Web3 | Identosphere Blogcatcher

The organs of an agent economy — payments, reputation, identity — have been built separately for months. OpenClaw may be the body they plug into.

Traders suggest unusual activity in IBIT may point to Hong Kong–based hedge funds, though no hard evidence has emerged.

The highly anticipated Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain will launch its mainnet on Monday.

This episode originally appeared on the Network State Podcast. Balaji Srinivasan and Benedict Evans sit down in Singapore for a wide-ranging conversation on the mechanics of disruption. Evans, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who now writes one of tech's most-read newsletters, argues that the conversation about any technology peaks during the transition—not at 0% or 100% adoption. They cover AI's real capabilities and limits, the politics of technological disruption, why crypto's killer metric is block space, and what smart glasses, elevator attendants, and the elephant graph reveal about how change works. 

 

Resources:

Follow Benedict Evans on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benedictevans/

Check out Benedict’s Newsletter: https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter

Follow Balaji Srinivasan on X: https://x.com/balajis

Check out Network State Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@nspodcast

High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove-ebook/dp/B015VACHOK/

eHang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUTu4_8QznE

The Deep Research Problem: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2025/2/17/the-deep-research-problem

ARC AGI: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

Uber and Airbnb didn't sell software: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2025/3/14/what-kind-of-disruption

AI Use cases: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/4/19/looking-for-ai-use-cases

Stablecoin surpasses Visa & Mastercard: https://crypto.news/ark-invest-stablecoin-transaction-value-in-2024-surpasses-visa-and-mastercard/

Senate passes stablecoin bill: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-senate-passes-stablecoin-bill-milestone-crypto-industry-2025-06-17/

 

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see 

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Ecosystem morale, narrative control, and ETH price all do well when we have a collective rallying cry. The zkEVM needs to become our new banner. 

The top airdrop hunts of February 2026: MegaETH Edition.

The token is outperforming the broader crypto market amid a string of Ripple announcements.

Yesterday was IBIT's highest volume ever and second largest daily drop.

Cypherpunk launched in November and has accumulated about 290K ZEC so far.

The Korean crypto exchange intended to send 2,000 WON to some users but accidentally sent 2,000 BTC instead.

The crypto exchange will pare back perpetual offerings on February 20.

MegaETH has no defined date for TGE ahead of its Monday mainnet

The launch was plagued by reports of delayed token distribution to early investors and technical issues.

Stablecoins have quietly become the most successful use case in crypto.

Eurozone finance ministers will convene on Feb. 16 to deliberate on integrating euro-denominated stablecoins as part of efforts to bolster the euro's global influence.

Catch up on the PIVX Weekly Pulse! From market shifts to everything happening in the community, we’ve packed the week’s biggest highlights into one essential update.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: Amidst a market-wide frenzy and heavy liquidations, the PIVX masternode network has shown impressive stability. Active nodes adjusted slightly from 2,098 to 2,052, with 46 nodes moving offline. Though the count dipped into the 1,990 range earlier in the week, it has since recovered, reflecting a swift rebound and continued confidence in the network. Price Check: The “Extreme Fear” currently dominating the market has spared few, and PIVX is no exception. As BTC and ETH hit their lowest points of 2024, PIVX traded within a USD range of $0.10 to $0.14 this week. This resulted in a weekly average of $0.1177, a 27.97% drop from last week’s $0.1634. Trading Buzz: PIVX trading activity showed strong staying power this week, with daily volumes consistently exceeding the $2 million mark. On a weekly basis, volume settled at $17.3 million, down 16.02% from the previous week’s $20.6 million. Despite this minor contraction, the underlying liquidity remains a bright spot amidst the general market frenzy.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

PIVX Weekly Pulse (Jan. 30th, 2026 — Feb. 5th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was a bloodbath today in crypto markets. Is it time to buy the dip, flee for safety, or hodl strong?

What Vitalik’s tiered state vision means for Ethereum tokens.

The security firm also revealed that wrench attacks are on the rise.

While crypto natives lament Bitcoin’s underperformance compared to precious metals, institutional traders are eyeing the digital asset.

The Trump family’s DeFi protocol was forced to sell $5 million of BTC today to cover an Aave loan.

The crypto exchange is withdrawing from the UK, EU, and Australia to "double down on America."

ETHZilla plans to tokenize the loan portfolio into a cash-flow-generating manufactured home loan token.

Bitcoin plunged under $66,000 while most altcoins cratered.

The move comes amid a broader Aptos TVL decline and less than two years after Merkle closed a $2 million seed round with participation from Aptos Labs.

The proposal also includes requiring any new deployment to guarantee at least $2 million in annual revenue to Aave.

The investigation into a secret UAE investment in World Liberty Financial focuses on potential ties to AI chip export policy.

The move comes as crypto prediction markets continue to rise in popularity, seeing record volumes.

Tether's $100 million investment in Anchorage Digital underscores a commitment to secure, regulated financial systems, reinforcing Anchorage's status as the first federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S.

The feature allows CEX users to copy top traders on the largest perp DEX.

Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of the Wall Street Journal sit down with a16z General Partner Martin Casado on WSJ’s Bold Names to ask whether the AI spending boom is a bubble waiting to burst. Martin explains why the fundamentals differ dramatically from the dot-com era—when WorldCom had $40 billion in debt versus today's tech giants with hundreds of billions on their balance sheets—and why a speculative valuation correction shouldn't be confused with systemic collapse. They also discuss where a16z sees opportunity in the "long tail" of AI companies beyond the state-of-the-art large language models.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Christopher Mims on X: https://twitter.com/mims

Follow Tim Higgins on X:  https://twitter.com/timkhiggins

Check out WSJ’s Bold Names: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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A survey shows strong demand for faster settlement, 24/7 access, and secondary trading.

In this episode, Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, sits down with Camila Russo to explain why institutional adoption accelerated last year.

Big banks enter the stablecoin arena as regulatory barriers fall. Can incumbents compete?

The digital asset treasury (DAT) movement is drowning, with nearly every DAT underwater.

The stablecoin protocol ended its “Frontier” rewards phase with a dollar-denominated token airdrop.

The world’s largest futures and options marketplace is exploring ‘tokenized cash’ as it leans further into crypto markets.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is already exploring tokenization with Google.

The partnership between Shopify, Coinbase and Stripe allows Shopify merchants to accept USDC payments settled on Base.

Bitcoin is down 18% in seven days as tech stocks continue to disappoint.

FIDD is now available to retail and institutional investors across Fidelity's platforms.

When pressed by Senator Sherman, Bessent responded taxpayer funds will not be used to buy BTC.

The funding round comes right after the platform had a record month for revenue and trading volume.

EUR-pegged stablecoins are set to grow 800x-1,600x by 2030, S&P projects.

Rui-Siang Lin was sentenced to 30 years for operating Incognito Market, a crypto-based dark web marketplace that facilitated $105M in drug sales.

Nevada's gaming regulator filed a civil lawsuit alleging Coinbase's prediction markets constitute unlicensed sports betting under state law.

Earlier this week, the City of Mountain View decided to shut down its network of 30 Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. Why? The city discovered that the private vendor, Flock Safety, had been sharing location data with outside agencies without authorization or transparency.

When Mountain View initially partnered with Flock Safety in May 2024, the police department offered residents firm assurances. Police Chief Mike Canfield promised that data would only be shared with other California agencies that specifically agreed to Mountain View’s strict data policies.

However, a public records request by a local news outlet revealed a different reality. As the department prepared its response, it discovered that Flock had unilaterally activated a “statewide lookup tool.” This feature allowed hundreds of California police departments to scour Mountain View’s database for 17 months without the city’s knowledge. Even more alarming, it was revealed that out-of-state agencies had unauthorized access to a city camera for several months in 2024.

Profit Over Privacy

This is a textbook example of how privacy is being abused by tech companies. In the surveillance industry, data liquidity is often marketed as a feature. Yet, for the public, this liquidity represents a massive leak in the bucket of civil liberties.

In his letter to the community, Chief Canfield expressed a sentiment that many privacy advocates share: “I personally no longer have confidence in this particular vendor.” He noted that the company’s lack of proactive disclosure and their circumvention of built-in protections were “frankly unacceptable.”

The Mountain View City Council is set to meet on February 24 to decide the fate of these cameras. While the police chief has already stated he opposes reactivating them due to the breach of trust, the broader lesson remains: surveillance technology is only as safe as the ethics of the company providing it.

A Pattern of Corporate Overreach

Mountain View is not alone. Cities like Eugene, Oregon, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have previously criticized Flock for leaving cameras active even after being ordered to turn them off.

This behaviour points to a systemic issue in the “surveillance-as-a-service” industry. When companies control the hardware, the software, and the cloud where data lives, they hold the keys to the kingdom.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

When “Smart” Surveillance Outsmarts Local Control was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

a16z general partner Erik Torenberg speaks with Justin Mares, founder and CEO of Truemed. They discuss why American health outcomes are so poor compared to the rest of the developed world, how crop subsidies created a food system that "systematically outputs unhealthy people," and what it would take to treat the chronic disease crisis as a national security issue. Mares explains how TrueMed allows people to spend tax-free HSA and FSA dollars on lifestyle interventions like gym memberships, sleep aids, and healthier food—and why he believes this could redirect hundreds of billions of dollars toward prevention. They also explore the case for psychedelics as mental health therapy and why peptides could disrupt the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Resources:

Follow Justin Mares on X: https://x.com/jwmares

Follow TrueMed on X: https://x.com/truemed

 

Timestamps:

00:00 — Introduction

0:44 — The Environment That Makes Us Sick 

04:19 — What Went Wrong in the 1970s

6:10 — The Subsidy Problem 

8:49 — Universal Ozempic Won't Save Us

12:21 — Building Truemed

15:59 — The Zoo Animal Theory of Human Health

18:33 — The Chronic Disease Crisis as National Security

27:52 — Psychedelics as Mental Health Therapy

35:49 — Why Peptides Will Disrupt Pharma

35:27 — Why Peptides Will Disrupt Pharma

 

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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An introduction to the Wei Name Service (WNS), a lean Ethereum naming experiment for affordable onchain domains.

The prediction market on Base recorded a spike in trading volumes at the end of January.

New trustless stablecoin protocols are taking shape amid TradFi's embrace of the hot sector.

Stock market weakness spilled into crypto, with crypto-related tickers plunging as much as 20%.

Vitalik says Ethereum L2s need a new role as the L1 scales faster, urging rollups to differentiate beyond “just scaling.”

The Ethereum co-founder argues for a pivot from the rollup-centric roadmap, citing progress made towards scaling the base layer.

Activity on Base-based AI-powered launchpad Clanker has surged as traders speculate on the rise of autonomous AI agents.

The platform hopes to capture volumes days ahead of Super Bowl LX.

Bitcoin and Ethereum fell as investors weighed delayed economic data, tightening risk appetite, and mixed ETF flows.

The bank's 2026 survey of 333 family offices found 89% have no crypto exposure, with only 17% planning to invest going forward.

The move lets eligible non-U.S. users trade more than 200 tokenized securities directly inside MetaMask’s self-custodial wallet.

Recorded live at our Founders Summit, a16z general partner Chris Dixon speaks with Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril and Oculus VR. They talk about what it takes to build hardware at scale, where the biggest technological bottlenecks are today, and why optimism is still warranted despite geopolitical turmoil and regulatory constraints. They also cover crypto, stablecoins, modern warfare, the U.S.–China technology race, AI and manufacturing, and frontiers like fusion and quantum computing—plus lessons from Oculus, the founding of Anduril, and how to build mission-driven teams.

