executes only when M of N configured signers approve, extended by modules and guarded by pre-execution checks. brand
- Ondo Finance · Real-world asset issuance and distribution infrastructure: short-duration US Treasuries wrapped into transferable on-chain tokens, plus a tokenized-equities platform with a broker-dealer stack behind it. brand
SPECIMENS
- AAPL · Apple Inc.
- TSLA · Tesla, Inc.
- NVDA · NVIDIA Corporation
- MSFT · Microsoft Corporation
- AMZN · Amazon.com, Inc.
- SPY · A fund. Its full name is in the footer attribution table.
- LAB07 · Not recorded.
- QQQ · A fund. Its full name is in the footer attribution table.
- GLD · A commodity trust. Its full name is in the footer attribution table.
- COIN · Coinbase Global, Inc.
- HOOD · Robinhood Markets, Inc.
- CRCL · Circle Internet Group, Inc.
- MSTR · Strategy Inc
Ticker symbols and company or fund names are the property of their respective owners and are used here nominatively, for identification and illustration only. Their appearance does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship, endorsement, or relationship.