 

Resources:

Follow Palmer Luckey on X: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey

Follow Chris Dixon on X: https://twitter.com/cdixon

 

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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Creators can now launch tokens on Solana via Solana DEX Raydium.

The national affiliate of the International Red Cross has rolled out a blockchain-based aid system that uses ZK proofs to protect sensitive data.

The Brave Search API, which allows companies to power their search and AI apps by integrating billions of results from the Web with a simple API call, is now integrated into Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company. Specifically, the integration of the Brave Search API into Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Code, and Cortex Agents bridges the gap between internal enterprise data and public world context by enabling agents to answer questions about current events, research market trends, and retrieve and source documentation with higher accuracy and reduced hallucinations.

The new integration is currently in public preview and was announced today at BUILD London, Snowflake’s developer conference for AI and apps, where Snowflake unveiled Cortex Code, a data-native AI coding agent that automates and accelerates end-to-end enterprise development by understanding enterprise data context. The integration with the Brave Search API brings real-time web knowledge into Snowflake, enabling more powerful, context-aware AI development for users. 

“We’re pleased to have the Brave Search API, the only commercially-available search API at the scale of the global Web, integrated into Snowflake’s leading coding agents and enterprise AI tools,” said Jan Piotrowski, Vice President, Business for Brave Search at Brave Software. “This integration will give Snowflake’s customers the comprehensive agentic web search solution they require for enterprise performance.” 

The Brave Search API delivers essential capabilities including world-class search engine features based on Brave Search’s independent index of the Web, packaged with ranking models. It also offers specialized endpoints to adapt results, such as local results, images, and AI summaries, as well as up to five snippets from over 35 billion pages, picked in real time to maximize contextual relevance to a search.

These features enable customers to access a rare data source: the search index of one of just three independent search engines at scale, and to benefit from its real-time nature grounded by over 100 million daily page updates. Brave offers customers a comprehensive solution, unlike competing options that provide smaller indexes, merely scrape the Web, suffer from high latencies, or are even at risk of being shut down due to their dependencies on third parties.

The Brave Search API also helps organizations supply their AI LLMs with real-time data, power agentic search, train foundation models, and create search-enabled software, and is for building applications that benefit from having access to the Web, going beyond the static knowledge of AI models. This enables customers to deploy their products with Web data that is fresh, reliable, and relevant, and offer the speed and reliability necessary for applications with millions of users around the world. 

The Brave Search API already supplies most of the top 10 AI LLMs with real-time Web search data, and for some of them, Brave is in fact the only search engine index supporting their AI answers.

The Brave Search API is also the only search API built with privacy at its core. Regardless of plan or subscription, Brave Search API data is used and maintained only for the narrow purposes documented in our Data Processing Addendum. 

In addition, the Brave Search API has undergone a thorough external audit, and earned our first SOC 2 Type II attestation. SOC 2 gives Brave Search API customers the confidence that one of the primary data sources they rely on to conduct their business has been independently verified as operating according to an industry-standard benchmark for security.

About Brave, Brave Search, and the Brave Search API

Brave is a privacy-preserving Web browser with 107 million monthly active users worldwide. Brave Search is the default search engine in Brave, and is also available in any browser at search.brave.com. Brave Search is the third-largest global independent search engine, with an index of over 35 billion webpages and handling over 2 billion monthly queries.

The Brave Search API helps organizations supply their AI LLMs with real-time data, power agentic search, train foundation models, and create search-enabled software, and is for building applications that benefit from having access to the Web, going beyond the static knowledge of AI models.

For more information, visit brave.com or follow the company on X @brave.

What happened to crypto prices this weekend?

Partnering with Waymo to Reshape how the World Moves

By Konstantine Buhler and Abhishek Malani Published February 2, 2026

1,190,000. That’s the number of road traffic deaths in a year. They are a leading cause of death for children and young adults worldwide. 

Ninety percent. That’s the reduction in serious injury crashes Waymo has achieved across 127 million fully autonomous miles. The technology to prevent most of these tragedies isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s operating at commercial scale across multiple cities, and it’s ready to expand.

Today, we’re honored to announce that Sequoia is co-leading Waymo’s $16 billion investment round alongside Dragoneer and DST Global. It reflects a simple truth: the age of autonomous mobility has arrived.

Why This Matters

The impact of autonomous vehicles will be profound. Beyond the safety improvements, which matter most, autonomous vehicles could return trillions of hours to humanity that are currently spent behind the wheel. They can bring mobility for those who cannot drive. They can offer cleaner, more efficient cities. They may fundamentally reshape urban life for the better.

At Sequoia, we help the daring build legendary companies. It is daring to work to automate a task humans spend trillions of hours on a year. It is legendary to massively decrease the loss of human lives and reshape mobility

The Business Reality

The numbers tell a remarkable story: Waymo delivered more than 15 million paid rides in 2025 alone. Today there are more than 400K rides every week across six major U.S. metropolitan areas. These aren’t test rides or demos. These are people relying on Waymo to get to work, to visit family, to live their lives.

Every mile driven makes the system safer. Every ride makes the experience better. Each city launched creates more value for the next. This is a compounding virtuous data cycle. We believe Waymo has built not only one of the most advanced manifestations of AI in the physical world, but also a vital service that will become as fundamental to modern life as smartphones or the internet itself.

The Market Opportunity

Transportation is a $7 trillion global market, and the shift to autonomous mobility is one of the defining technology transitions of our time.

What drew us to Waymo was not only the technology, but also the operational excellence required to deploy that technology at scale in the real world. Building an autonomous vehicle in a lab is hard. Building one that works safely is harder. Building one that works safely in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and Las Vegas, in rain and shine, day and night, while maintaining customer delight and regulatory trust, requires a rare combination of technical depth and operational sophistication.

The Team

Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov are exceptional leaders. Tekedra brings operational rigor and regulatory understanding, combined with the community trust-building required to bring autonomous vehicles to new markets. Dmitri is one of the world’s foremost experts in autonomous driving, having led Waymo’s technical development since its inception as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009.

What struck us most in our conversations with the Waymo team was their clarity of purpose. They are building Waymo not as a technology demonstration but as infrastructure that will reshape how the world moves. That mission orientation, combined with their execution track record, gives us tremendous conviction in what they will accomplish in the years ahead.

What’s Next

We’ve watched Waymo achieve something special: moving from cutting-edge research to commercial deployment, with the operational maturity and safety record to support continued expansion. 

We’ve studied Waymo’s safety data, ridden in their vehicles, met their team, and observed their operations firsthand. 

With this capital, Waymo is planning significant expansion. They’re targeting 20 additional cities this year, primarily across the United States with select international markets. The recent Miami launch demonstrated their approach: enter a market, earn trust through safety, scale rapidly through operational excellence. They’re scaling their fleet and building the team required to meet rapidly growing demand for autonomous mobility.

We’re excited to support the Waymo team as they expand the safety and magic of the Waymo Driver to more cities and, over time, to the world.

We’re early on this journey and honored to be part of it. Let’s ride.

To learn more about Waymo, visit waymo.com. To join the team building the future of transportation, see their careers page. 

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The post Partnering With Waymo appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

Prices rose modestly after a stronger-than-expected U.S. manufacturing report.

Crypto experts agree creator coins haven’t worked so far, but some disagree on whether Buterin’s proposed fix solves the problem.

ZAMA is currently trading 30% below its ICO price.

President Trump received $500M from the UAE's "spy sheikh" for a slice of his crypto empire

BitMine is sitting on over $6B in unrealized trading losses.

The stablecoin-focused blockchain backed by Bitfinex is slated to roll out its mainnet upgrade on Feb 4.

The latest document release outlines Epstein's extensive relationship with Brock Pierce.

The new markets will trade on Hypercore via the upcoming HIP-4 upgrade.

Traders appeared to read the disclosure as bullish despite governance and legal questions.

The stablecoin’s market cap almost tripled in 2025 alone.

a16z general partner David Haber spoke with Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz on the current macro environment, enterprise AI adoption, and crypto and AI policy. Solomon describes what he calls the "sweetest spot" he's seen in 40 years and explains Goldman's "One GS 3.0" initiative to reimagine core processes with AI. Horowitz discusses why "leads aren't what they once were" in AI and how a16z grew from a startup VC to capturing 18% of all US venture capital.

 

Resources: 

Follow David Solomon on X: https://twitter.com/DavidSolomon

Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz

Follow David Haber on X: https://twitter.com/dhaber

 

Timestamps: 

00:00 — Introduction

02:09 — Goldman's Evolution from Partnership to Public Company

08:54 — How a16z Went from Top Tier to 18% of All US Venture Capital

15:33 — "As Sweet a Spot" as Solomon Has Seen in 40 Years

19:00 — M&A Outlook: "Whatever the Question Is, the Answer Is Maybe"

21:33 — Why Leads Aren't What They Once Were in AI

23:03 — Crypto Policy: The Genius Act and Clarity Act

25:24 — AI Policy: "Don't Regulate Math"

28:03 — One GS 3.0: Reimagining Processes with AI

32:54 — Will AI Agents Change Investing?

34:00 — Favorite DJ

 

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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The bank said its institutional clients will be able to manage fiat currencies and stablecoins in one place.

If you’ve lived in France and looked for a job since the early 2000s, there’s a high probability your personal details were part of the data breach.

When you are the primary government agency responsible for helping millions of people find work, you aren’t just a bureaucracy. You are a treasure chest. And as France Travail recently learned, if you leave the lid unlocked for two decades, someone is eventually going to reach inside.

Last week, the French data protection authority (CNIL) handed down a $6 million fine to the agency, following a security breach that exposed the data of nearly everyone who had registered with the organization over the last 20 years.

In early 2024, hackers used classic social engineering to infiltrate France Travail. By tricking staff at organizations responsible for supporting job seekers with disabilities, the attackers successfully hijacked their accounts.

Once inside, the hackers found they had far more power than they should have. The CNIL’s investigation revealed that France Travail had violated the “principle of least privilege,” meaning users had access to way more data than was actually necessary for their jobs.

Perhaps the most disturbing detail of the breach is the timeline. The hackers didn’t just get current records; they accessed the data of everyone who had interacted with the agency for the past two decades.

While sensitive health data remained untouched, the haul was still a fraudster’s dream: national insurance numbers, email and postal addresses, and telephone numbers.

Why did it take so long to notice? The CNIL pointed to several “essential security principles” that were ignored. For one, the barriers to entry were too low for such sensitive systems. Furthermore, there weren’t enough checks on system logs to detect “abnormal behaviour.” When the hackers started vacuuming up 20 years of history, the alarms didn’t go off because, essentially, there were no alarms installed.

The $6 million fine is basically an “I told you so” from the French government to its own agency. CNIL justified the heavy penalty based on the massive number of people affected and the ignorance of basic security protocols. For its part, France Travail says it recognizes the seriousness of the events but expressed regret over the severity of the fine, citing its commitment to cybersecurity after the disaster occurred.

In the world of data privacy, the answer to “What could possibly go wrong?” is usually: everything you didn’t bother to monitor.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

20 Years of Data, Zero Alarms was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this episode, host Friederike Ernst is joined by Thomas Thiery, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, to discuss EIP-7805 and the implementation of FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists). Thomas explains how the rise of MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) has created a centralized builder market where a few actors now control over 85% of Ethereum's block production, creating a dangerous bottleneck for censorship. FOCIL addresses this by empowering a decentralized committee of 16 validators to mandate transaction inclusion, making any block that ignores these lists invalid.

 

They explore the "Tornado Cash" moment and the risks of "silent censorship" for competitive or regulatory reasons. Thomas explains why FOCIL intentionally prioritizes the public mempool over MEV-heavy transactions to prevent the system from being co-opted. Finally, the conversation looks at the future of the Ethereum roadmap, including the Osaka fork and the technical trade-offs between inclusion lists and long-term privacy solutions like encrypted mempools.

 

Topics

00:00 Intro & FOCIL

04:15 MEV & Centralization

09:30 The Builder-Searcher Pipeline

15:00 Silent Censorship Risks

21:45 FOCIL Architecture & Committees

27:10 Validity Rules for Attestors

35:20 Spam Protection & Invalid TXs

42:15 FOCIL vs. Encrypted Mempools

49:00 EIP-7805 Status & Fork Timelines

55:30 Future: PQC & ZK EVM

Links

Thomas Thiery on X: https://x.com/soispoke

Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.foundation/

EIP-7805 (FOCIL): https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7805

Gnosis: https://gnosis.io/

Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io

Expert opinions diverge on the scope and timing of the threat.

The Irish government has announced plans to draft new legislation that would officially permit law enforcement agencies to use spyware.

Jim O’Callaghan, the Minister of Justice for Home Affairs and Migration, stated last week that the move is essential for the nation to modernize its “lawful interception powers.” According to O’Callaghan, creating a formal legal basis for the use of “covert surveillance software” is necessary to effectively combat serious crime and evolving security threats.

The law will allow authorities to deploy surveillance software to infiltrate devices. It also allows for the use of electronic scanning equipment designed to pinpoint and record identifier data from mobile devices, enabling them to be tracked to specific geographic areas.

Minister O’Callaghan described the planned legislation as “long overdue,” arguing that the current system needs to keep pace with modern technology. However, recognizing the sensitive nature of these tools, he emphasized that the bill would include “robust legal safeguards to provide continued assurance that the use of such powers is necessary and proportionate.”

Proponents highlight that the bill actually increases judicial control. Currently, the Minister can sign warrants, but the new bill moves this power to the courts, requiring a judge to verify that the surveillance is necessary.

But on the flip side, one could argue that once the state has a legal basis to use spyware, it creates a climate of fear. Even if intended for serious crime, these tools have a global track record of being used against journalists, whistleblowers, and political activists. Furthermore, you cannot break encryption for the police without breaking it for everyone. By forcing companies to cooperate with covert software or creating backdoors, the government creates vulnerabilities that foreign hackers and hostile states will eventually exploit.

History shows that “extraordinary” powers rarely stay that way. The ICCL warns that tools designed for terrorism often “creep” into use for petty crimes or public order offenses once the technology becomes routine.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

Ireland Tilts Toward State-Sanctioned Spyware was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Token design level-ups helping solve the 'good coins problem.'

We are excited to share Panther Protocol’s $ZKP listing on LCX! The Liechtenstein Cryptocurrency Exchange (LCX) is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange and tokenization platform building institutional-grade infrastructure for digital assets. Through this listing, Panther Protocol’s $ZKP token will gain greater exposure in the European market by becoming accessible to LCX's 250,000 users. 

With the upcoming Mainnet launch, this listing will improve the on- and off-ramp accessibility of the $ZKP token, creating additional opportunities to onboard more users to the Panther ecosystem. Especially in the EU. With the LCX listing, $ZKP will now be available on six exchanges, including MEXC, Uniswap (DEX), HTX, Lbank, and BitMart. 

LCX will support the ZKP/EUR trading pair, with the listing date set for February 3rd. 

About LCX

LCX (https://lcx.com) is a regulated, MiCA-ready, EU-focused centralized exchange (CEX) dedicated to providing solutions for compliant digital assets. With its headquarters in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and offices in Crypto-Valley Zug, Switzerland, LCX (Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange) offers a secure platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing digital currencies. LCX has obtained 9 crypto-related registrations from the Financial Market Authority of Liechtenstein, operates under the new blockchain laws, and has introduced a comprehensive crypto compliance suite. 

About Panther Protocol Foundation

Panther Protocol Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the growth, sustainability, and responsible use of Panther Protocol. While it does not operate the protocol or facilitate digital asset services, the Foundation plays a critical role in promoting adoption, supporting open-source development, advancing research, and raising awareness around the protocol’s core privacy-preserving technologies.

By empowering users, developers, and permissioned actors within DeFi and web3, the Foundation contributes to building a more secure and confidential digital future.

For more information, visit www.panther.org.

To learn more about Panther Protocol, visit www.pantherprotocol.io.

Contact
Panther Protocol Foundation
📧 Email: general@panther.org
🌐 Website: www.panther.org

Disclaimer: The Panther Protocol Foundation is not recommending that readers engage in cryptoasset trading activity, and users or potential users of the protocol should not regard this message or its contents as involving any form of recommendation, invitation, or inducement to deal in cryptoassets. Due to the potential for losses, regulators consider this asset class to be high risk.

Pay-on-behalf experiments are expanding crypto payment acceptance, but some experts have regulatory concerns.

PIVX Weekly Pulse (Jan. 23rd, 2026 — Jan. 29th, 2026)

Your PIVX weekly pulse is here. We’ve broken down the last seven days of market shifts, listings, and community updates into one essential read. Let’s get into it.

Market Pulse Privacy Meets Fashion: History has been made in the heart of Nigeria. A boutique store in Lagos has officially become the first in the country to accept PIV. No more middleman fees or prying eyes; just authentic style met with authentic privacy. Masternode Count: While the PIVX masternode network has maintained a high level of resilience, we’ve seen a slight shift in the numbers this week. The number of active masternodes dipped from 2,122 to 2,098, with 24 nodes moving offline. This minor contraction likely mirrors the broader ‘risk-off’ sentiment across the crypto market, as some operators may be moving to safeguard their collateral against recent price volatility. Price Check: Despite a strong start, PIVX price action succumbed to general market pressures this week. Amidst a bearish environment that saw BTC and ETH drop by roughly 7% and 6% over the last seven days, PIVX traded in a broad range of $0.14 to $0.19. This volatility resulted in a weekly average of $0.1634, marking a 6.89% dip compared to the previous week’s average of $0.1755. Trading Buzz: Trading volume followed the general market trend this week, settling at $20.6 million compared to last week’s $58.9 million. While this represents a 65.03% decline in total weekly activity, the underlying liquidity remained robust. Daily volumes exceeded the $2 million mark throughout the period.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

PIVX Weekly Pulse (Jan. 23rd, 2026 — Jan. 29th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The DeFi product suite and super app launched its token today.

Lower spending and more conservative treasury management helped Polkadot record a profit in Q4, according to a new report.

Approval would help prediction markets accommodate institutional volumes.

KRAKacquisition Corp is trading on Nasdaq under the ticker KRAQU.

The nominee poised to replace Jerome Powell has been echoing Trump's claims the current chair has been too slow to cut rates.

Kain Warwick—DeFi OG and founder of Synthetix and Infinex—is back on The Defiant Podcast with Camila Russo for a no-BS conversation at a pivotal moment: Infinex just ran its INX token sale and is heading into its TGE.

Crypto Twitter feels broken – can X fix it? And where does onchain social fit in?

AI judges could fix prediction markets, but only if their decisions are reproducible.

Ethereum Layer 2 network MegaETH is slated to launch its mainnet and native token on Feb. 9.

The limited-run NFT collection was claimable by top users last week and will offer Ink Points boosts going forward.

ETF buying, staking and corporate holdings continue to reduce liquid ETH.

Binance plans to convert its $1 billion SAFU fund into BTC within the next month.

All the top-10 cryptocurrencies are extending yesterday's losses as total market cap holds out around $2.9 trillion.

Ten years ago, on January 30, 2016, a silent revolution was hard-coded into the genesis block of a project then known as Darknet (DNET). It didn’t launch with a flashy Silicon Valley ICO or a billionaire’s tweet. But it held a promise to make financial privacy not just an option, but a human right.

Today, as PIVX celebrates its 10th anniversary, it stands as a rare survivor of many crypto cycles, bull run, and bear markets. We trace the timeline of a decade of decrypting freedom.

2016: The Silent Birth

The revolution didn’t start in a boardroom; it began on January 30, 2016, with the launch of Darknet (DNET). Forked from Dash, it was built by visionaries who believed that anonymity was being diluted. With a fair launch and no pre-mine, the power was handed to the community from day one.

Although the first block was mined using Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, the project quickly transitioned to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) in August of the same year. It is worth mentioning that the first budget superblock payout occurred on April 3, 2016, activating PIVX’s decentralized governance and self-funding mechanism.

2017: Painting the World Purple

As the project matured, it shed its “DNET” moniker and rebranded to PIVX. This era saw the introduction of the iconic purple branding and the PIVX Manifesto, which declared privacy a non-negotiable human right.

By June, PIVX set the pace by becoming the first PoS blockchain to enable fully anonymous transactions following the implementation of the Zerocoin protocol. The first zPIV was minted and spent on testnet, effectively cutting the digital paper trail.

2018: Pioneer of Private Staking

Another major first for PIVX was the launch of zerocoin proof of stake (zPoS). This was enabled in May 2018. For the first time, users could earn rewards while remaining completely anonymous through zPoS.

Barely three months later, the network hit another milestone. More than 10 million PIV had been anonymized via the zerocoin protocol. PIVX was eventually recognized as a pioneer in privacy-centric PoS tech. Meanwhile, advanced testing was underway for a decentralized exchange feature.

2019: The Trial by Fire

This was the year PIVX proved its resilience. Following the departure of the founder and two lead developers, the network faced its greatest technical challenge. In early March, the team detected “Wrapped Serials” exploit activity. Within days, the exploit was publicly confirmed, and zPIV functionality was disabled network-wide via spork.

While a subsequent libzerocoin vulnerability was disclosed in April, PIVX remained unaffected because of its swift response. This crisis became a catalyst. The team accelerated research into zk-SNARKs, releasing conversion tools to move users from zPIV back to PIV and laying the bedrock for what would eventually become SHIELD.

2020: The Road to SHIELD

While the world went into lockdown, PIVX entered an intense R&D phase. In February, the “Road to 5.0” was announced, a bold commitment to be the first PoS chain to implement zk-SNARKs (Sapling).

The year was a flurry of breakthroughs: Cold Staking was fully activated in January, allowing secure, non-custodial earning. By August, the team had Sapling running on regtest, and by November, they completed the first-ever shielded-to-shielded transaction on a PoS network. It was a foundational year of gutting the obsolete Zerocoin code to build a modern cryptographic fortress.

2021: The Dawn of SHIELD

On its 5th anniversary, PIVX unleashed its masterpiece. On January 30, 2021, at block 2,700,500, the SHIELD protocol was activated via a hard fork. This moved PIVX into the “Zero-Knowledge” era, giving users the ability to send fast and fully shielded transactions.

No longer did users have to “mint” specific denominations of coins; instead, they could send any amount, including decimals, with total invisibility. SHIELD became the ultimate tool for financial data protection, hiding the sender, the receiver, and the transaction value from the public blockchain.

2022: Governance at Your Fingertips

To ensure the DAO remained truly democratic, PIVX introduced a dedicated Governance Tab directly into the core wallet. This transformed blockchain voting into a simple, visual interface, allowing any Masternode owner to view and vote on community proposals with a single click, further decentralizing the project’s future.

2023: The New Economic Engine

PIVX released its updated Economics Whitepaper in January 2023, restructuring rewards to fuel long-term growth. The new block distribution allocated 6 PIV to Masternodes, 4 PIV to Stakers, and increased the Treasury allocation to fund a new decade of innovation. This ensured the network remained both secure and self-sustaining.

Utility also took a leap forward this year with the launch of PIVCards. The service provided a bridge between digital privacy and real-world spending, allowing users to buy gift cards for countless brands like Amazon, Netflix, and Steam without needing an account or sharing personal info.

2024: Compliance Without Compromise

As global regulations intensified, PIVX v5.6 introduced a masterstroke of pragmatism: Exchange Addresses. This new address type allowed centralized exchanges to remain compliant by restricting incoming shielded transactions. It was a bridge between the world of radical privacy and the world of traditional finance, ensuring PIVX remained liquid and accessible to the public.

Furthermore, the introduction of Shielded UTXO Locking brought full feature parity to the wallet. Users could now “lock” their private funds just as easily as their transparent ones, preventing accidental spends and providing granular control over their holdings.

2025: Global Outreach and the Vector Era

PIVX evolved its community strategy with the launch of the Global Ambassador Program. The program was so popular that the team had to close applications within 48 hours, resulting in a tier of “Advocates” who localized the PIVX message through meetups and merchant outreach across the globe.

On the technical horizon, the most talked-about release was Vector, a brainchild of devs from PIVX Labs. Originally unveiled as Chatstr, Vector is a privacy-centric messaging app that bridges the PIVX and Nostr ecosystems. It introduces a paradigm where your PIVX wallet is your identity, enabling encrypted communication and a future intended to compete with mainstream platforms like Telegram.

Conclusion

From the experimental days of Darknet to the sophisticated, zero-knowledge architecture of SHIELD, the mission remains unchanged: to give individuals the keys to their own financial destiny. PIVX has survived a decade by refusing to compromise, adapting to regulation without sacrificing its soul, and prioritizing the community over the corporation.

The next ten years will undoubtedly bring new challenges, but the foundation is unshakeable. Whether through localized grassroots advocacy or cutting-edge cryptographic breakthroughs, PIVX continues to lead the charge. The genesis block may have been mined in 2016, but the era of true financial freedom is only just beginning.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

PIVX at 10: A Decade of Decrypting Freedom was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have just released FROST v3.0.0-rc.0. The main changes in this release have been changing the cheater detection feature to allow specifying as a function parameter instead of a compile-time feature, a big refactor of the repair share and refresh share functionality, improving our test coverage for serialisation and async, and some significant improvements to our documentation.

Feature Configuration Changes

The `cheater-detection` feature was removed to simplify the feature matrix and reduce maintenance burden. Since most users want cheater detection enabled, it is now the default behavior. For users who explicitly need to disable it (e.g., for performance in trusted environments), a new `aggregate_custom()` function was added that accepts a `CheaterDetection` argument. The `std` and `nightly` features have also been removed since the crates are now no-std by default (with the exception of frost-ed448) and the nightly feature was never used. 

Key Refresh and Repairable Module Improvements

The `refresh` module was simplified to improve usability: `compute_refreshing_shares()` no longer takes `min_signers` and `max_signers` arguments since these values can be inferred from the `PublicKeyPackage`. This prevents errors from mismatched parameters and makes the API harder to misuse.

The `repairable` module also underwent some refactoring to improve readability. Functions were renamed from `repair_share_step_X()` to `repair_share_partX()` for consistency with DKG naming. New `Delta` and `Sigma` types replace raw `Scalar` values, preventing accidental misuse, and these functions now return a `KeyPackage` instead of `SecretShare`, which is more useful since `SecretShare`s do not need to be stored long-term.

To improve security, `ZeroizeOnDrop` was implemented for `SigningNonces`, ensuring that sensitive nonce material is automatically zeroed from memory when it goes out of scope.

Enhancements

We added `pre_commitment_aggregate()` and `pre_commitment_sign()` hooks to the `Ciphersuite` trait as well as `Ciphersuite::post_generate()` to allow ciphersuit specific customization.

A `min_signers` argument was added to `PublicKeyPackage::new()` (wrapped in `Option` for backwards compatibility) to ensure threshold information is preserved with the public key package. The `frost-rerandomized` crate is now re-exported in ciphersuite crates, making it easier to use rerandomized signing without additional imports.

The `InvalidSignatureShare::culprit` field was changed to `culprits` (now a `Vec`), and `Error::culprit()` was similarly renamed to `culprits()`, allowing multiple misbehaving participants to be identified in a single aggregation attempt. The `Ciphersuite`, `Scalar`, and `Element` traits now require `Send` and `Sync` bounds to enable safe use in async contexts. The serialization traits (`SignatureSerialization`, `Field::Serialization`, `Element::Serialization`) were simplified to no longer require `TryFrom<Vec<u8>>`; instead they must implement `AsMut<[u8]>` and `TryFrom<&[u8]>`, which avoids unnecessary allocator usage and enables encryption of DKG round 2 data without allocation. 

frost-rerandomized Crate

The `cheater-detection` feature was also removed from this crate with the same behavior changes as frost-core.

The frost-rerandomized crate received a revamped API motivated by Zcash integration requirements. The previous approach generated randomizers in a way that depended on a single party’s randomness whereas the new API ensures all signing parties contribute to the randomness, improving security.

New functions include `RandomizedParams` created for generating a randomizer based on signing commitments and fresh random data, and for recreating the same randomizer from a stored seed. 

Documentation Improvements

Documentation was expanded to clarify security requirements: authenticated and confidential channels are needed for DKG (to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks during key generation), but only authenticated channels are needed for signing. Warnings about secp256k1 usage were added to help users understand the security considerations.

A network topologies documentation section was added explaining the different ways FROST participants can be organized. A FROST Server section and zcash-devtool demo section have also been added.

There are lots of breaking changes, so please do have a look at the frost-core Changelog as well as the frost-rerandomized Changelog for more details before upgrading.

Many thanks to @conradoplg, @natalieesk, @mpguerra, @StackOverflowExcept1on, @VolodymyrBg, @crStiv, @azuchi and @kwsantiago for their contributions.

Thanks for reading!

The post FROST Release v3.0.0-rc.0 appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Warsh is known as having a neutral to positive stance on Bitcoin and crypto.

Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now submits pull requests he built entirely through prompting, never touching code himself, and why 25% of users immediately copy error messages to LLMs instead of debugging manually. The web isn't dying to agents; it's being reborn by them, with CEOs coding again and non-developers shipping production apps while the entire economics of software—from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to pure usage—gets rewritten in real-time.

 

Resources:

Follow Matt Biilmann on X: https://x.com/biilmann

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

 

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Before Fusaka went live, Bitwise's CIO had predicted that the upgrade would increase Ethereum's revenue capture.

The new standard enables AI systems to use creative work legally and to automatically pay rights holders.

In this interview, Camila Russo sits down with Danny Ryan — former Ethereum Foundation researcher and a key leader behind Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake — now Co-Founder & President at Etherealize, to talk about the next big wave for crypto: institutional adoption of Ethereum. Recorded in Buenos Aires during Devconnect, Danny breaks down why the mood inside banks has flipped from “we can’t touch crypto” to “if we don’t adopt it, we’ll be left behind.” We dig into what institutions actually want beyond ETFs, why the biggest opportunity isn’t “tokenizing assets” but rewiring markets from first principles, and why privacy is table stakes for institutional-grade onchain finance.

From fledgling bets to bona fide unicorn hype machines, these crypto startups have narrative momentum on their backs.

The Ethereum scaling solution is launching a deployment suite for enterprise clients looking to build blockchains.

As AI streamlines NFT development, a renewed cycle of experimentation is taking shape.

The new guidance focuses on the structure of tokenized securities.

The Senate Agriculture Committee passed its crypto clarity bill on party lines.

While Bitcoin ETFs still lead by a wide margin, Solana’s early ETF inflows outpaced Ethereum’s launch period.

More than 70,500 ETH left unclaimed after the 2016 DAO hack will be deployed through a new fund focused on Ethereum security.

While the Senate Agriculture Committee passed its part of the crypto market structure bill today, the Senate Banking Committee has yet to vote on its more comprehensive version of the CLARITY Act.

BTC slipped below $85,000 as stocks took a hit this morning, reportedly driven by AI spending fears after Microsoft's earnings report.

Unclaimed funds from the 2016 DAO hack are being repurposed into a $220M security endowment for the Ethereum ecosystem.

As part of its "reboot," the early decentralized prediction protocol is developing a shared on-chain "truth layer" for other protocols.

The pro-crypto super PAC's backers include Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z.

The 1INCH token tanked after on-chain data showed millions of dollars in sales from early investor wallets.

Recently, Marc Andreessen joined Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast. They talked about why 2025 may be the most significant year in tech history, how AI is reshaping the future of product managers, designers, and engineers, and what founders need to understand about building in this moment—from where moats actually exist in AI to what the most AI-native companies are doing differently to the skills Marc is teaching his own kids to thrive in what comes next.

 

Resources:

Follow Marc Andreessen on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca

Follow Lenny Rachitsky on X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

Check out Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast

 

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Twin market structure bills in the Senate are raising eyebrows in the crypto industry.

WisdomTree's integration of its tokenized fund offerings with the Solana blockchain emphasizes the rising demand for regulated real-world assets (RWAs) within the decentralized finance landscape.

Open AI is reportedly building its own social network with biometric identity verification.

Coinbase, in collaboration with Kalshi, has introduced prediction markets across all 50 U.S. states, allowing users to trade on real-world events.

The CLANKER and BANKR tokens are up 24% and 34% as attention turns back towards the AI agent ecosystem on Base.

Industry experts say Fidelity’s decision to launch FIDD on Ethereum could signal growing institutional comfort with public blockchain infrastructure.

Going bankless in the age of wrench attacks.

The Optimism community reached a quorum authorizing a yearlong program to convert Superchain revenue into OP purchases starting in February.

Vitalik made a 16% return through Polymarket in 2025.

Partnering With Flapping Airplanes

Building the “young person’s AGI lab” to unlock data efficient models, which we believe is the bottleneck to laddering up the next rung of AI intelligence

By David Cahn Published January 28, 2026

Sometimes you meet a founder who is so good that you want to back them no matter what they are working on. Just as rarely, you meet a company whose vision is so singular, it feels both inevitable and differentiated at the same time. When I first sat down with Ben and Asher Spector to discuss Flapping Airplanes, I felt both of these to be true at once. 

Ben is a founder of Prod, which has quickly become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley. Asher, one year Ben’s senior, is a former debate champion turned Stanford statistics Ph.D. The brothers have an eye for raw talent, and aged 25 and 26 respectively, they are building the “young person’s AGI lab.” Their co-founder Aidan Smith is a former founder and  Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink for three years while in college at Georgia Tech. Ben and Asher believe that raw talent — the type of people who would previously have gone on to do Ph.D.s or join quant firms — are the key to unlocking the next phase of AI development. This stands in sharp contrast to the approach of focusing on “brand name” AI talent at any price, which seems so in vogue right now. 

There is something else that is countercultural about this lab too: they recognize that scale alone is not enough. Indeed, the lab is predicated on this notion. There is only one Internet, and we’ve run out of it. Data is the bottleneck today to further AI scaling, not compute. Today’s AI models are wildly inefficient, something that Dwarkesh Patel has recently hammered home in his interviews with Andrej Karpathy, Richard Sutton and others. Flapping Airplanes is dedicated to searching for a more data-efficient AI. The company’s name is a nod to a more biological notion of machine intelligence.

Research vs. Scaling

One of the fundamental debates right now in AI is around scaling vs. research. The scaling paradigm argues for dedicating a huge amount of society’s resources, as much as the economy can muster, toward scaling up today’s LLMs, in the hopes that this will lead to AGI. The research paradigm argues that we are 2-3 research breakthroughs away from an “AGI” intelligence, and as a result, we should dedicate resources to long-running research, especially projects that may take 5-10 years to come to fruition. 

While the divide between these two schools of thought is far from absolute — research breakthroughs make compute investments more efficient, and GPUs are required for net new research — they each lead to different tradeoffs. A compute-first approach would prioritize cluster scale above all else, and would heavily favor short-term wins (on the order of 1-2 years) over long-term bets (on the order of 5-10 years). A research-first approach would spread bets temporally, and should be willing to make lots of bets that have a low absolute probability of working, but that collectively expand the search space for what is possible.

One concern I have had is that by starving Ph.D. programs of talent, and by reallocating a lot of this talent to scale-oriented work (as opposed to fundamental research), we could actually push out the AGI timeline. As I noted in a previous blog post, “corporate politics tends to favor in vogue, consensus ideas over more radical, unpopular ones — the very kinds of ideas that can take years to prove worthwhile, and which scientific breakthroughs often depend on.” Flapping Airplanes is explicitly intended to provide a Ph.D.-like experience — true research independence, long-time horizons — while bridging the pay gap between academia and Big Tech.

One of the biggest learnings of the last decade in AI is the dramatic economic value of fundamental scientific progress. Since academia seems ill-suited to compete with Big Tech on this dimension right now, especially in AI, Flapping Airplanes is taking this into their own hands. And they are focused on precisely the problem that is likely to define the next wave of AI: building models inspired by the data efficiency of biology. With that as a north star, the company will make bets in a variety of directions to get there. 

Profit Motive vs. AGI Motive

There are two coherent motives right now in AI. One is the profit motive, and this should inspire all application builders, given the tremendous opportunity ahead. As I have noted on many occasions, AI is so underpenetrated relative to the capability set available, it is likely to create a golden age for builders for many years to come. There is a large profit pool available, and we are in the very earliest stages of generating it.

The second coherent motive in AI is AGI, predicated on the belief that now that we’ve unlocked a machine intelligence, we should push toward upleveling that intelligence. Economically, progress in this direction is likely to be extremely valuable. The question is how to take on this objective in an efficient way, with a reasonable probability that resources invested will translate into long-term positive results. Flapping Airplanes is a pure play in that direction. 

The New Guard

One of the most attractive aspects for me in partnering with Flapping Airplanes was the team. I have met nearly every candidate that has interviewed at Flapping Airplanes, and certainly every person the company has hired. This is one of the best teams I’ve ever seen assembled at the beginning of such an ambitious journey. 

There are two core beliefs that make Flapping Airplanes different for top talent:

A belief that young people have always unlocked fundamental science in the past (Einstein was 26 during his “Miracle Year”) A conviction that AI research is not a mystical domain for experts, but a domain learnable by anyone that is smart and ambitious

With just these two premises, Flapping Airplanes is at odds with a prestige-obsessed culture in the Valley right now. It is exactly this obsession with substance and with raw individual talent that made Ben so successful at Prod, and it is this “flame spotting” ability that gives me confidence in the courageous effort that is now Flapping Airplanes.

If you are interested to join, please reach out to recruiting@flappingairplanes.com.

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Most large-caps are posting modest gains today, despite crypto market sentiment remaining fear-driven ahead of today's Fed meeting.

Fidelity Digital Dollar will launch on Ethereum in the coming weeks.

The L2's mainnet launch will follow a week-long stress test that aims to process 11 billion transactions at a sustained 15–35K TPS.

It’s no secret that many blockchain projects rely on a centralized foundation or a small group of lead developers to decide where funding goes. PIVX, however, operates as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and central to this autonomy is the PIVX Treasury.

The PIVX Treasury is a self-funding mechanism that ensures the project doesn’t have to rely on venture capital, ICOs, or “charity” to survive. In this article, I’ll work you through all you need to know about the Treasury.

Where the Money Comes From

PIVX does not have a cap on its supply. Instead, the network PIVX utilizes a dynamic coin supply model. That said, the Treasury is not a pre-mined pot of gold; rather, it is fueled by the blockchain’s emission schedule.

Every time a new block is “minted” (roughly every 60 seconds), a specific amount of PIV is created. As of 2026, the standard reward distribution for a single block is 4 PIV to stakers for securing the network, 6 PIV to masternode operators for governance, and 10 PIV is “allocated” to the treasury.

While staker and masternode rewards are minted instantly, the 10 PIV treasury allocation is not created immediately. It is simply “available” to be minted if the community votes for a proposal. If no proposals are passed, those coins are never created.

The Power of the Masternode

The Treasury is a democracy, but it is one where the “voters” are those with a significant stake in the network’s health. To vote on how the Treasury funds are spent, one must operate a masternode.

A Masternode requires a locked collateral of 10,000 PIV. Each Masternode equals one vote. This ensures that the people making financial decisions are heavily incentivized to act in the best interest of the coin’s value and longevity. Because anyone with 10,000 PIV can set up a node, the power is spread across hundreds of individual owners globally rather than a single board of directors.

The Lifecycle of a Proposal

The Treasury operates on a monthly cycle, culminating in an event known as the Superblock.

Step 1: Submission

Anyone, from a lead developer to a community member, can submit a proposal to the network. To prevent “proposal spam,” the network requires a submission fee of 50 PIV, which is permanently burned (destroyed).

Step 2: Debate and Voting

Proposals are usually published on the community forum or discussed in the PIVX Discord. Masternode owners use their PIVX Core wallets or the MyPIVXWallet to cast “Yes,” “No,” or “Abstain” votes.

Step 3: The Superblock

Every 43,200 blocks (approximately 30 days), the blockchain looks at all active proposals. A proposal “passes” if it receives a net total of positive votes exceeding 10% of the total Masternode count. If the proposal passes, the network automatically creates a Superblock.

The Superblock contains the total amount of PIV requested by the winning proposals. The PIV is sent directly from the blockchain to the proposer’s address. There is no middleman.

It is worth mentioning again that the treasure has a “use it” or “lose it” nature. So, if the community only votes to spend 10,000 PIV, the remaining 33,200 PIV are never minted. All transaction fees on the network are burned, and unused treasury allocations are skipped. This creates a counterbalance to inflation, ensuring that the PIVX economy remains stable over decades.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

How the PIVX Treasury Works was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After the BIRB tokenomics dropped, the Moonbirds NFT floor slid over 30%.

As we begin 2026, the Zcash Foundation (ZF) stands at a pivotal moment in its mission to steward privacy-preserving financial infrastructure for the public good.

This year our priorities reflect both maturity and ambition. Across  engineering, community engagement, and humanitarian initiatives, we are strengthening the tools that make privacy possible, deepening our collaborative partnerships, and ensuring that the next phase of Zcash development is even more accessible, resilient, and impactful than ever before.

Zebra: A Modern Foundation for Zcash

Following Network Upgrade 7 (NU7), Zebra will become the sole consensus node implementation. Written in Rust, Zebra embodies ZF’s commitment to open, modular, and verifiable infrastructure—designed to make it easier for developers, wallets, and applications to integrate with the Zcash ecosystem.

In 2026, our focus is threefold:

Performance: Benchmarking Zebra’s performance and addressing regressions to ensure reliable, high-throughput operation. Consensus: Completing implementation of NU7 ZIPs to reflect the full consensus of the Zcash community. Integration and Privacy: Advancing the Z3 stack—integrating Zebra, Zaino, and Zallet—to create a seamless replacement for legacy zcashd, with built-in Tor support for end-to-end network-level anonymity.

These efforts not only enhance efficiency and usability but also reinforce Zcash’s core promise: privacy that’s both principled and practical.

FROST: Threshold Signatures for the Next Generation

ZF’s work on FROST for Zcash continues to mature. FROST—Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures—enables shielded transactions to be authorized by multiple participants without compromising unlinkability, a key requirement for post-NU7 lockbox distribution.

Our 2026 goals for FROST for Zcash include:

Releasing FROST v3 and finalizing ZIP-312, moving it out of draft status. Integrating FROST into zcash-devtool for broader developer accessibility. Implementing a Distributed Key Generation (DKG) protocol to support key generation and secure multiparty signing.

These milestones ensure that multi-party control over Zcash funds is not only possible but easy to implement—empowering institutions and communities alike.

Shielded Aid Initiative (SAI): Privacy in Humanitarian Practice

Through the Shielded Aid Initiative (SAI), ZF continues to demonstrate how privacy-preserving technology can directly improve lives. SAI partners with humanitarian organizations to embed privacy into digital cash programs—ensuring that innovation strengthens protection, rather than creating new risks.

In 2026, SAI’s focus areas are:

Building credibility through field-tested pilots, high-impact publications, and sector engagement. Exploring partnerships that unite service providers, public-good investors, and ecosystem collaborators. Advocating for change by helping major donors adopt privacy-by-design requirements. Providing direct support to aid organizations through technical assistance, education, and project design. Developing trust through a ZK-based identity solution that protects user privacy and enables secure access across humanitarian data systems.

By tackling challenges such as identity without exposure, accountability without surveillance, and compliance across jurisdictions, SAI reinforces a central truth: privacy is not a luxury—it’s a safeguard for human dignity.

Community: A Global Network of Builders

Our community remains at the heart of Zcash. In 2026, we are expanding our events and engagement roadmap to foster collaboration and innovation across every level of the ecosystem.

Mark your calendars for this year’s major gatherings:

Zcomm (Virtual) — March 24, 2026 | Community Builders Zcash Dev Summit (Rome, Italy) — May 8, 2026 | Technical Contributors Zcon7 (Cancún, Mexico) — October 27–29, 2026 | Everyone!

Each event provides space for shared learning, problem-solving, and connection—whether you’re a developer, researcher, advocate, or new community member.

Looking Ahead

As ZF continues advancing engineering, community events, and humanitarian initiatives, we do so with deep gratitude for the collaboration, scrutiny, and creativity of the global Zcash community. 

Together, we are shaping the infrastructure, tools, and norms that will define privacy in the digital age.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

—
Alex Bornstein
Executive Director, Zcash Foundation

The post Zcash Foundation 2026: Stewardship and Innovation appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Can a country be built from the internet up? Not as a metaphor or an online community, but as a system that replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed, money, law, and governance.

In this conversation taken from The Network State Podcast, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz joins Balaji Srinivasan to explore how internet native institutions are beginning to mirror and challenge traditional state structures. Drawing parallels to China’s early special economic zones, they discuss how constrained experiments like Shenzhen tested new rules without rewriting the entire system, and why similar experimentation is now happening online.

The discussion examines crypto, digital identity, and network states as attempts to turn code into coordination and coordination into legitimacy, while grappling with a core tension. Code is deterministic, but societies are not. Ben and Balaji explore where these systems work, where they break, and whether network states are a curiosity or the next phase of governance.

 

Resources:

Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz

Follow Balaji on X: https://x.com/balajis

Listen to more from The Network State: https://ns.com/podcast

 

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The new product offers exposure to spot gold while generating yield.

The GPU-backed stablecoin protocol plans to launch its CHIP governance token in Q1.

The memecoin sector is far from its peak, but increased activity is driving attention back to PUMP.

Nomura's Laser Digital crypto subsidiary has applied for a U.S. national trust bank charter.

Nifty Gateway is altering course after community outrage slammed its original shutdown plans.

The surging activity in silver and tokenized markets has driven more than $1 billion in daily volume on the HIP-3 platform.

DeFi’s leading stablecoin issuer is now catering to the United States and its federally regulated crypto environment.

Guest Op-Ed: A reverse playbook for keeping crypto small, divided, and insular.

Dragonfly Capital led the Series C raise.

More than 30% of the ETH supply is now staked, while Layer 2 throughput has topped 300 TPS.

Most of the top-10 assets are little changed today, with modest losses led by XRP.

Tether launched USA₮, a dollar-backed stablecoin issued through Anchorage Digital Bank and designed for the U.S. market under the GENIUS Act.

Partnering with Pace: Making Work Weightless

By Bryan Schreier and Lauren Reeder Published January 27, 2026 Team Pace.

It’s 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. A 300-page claims submission lands in your inbox. Your coffee goes cold as you settle in for the next three hours: reading, cross-referencing clauses and data to preserve the web of relationships, and hopping between dozens of screens typing, validating, and re-entering information. You send one piece off to one team and another to a third party vendor around the world. Box by box, field by field, system by system, data moves from one place to another. It’s necessary work. Important work. But it’s also crushing. 

By noon, you’re done. One submission down. Twelve more waiting.

This is the reality for hundreds of thousands of insurance professionals. This isn’t work that lacks purpose—ensuring accurate underwriting, processing claims correctly, managing policies is important—but the tools haven’t caught up to the complexity. The web of systems that we have built to manage this complexity grows faster than any team can scale.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Imagine instead: that same submission arrives. You forward it to Pace. Then you get up. You walk down the hall to talk with your colleague about the weekend, about that tricky endorsement clause that keeps causing issues, about the new hire starting next week. 

Behind the scenes, Pace agents read your SOPs, reason over your documents, and operate across your back-office systems. Fifteen minutes later, you return to your desk. In your inbox: a complete review with a concise summary, each relevant detail cited, decisions and reasoning documented. A single button to confirm and submit.

You click it. Done.

This isn’t a demo. This is happening today, at some of the largest and most regulated insurers in the world, companies processing tens of thousands of tasks through Pace’s AI agents every month.

The decade of agents is here, as Andrei Karpathy predicted. But the gap between an impressive model demo and agents completing production work in regulated enterprises? That’s the chasm most companies can’t cross.

Pace is crossing it. They’re not just deploying models. They’re doing the hard, unglamorous work that actually matters: learning your standard operating procedures. Integrating with your core systems. Meeting accuracy and reliability SLAs. Auditing every decision. Implementing guardrails and permissions.

The founder, Jamie Cuffe, and his team have seen this problem firsthand. They understand both the pain (manual work at scale in highly regulated industries) and the path forward (end-to-end agent operating procedures, powered by reinforcement learning). More importantly, the entire team is obsessed with making it actually work, not just impressive in a slide deck.

What Pace is building isn’t just faster document processing or BPO. It’s a fundamental reimagining of how knowledge work happens. The transformation is already underway. Insurance is first, but this playbook works anywhere paperwork bogs down progress: financial services, healthcare, logistics. Any industry where regulations are complex, documents are lengthy, and precision matters.

We at Sequoia are thrilled to lead Pace’s Series A to partner with Jamie and the team. This is how work should feel: light, unburdened, free to focus on what truly matters.

The paperwork can take care of itself.

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Roughly $16 billion in illicit crypto flowed through Chinese-language Telegram-based networks in 2025.

Out-of-Pocket is a healthcare education company founded by Nikhil Krishnan that helps people understand how healthcare works and how to navigate it in practice. In this episode, a16z investing partner Jay Rughani and Nikhil discuss why health insurance is losing its role as the default way people access care. They explain how rising costs are pushing more consumers to pay out of pocket for diagnostics, preventive care, and navigation. The conversation also looks at what this shift means for startups, AI-powered tools, regulation, and access as healthcare continues to move beyond insurance.

Resources:

Follow Jay Rughani on X:  https://twitter.com/JayRughani

Follow Nikhil Krishnan on X: https://twitter.com/nikillinit

Read Out of Pocket’s 2026 Predictions: https://www.outofpocket.health/p/out-of-pockets-2026-predictions

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What happens when privacy, community, and play collide?

The answer is Brave Games, the first-ever reality-style vault heist competition designed to live on the Web and unfold in real time across X and the Brave ecosystem.

Kicking off in February 2026, Brave Games is a multi-week, community-powered experience bringing together Brave, Midnight Network, and Mythical Games. It’s also built in partnership with Fanon, a social gaming platform designed to power large-scale, community-led play across the open web. Together, these teams are exploring interactive, privacy-respecting ways for communities to engage online, through what Fanon aptly calls “the Internet’s game show.”

Brave Games is designed to be open to anyone. You don’t need gaming experience, a social media following, or deep technical knowledge to take part. If you’re curious, observant, and enjoy thinking strategically, you’re already qualified.

What is Brave Games?

Fanon, the social gaming platform powering Brave Games, describes it as being “built for the curious, the strategic, and the suspicious.”

Reality shows have taught us something universal: there are always more watchers than players. Millions of people love following along from the sidelines, convinced they would spot the traitor faster, make the smarter move, or call the outcome before anyone else.

Brave Games is built for that instinct, and for the itch to step inside the show.

Brave Games is part spy mission, part social experiment, and part strategy game. It presents a reality-style vault heist where players—whether community members, fans, or curious participants from across the Internet—choose a faction, form alliances, solve encrypted clues, bluff rivals, sabotage friends, and race to unlock a digital vault that very much does not want to be opened.

Over the course of multiple rounds, participants can engage in different ways. They can join the game directly and face difficult decisions, like whether to protect an ally or quietly work against them. Or they can follow the action closely, make predictions, and turn every well-timed “I knew it” into something tangible.

Over the course of the competition, players will:

Join one of three competing factions: Brave, Midnight, or Mythical Complete missions and solve layered clues Navigate social strategy, shifting alliances, and surprise twists Watch for undercover “moles” embedded within teams Participate through prediction mechanics, social challenges, and timed events

The experience unfolds across the Brave browser, Fanon’s platform, and social channels like X and Discord, weaving together gameplay, community interaction, and themes of privacy, security, and digital defiance.

And yes, it’s free to play.

How to join Brave Games

Brave Games is played through the Brave browser, which is required to participate. The experience is designed to work across all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

If you don’t already have Brave installed, you can download it for free at brave.com/download.

Pre-registration for Brave Games opens January 27, with team leads revealed and the first clues beginning to surface soon after.

How Brave Games came together through Rewards 3.0 and BAT

The Brave Games partnership with Fanon emerged through the Brave Rewards 3.0 Partner Program, where Brave works closely with partners to explore new ways the Basic Attention Token (BAT) can power real, engaging experiences across the Web and in everyday life.

What began as a Rewards Partner Program collaboration evolved into a fully gamified, community-driven campaign that blends Fanon’s social gaming infrastructure with Brave’s focus on user-first design and transparent incentives. Brave Games is one example of how BAT-powered partnerships can grow into interactive, accessible, and community-led experiences.

Since launching in 2017, BAT and Brave Rewards have grown into a widely adopted ecosystem, with over 99% of BAT in circulation, more than 1.5 million verified creators accepting BAT, and hundreds of advertiser campaigns leveraging Brave Ads.

Fanon builds and hosts the game experience, while Brave leads brand direction, community coordination, and ecosystem collaboration.

Why this collaboration matters

Brave Games is about experimenting openly with new models of engagement that respect users by design. Each core partner brings something distinct:

Brave’s privacy-first browser, search engine, and wallet, available to over 107 million monthly active users Midnight’s work on regulation-friendly, data-protecting applications powered by zero-knowledge cryptography Mythical Games’ expertise in building accessible, player-owned gaming economies that millions can enjoy without needing to understand crypto

Together, we are exploring what happens when participation is voluntary, incentives are transparent, and community trust is treated as a requirement rather than an afterthought.

A rare community moment: live on X Spaces

To mark the opening of Brave Games pre-registration, the BAT community is invited to a special live X Spaces conversation on January 27 at 2:00pm Pacific / 5:00pm Eastern, taking place in lieu of the usual weekly BAT Community Call.

The X Space will be hosted by Luke Mulks, VP of Business Operations at Brave, and will feature Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave; Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Global and the visionary behind Midnight; and John Linden, CEO of Mythical Games.

This kind of open, unscripted conversation between leaders across three major ecosystems is rare, particularly in a format where the community can listen in, engage directly, and ask questions in real time.

The discussion will explore:

Why Brave Games came together What each team hopes to learn from the experiment How community participation will help shape what comes next

“Brave Games combines social networks, communities, and Brave’s 107 million monthly active users into dynamic gameplay that brings partners and networks new ways to bring their latest and best projects to market for real users to enjoy together.” — Brendan Eich, CEO & Co-founder of Brave

“Brave Games is an exciting example of what the open web can achieve when communities are treated as highly valued contributors, and supported by strong privacy and transparent incentives. Too often, participation online comes at the cost of control over personal data or identity. Brave Games shows how privacy-by-design and zero-knowledge technology can enable social, playful experiences without asking users to compromise on trust.” — Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output 

“Brave Games is exactly the kind of experience we love at Mythical, it brings players together in a way that’s social, competitive, and rewarding. We’re excited to rally Team Mythical and show what our community can do when the stakes are high and the competition is real.” — John Linden, CEO of Mythical Games

What’s next

Pre-registration for Brave Games opens January 27, and from there the heist unfolds one phase at a time, as factions compete, alliances shift, and the vault draws closer.If you’re curious about where privacy-first design, community participation, and play can intersect, now is the time to start paying attention.

For ongoing updates, announcements, and key moments throughout the Brave Games, @AttentionToken on X will serve as the primary source of information.

Each faction will also host dedicated Brave Games channels in their Discord or Telegram communities, where interested participants can connect and start discussing the Games ahead of registration.

Brave (BAT Brigade Discord) → Join the #brave-games-chat channel directly. Midnight Discord → Look for the #bravegames-all-comms channel. Mythical Games Telegram

The project said its auction app dominated Ethereum activity on Jan. 24 and that TVS topped $100 million within three days.

The Hyperliquid-based market provider’s cumulative equity and commodity volumes crossed $1 billion over the last 24 hours.

DeFi yield is now directly accessible on Kraken.

At Davos, the global elite’s inner circle gave crypto a real seat at the table.

The "iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF" will hold IBIT and sell calls to earn income.

The EF wants a post-quantum transition with zero downtime and zero loss of funds.

The new fund, VAVX, offers spot exposure to AVAX and may generate staking rewards.

Gold's new all-time high extended a rally fueled by U.S. tariff threats, shutdown risks, and central bank buying.

In this episode, Jen Kha, Head of Investor Relations, and David George, General Partner, discuss how late-stage private markets are evolving as AI reshapes scale, capital intensity, and growth timelines. They explain why AI-driven companies are staying private longer, how infrastructure spending is changing return profiles, and what this moment means for durability, value creation, and long-term outcomes in private markets.

Timecodes:

0:00 — Introduction

04:21 — The Market Opportunity for AI

26:48 — Pricing, Monetization, and Cash Burn

43:15 — Companies Staying Private Longer

51:30 — Portfolio Composition and Construction

57:18 — Team Culture and Collaboration
 

Resources:

Follow Jen Kha on X: https://x.com/jkhamehl

Follow David George on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83

 

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Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures/ for more information.  A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://a16z.com/portfolio.

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For companies building AI or search applications, or training foundational models, success can hinge on the quality (and data retention policies) of their Web search API. Big Tech APIs have been reduced, restricted, or altogether removed from public access; they’re also a privacy nightmare. Scraper APIs—and thus the companies who use them—get results from unofficial calls to a fully-fledged search engine (usually Bing or Google), so they have no control over the retention policy of the query.

The Brave Search API is the only search API built with privacy at its core. Regardless of plan or subscription, Brave Search API data is used and maintained only for the narrow purposes documented in our Data Processing Addendum. To help meet ever-growing compliance obligations, Brave also offers enterprise customers the option of Zero Data Retention (ZDR).

With ZDR, Brave Search API enterprise customers can ensure that no queries are retained for any length of time. 1 ZDR simplifies compliance obligations, reduces liability exposure, and means API customers don’t need to worry about their data being leaked, because that data is never stored in the first place.

ZDR is available to all Brave Search API customers on a custom enterprise plan, and can be enabled by contacting API support.

The problem with scrapers and Big Tech API options

Today, thousands of AI applications rely on Web search to ground responses to their user queries and to supply real-time data. This includes popular AI applications like chatbots and agents, as well as website-native search apps and more. With a search API, an end-user’s query is sent to a search engine via an API call. The search engine supplies grounded, relevant results, which are then served back to the user. A search API for the Web thus becomes one of the most critical components in an app’s technical stack.

Outside of Brave, other search APIs on the market today fall into one of two categories, both of which make ZDR impossible for them to offer:

The scraper API

These supposedly “independent” search APIs aren’t independent at all, but instead scrape their results from Google or Bing. This reliance on Big Tech creates a few key problems:

The data funnel: Most often, when your application sends a query to a scraper-based API, that API then sends the query to the Big Tech search engine in real-time. This means the search engine, which has its own extensive data collection and retention policies, will receive and log the original user query. Privacy blind spots: Even if the scraper-based API promises ZDR on their end, they’re still submitting user queries to a Big Tech search engine, which means ZDR cannot be maintained throughout. Enforceability: Scraper-based APIs will have no ability to enforce data deletion or data protection on the receiving Big Tech search engine.

With scraper-dependent APIs, a user’s query and data are shared with third parties without their knowledge, and with no recourse to have data deleted or removed. This is a practice the user would likely not consent to, and that can expose the app provider to compliance risk.

The Big Tech API

While it may seem “better” to directly call the originating index, this strategy also presents problems. First, Big Tech companies like Google and Bing have closed their APIs, giving access either for a very small number of queries—too few to reliably build on—or not at all. This is particularly true since Bing formally retired its Search API.

Furthermore, Big Tech has given users few reasons to trust them. Big Tech’s entire business model is predicated on profiling users, with core infrastructure designed to track, store, and build profiles based on user queries, clicks, and behavior. So true ZDR is not an option.

Brave’s independent architecture enables true ZDR

The Brave Search API offers a fundamentally different, simpler path to ZDR because of its unique, vertically integrated architecture: Brave is independent of Big Tech because it is powered by its own unique index of the Web. With the Brave Search API, no scrapers ever touch a customer’s queries or data.

An independent index, no scrapers required

The foundation of the Brave Search API is the Brave Search index, a proprietary index of more than 35 billion webpages, with tens of millions of new pages crawled and updated each day. This index is built, maintained, and owned entirely by Brave.

When your application sends a query to the Brave Search API, the query is processed by Brave’s own index and ranking algorithms, which makes Brave’s architecture simple to visualize:

Customer app ←→ Brave Search index

Without scrapers, Brave can ensure API customers retain control of their user data. Brave controls the entire search stack, from the crawling bot to the API endpoint, which allows easy enforcement of restrictive data retention policies. We can easily implement system-wide policies that prevent the logging or long-term retention of end-user search queries, or the use of those queries for unintended purposes. It also means we can offer true ZDR.

The value of ZDR for developers

Choosing the Brave Search API isn’t just about compliance; it’s also a smart development decision for any company working in the modern, privacy-conscious landscape.

Brave Search API Scraper-based or Big Tech APIs Data source Proprietary, independent index Big Tech engine (via scraper or direct call) Query path Your app → Brave Search index Your app → scraper → Big Tech engine 
Your app → Big Tech engine ZDR Reliably enforceable May be unenforceable due to third-party involvement or opaque retention policies

If you’re building an AI or search application—or a platform that allows end users to create their own AI or search apps—it’s imperative that your Web data source isn’t indiscriminately logging user queries. This is especially true in use cases that entail the handling of sensitive or regulated data like financial, healthcare, or legal information.

Regardless of plan or subscription, Brave Search API data is used and maintained only for the narrow purposes documented in our DPA. Our technical independence also allows us to deliver Zero Data Retention, giving developers a truly private, reliable, and trustworthy source for Web data.

The Brave Search API supplies most of the top ten LLMs in AI with real-time Web search data. For some of these customers, Brave is the only search index supporting their AI answers. If you’re not yet a Brave Search API customer, the API is available with both free and low-CPM subscriptions. Sign up and make your first API call today at https://brave.com/search/api/, or contact us to learn more about bespoke plans.

If you’re already a Brave Search API customer on a custom, enterprise plan, contact us to learn more about enabling ZDR.

Unless required by law or regulation, as is the case for any lawful search API provider. ↩︎

In this episode, we are joined by Zach Abrams, CEO of Bridge, to unpack the infrastructure behind the next generation of global payments. Zach discusses Bridge’s mission to move stablecoins beyond mere trading use cases and into core financial services, a vision that recently led to its landmark acquisition by Stripe . He explains how stablecoins function as an innovation at every layer of the money stack, enabling payments that are fundamentally faster and cheaper than legacy systems like ACH or SEPA.

They delve into the technical "puzzle pieces" of payments, from the inefficiencies of FBO bank accounts to the "cheat code" of compounding growth in the stablecoin sector. Zach introduces the concept of Stablecoin Orchestration and details why the current USDC/USDT duopoly is unaligned with high-velocity payments due to rent-seeking burn fees and AUM-focused models . Finally, the conversation explores the future of consumer finance, where non-custodial wallets act as bank replacements and a pluralistic ecosystem of local, company-issued stablecoins challenges the dominance of the US dollar

Topics

00:00 Intro & Context 04:15 Legacy Rails vs. Stablecoin Innovation 09:30 The "Cash App" Hack & Payments Creativity 15:00 Why Bridge Joined Stripe 21:45 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Startup Needs 27:10 Stablecoin Orchestration & Issuance Explained 35:20 The Duopoly Problem: Why USDC/USDT Isn't Enough 42:15 Orthogonal Competition: The "Europe" of Stablecoins 49:00 Wallets as the New Primary Bank Account 55:30 Regrets of a "Child of the Depression" Founder

Links

Zach Abrams on X: https://x.com/ZCAbrams Bridge: https://bridge.xyz Stripe: https://stripe.com Gnosis: https://gnosis.io/

Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io

What Ethereum represents in a world where global coordination is fragmenting rather than consolidating.

PIVX Weekly Pulse (Jan. 16th, 2026 — Jan. 22nd, 2026)

Welcome to your weekly PIVX ecosystem report. We’ve distilled the last seven days into a quick-read briefing on market shifts and technical updates to keep you at the forefront of all things PIVX.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: The PIVX masternode network has continued to show remarkable consistency over the last couple of weeks. The number of active masternodes adjusted slightly to 2,122, with just a single node going offline over the past week. Price Check: PIVX saw a significant surge in market momentum this week as price action broke out of its previous range. With Daily USD Values ranging from $0.16 to $0.19, the weekly average reached $0.1755. This represents a substantial 29.42% climb compared to last week’s $0.1356. Trading Buzz: There was a major bump in trading activity this week, with the total weekly volume reaching $58.9 million. Comparatively, last week saw a total volume of $24.7M, suggesting a rise in market activity and liquidity over the seven-day period.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

PIVX Weekly Pulse (Jan. 16th, 2026 — Jan. 22nd, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Gemini drew SEC scrutiny in 2023 for offering unregistered securities to retain investors.

PwC’s 2026 crypto regulation report says market surveillance, disclosures, and investor protections are moving onchain.

A look inside Babylon, ElizaOS’s new AI prediction market arena launching soon.

Altcoins trade mixed as total crypto market capitalization remains unchanged at $3.11 trillion.

ICOs are back in the picture. How are the latest token drops performing? It's... complicated.

Tether Gold and Paxos Gold remain the largest onchain gold tokens, as the tokenized commodity sector grows.

Some outlined the connection between lower fees on mainnet since Fusaka and increased attacks.

The crypto exchange previously shuttered stock trading in 2021.

Users in Brazil and the U.S. (excl. NY) can now easily trade millions of Solana tokens using their Coinbase balances.

Ledger's prospective $4B crypto IPO is the latest in a wave of IPO activity for crypto companies.

The Zcash Foundation is pleased to announce the release of Zebra 4.0.0. This release focuses on improving observability, streamlining operations, and enhancing developer experience.

What’s New in Zebra 4.0.0 ⤷ Better Observability and Tracing

We’ve significantly improved the local development experience with new observability infrastructure: 

Grafana Auto-Provisioning: Automatic datasource configuration with fixed UIDs for consistent development environments AlertManager Integration: Built-in alerting capabilities for monitoring critical metrics Improved Docker Compose Setup: Streamlined local testing and development workflows

Additionally, Zebra now includes comprehensive distributed tracing support through OpenTelemetry integration, enabling operators to visualize request flows through the node and monitor RPC performance. This feature will make it significantly easier to:

Diagnose performance bottlenecks in real-time Track request paths through the system Monitor RPC call latency and throughput Identify optimization opportunities

The OpenTelemetry integration is feature-gated and can be enabled based on your operational needs. Traces can be exported to Jaeger and other compatible backends for detailed visualization and analysis.

These improvements make it easier than ever to contribute to Zebra and test changes in a  production-like environment.

⤷ Configuration and Compatibility Improvements

Flexible TOML Configuration: Zebra now accepts TOML configuration files, regardless of file extension. Previously, valid TOML files with extensions like .conf would cause the node to exit, even when properly formatted. This change improves compatibility with various deployment scenarios and configuration management tools.

RPC Compatibility Enhancements: The getinfo RPC method now returns the errorstimestamp field as an i64 to match zcashd behavior, improving compatibility with existing tools and clients that interact with both implementations.

⤷ Performance and Infrastructure Updates

Docker Build Optimizations: We’ve resolved disk space issues in Docker builds by implementing configurable larger runners for CI/CD workflows. This ensures more reliable and faster container builds, particularly beneficial for automated deployments.

Updated Checkpoints: The release includes fresh checkpoint data to accelerate initial block synchronization for new nodes.

Dependency Updates: All dependencies have been updated to their latest compatible versions, including security patches and performance improvements.

Breaking Changes

While Zebra 4.0.0 maintains backward compatibility for most use cases, please note:

Configuration files are now strictly parsed as TOML format regardless of extension The getinfo RPC method now returns the errorstimestamp field as an i64 to match zcashd behavior Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release: @gustavovalverde, @conradoplg, @emersonian, @syszery, and all the community members who reported issues and provided feedback. Your contributions make Zebra better for the entire Zcash ecosystem.

Getting Started with Zebra 4.0.0 Installation

The easiest way to get started with Zebra is using Docker:

Or build from source:

Enabling OpenTelemetry Tracing

To enable distributed tracing, build with the observability features:

Then configure your OpenTelemetry collector endpoint in your Zebra configuration file.

Documentation

For detailed documentation on configuration, deployment, and advanced features, visit the Zebra Book.

Get Involved

Zebra is an open-source project and we welcome contributions from the community:

Report issues or suggest features on GitHub Join discussions on the Zcash Community Forum Contribute code improvements via pull requests Check outgood first issues if you’re new to the project
Zebra is the Zcash Foundation's independent, consensus-compatible implementation of a Zcash node, written in Rust for performance and safety.

The post Zebra 4.0.0 Release: Enhanced Observability and Developer Experience appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Mintlify is a documentation platform built by cofounders Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee to help teams create and maintain developer docs. In this episode, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Jennifer Li and Yoko Li speak with Han and Hahnbee about how coding agents are changing what “good docs” mean, shifting documentation from a human-only resource into infrastructure that powers AI tools, support agents, and internal knowledge workflows. They share Mintlify’s early journey, including eight pivots, the two-day prototype that landed their first customer, and the “do things that don’t scale” sales motion that helped them win early traction. The conversation also covers why docs go out of date, what “self-healing” documentation requires to actually work, and how serving fast-moving customers has shaped both their product priorities and their pace.

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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The bill would create a reserve fund to hold certain digital assets transferred to the state under unclaimed property rules.

Interactive Brokers is setting itself up as an early play on a regulated blockchain future

AXS surges as Axie Infinity debuts bonded rewards and reputation-based fees.

The DeFi token jumped after River announced an expansion of its stablecoin infrastructure.

Critics warn of expanded CFTC oversight and custody requirements.

Altcoins posted mild losses as total crypto market capitalization dipped 1% to $3.11 trillion.

Lens and Farcaster enter new chapters under Mask and Neynar.

Crypto startup Superstate has closed a large Series B round led by Bain Capital Crypto.

Accelerated activity on Base deployments of Uniswap and Aerodrome drove the growth.

The Most Precious Resource

Kais, Blockit, and Optimizing Time

By Pat Grady Published January 22, 2026 Adding Value

People and markets. These are the two core primitives in our business.

Investing in a Person

In 2019 we invested in Kais Khimji – not as a founder, but as a partner. Here is an excerpt from our investment thesis on Kais:

Long term, Kais has a chance to be exceptional. Dating back to high school, he has always been the hardest worker in the room. His appetite for learning is exceptional. He is thoughtful about companies and people. He takes initiative. He receives feedback well, and he acts on it. He cares about relationships and makes a genuine effort to connect with people. He is the consummate underdog. He has tenacity in spades, a relentless appetite for self-improvement, and the IQ & EQ to be exceptional long term.

We probably didn’t need to use the word “exceptional” three times, but we were excited! 

Investing in a Market

Fast forward a few years, and Kais had some news for us: he was becoming a founder. We were sad, but only for a moment. This was his calling, and we were delighted to see him pursue it. Even when we were first getting to know him, he was talking about this idea he had for an app that could optimize the world’s time. 

“Return on time” has always been part of Sequoia’s lingua franca, so this market is close to our hearts. Here is an excerpt from our investment thesis in Blockit:

Time is our most precious resource. For most people, that resource is sub-optimally allocated with high-touch, high-friction, expensive scheduling. Thanks to the magic of LLMs, Blockit is building a world in which time is optimally allocated, painlessly. This takes the shape of a freemium subscription business with high virality (scheduling is a multi-player game), strong network effects (more calendar inventory leads to better matching which leads to a better experience), and high monetization (replacing work, not software). Blockit has a chance to become a $1Bn+ revenue business, and Kais will make sure it gets there.

When People & Markets Collide

The collision of people and markets produces businesses.  Kais and cofounder John Han have assembled a small but elite team perfectly suited to the task at hand, and their progress to date has been impressive.

One qualitative litmus test we apply to new investments is the following: could this become one of the most important companies of the next couple decades? 

Blockit passes this test with flying colors. Imagine a world in which you’re more productive at work and more present at home. You’re both happier and healthier. It’s a pure pareto gain on life. This is the future Blockit promises.

It is an honor to partner with Kais, John, and the rest of the Blockitons, and to support them in building this dream into a reality. 

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The post The Most Precious Resource appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

The report looks at foreign currency stablecoin adoption, namely of USD-pegged assets, in 45 emerging market countries.

Inferact is a new AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM. Its mission is to build a universal, open-source inference layer that makes large AI models faster, cheaper, and more reliable to run across any hardware, model architecture, or deployment environment. Together, they broke down how modern AI models are actually run in production, why “inference” has quietly become one of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure, and how the open-source project vLLM emerged to solve it. The conversation also looked at why the vLLM team started Inferact and their vision for a universal inference layer that can run any model, on any chip, efficiently.

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt

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Solana Labs’ mobile arm launched its web3 smartphone Seeker in August

BitGo priced its IPO at $18 per share, looking to raise $212M in the first major crypto listing of 2026.

The survey found younger Americans are far more likely than baby boomers to boost crypto activity this year.

The privacy coin trade continues to heat up, but what are the key differences between Monero's XMR and Zcash's ZEC?

The protocol is overhauling its staking mechanism, swapping multi-year locks for a 14-day withdrawal period and shifting to an algorithmic emissions model.

Major altcoins gain as total crypto market capitalization climbs 1% to $3.14 trillion.

Neynar acquires Farcaster from Merkle as founders step back. The move follows Lens shifting to Mask Network amid a broader SocialFi reset.

The Ethereum co-founder said he plans to post more on Lens this year and warned that many crypto social projects rely too heavily on tokens and hype.

Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison is set for release from a federal halfway house today after partially serving a two-year sentence for fraud charges.

The publicly traded online brokerage firm is getting ready to onboard institutions to prediction markets to manage their risk.

The post Welcome, Chang Li! appeared first on Greylock.

The total value locked across crypto prediction markets broke above its previous U.S. presidential election-fueled ATH.

As we look back on 2025, Zcash Foundation (ZF) celebrates a year of progress, collaboration, and strategic growth that strengthened the Zcash ecosystem and advanced financial privacy for the public good. Across technical development, governance, and community initiatives, our shared work this year reflected the Foundation’s enduring belief that privacy is essential infrastructure for human dignity.

The year began with transition and renewal. In the first quarter, ZF bid farewell to longtime Executive Director Jack Gavigan, whose leadership over four years left an indelible mark on the organization and the broader Zcash community. With Jack’s departure, COO Alex Bornstein served as Interim Executive Director. 

This period also marked a season of community empowerment and collaboration: the results of the Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) election brought new energy to participatory grantmaking, and the Foundation introduced a new Zcash trademark policy ensuring that Zcash’s identity remains protected while fostering broader adoption. Our flagship conference, Zcon VI, held virtually and co-curated with ecosystem partners, showcased the power of decentralization and cross-ecosystem collaboration, followed by the inaugural in-person Zcash Dev Summit in Sofia—a pivotal step toward fostering technical dialogue and innovation. In recognition of our broader organizational excellence, ZF earned a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, affirming our commitment to transparency and accountability.

The following quarter built on that momentum with strengthened internal alignment and long-term planning under interim executive leadership. A major governance milestone was the ZF Board’s endorsement and community’s adoption of the Community & Coinholder (C&C) Funding Model, a participatory framework that balances community input and coinholder governance with an eye toward long-term sustainability and decentralized decision-making. Extensive ZCAP polling and coinholder participation underscored strong community support for this framework. The Foundation also emphasized team cohesion and strategic alignment through an in-person staff retreat, fostering collaboration and planning as ZF continued to evolve in service of the ecosystem.

During the third quarter, ZF entered a new phase of mission-driven impact and global engagement. The quarter’s centerpiece achievement was the launch of Shielded Aid Initiative, an innovative effort to apply Zcash’s privacy-preserving capabilities to humanitarian aid delivery. By helping NGOs protect vulnerable recipients and align with international data protection standards, this initiative highlights the real-world potential of privacy technology. 

Complementing this work, ZF shared its Three-Year Vision for Community Events—a roadmap for inclusive, global gatherings that strengthen learning, collaboration, and participation across the Zcash community. This strategy encompasses a range of convenings, including virtual and in-person events such as Zcomm, Zcash Dev Summits, Zcon Voices, and the flagship Zcon7 in 2026. We also made significant updates to the Zcash Community Forum’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, aligning community governance tools with international data protection standards and reaffirming ZF’s commitment to responsible governance.

During the final quarter of the year, the Foundation announced several momentous leadership appointments, most notably the ZF Board’s appointment of Alex Bornstein as Executive Director. Reflecting on ZF’s direction and the broader Zcash ecosystem, Bornstein emphasized the importance of collaboration and execution in realizing Zcash’s long-term vision:

“Zcash’s future will be defined by bold coordination and relentless execution. Our strength lies in collaboration—with the Foundation’s world-class engineers, our partners at ECC, Shielded Labs, ZCG, QEDIT, ZecHub, and the global community driving innovation every day. Together, we’re not just sustaining momentum, we’re pioneering the next generation of privacy technology. The world needs privacy that scales, and Zcash will deliver it.”

Two other key leadership appointments were announced during this same period, Danika Delano as Chief Operating Officer and Pili Guerra as Head of Engineering, reflecting our commitment to promoting from within and recognizing the exceptional talent that has been instrumental to our success. 

ZF also introduced the new Zcash Foundation website that includes a donation page, designed to improve accessibility and public accountability. 

ZF transitioned ZCAP voting from the legacy Helios platform to Secure Internet Voting (SIV), which is a modern, cryptographically transparent and privacy-respecting system chosen for its responsive support, enhanced auditability and alignment with community values. The election engagement in the first SIV-powered ZCG election was excellent, with a record turnout!

Amid renewed momentum for Zcash this quarter, Alex spoke on the global stage at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy’s panel, “Humanitarian Futures: Still here, still human – what next?” The event brought together leaders to explore how the sector can adapt to global challenges through resilience and innovation. Alex’s participation highlighted Zcash’s growing relevance and elevated awareness of ZF’s Shielded Aid Initiative and its privacy-preserving approach to humanitarian response. Alex was also a featured guest on Cointelegraph’s “Chain Reaction” podcast, where he discussed the growing significance of Zcash and its role in humanitarian aid and digital financial inclusion.

Parallel to these organizational milestones, ZF sustained high-impact engineering momentum by strengthening the open-source infrastructure that Zcash depends on for day-to-day reliability and long-term protocol evolution. Across four major Zebra releases: Zebra 2.5.0 Release (deploying NU6.1 on the public Testnet), Zebra 3.0.0-rc.0 Release (locking in the mainnet activation parameters and hardening CI/Docker), Zebra 3.0.0 Release: Our Most Feature-Rich Release Ever (a production-readiness step-change, including platform support and operational tooling), and Zebra 3.1.0 Release (stability and infrastructure-focused improvements for operators). This work in total: reduced systemic risk and improved node operability in ways that directly strengthen network resilience. That delivery cadence was matched by rigorous third-party assurance: the Zebra NU6.1 Audit by Least Authority reinforced confidence that Zebra’s consensus-critical changes were implemented with the level of scrutiny required for high-stakes network upgrades. 

ZF’s cryptography work continued to push the ecosystem toward safer, more usable multisig: the team shipped a security-focused update in the FROST 2.2.0 Release, and the external review documented in FROST Demo Audit: frost-client and frostd validated the security posture and practical integration path for wallets. Together, these releases and audits underscore ZF’s ongoing investment in privacy-preserving, production-grade, independently validated open-source software—the kind of infrastructure work that compounds over time by making the network more robust, upgrade-ready, and trustworthy for the full ecosystem of users and integrators.

Throughout 2025, ZF continued to make transparency a cornerstone of our mission, reflecting our belief that open communication and accountability are essential to building public trust in privacy technology. Our quarterly reports, Q4 2024 Report, Q1 2025 Report, Q2 2025 Report, and Q3 2025 Report, provided detailed updates on financial stewardship, governance participation, community initiatives, and organizational progress. These reports serve as an evolving public record of how ZF operates: as an accountable steward of financial privacy infrastructure, a convener of community dialogue, and a transparent nonprofit working in service of the public good.

As we enter 2026, ZF remains focused on building robust software, fostering participatory governance, and scaling global engagement in ways that uphold privacy rights and digital autonomy. To the Zcash community—thank you for your collaboration, feedback, and shared belief in what privacy technology can enable. The best is yet to come.

The post Zcash Foundation: 2025 Year in Review appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Bermuda is gearing up to digitize its entire economy on Base, citing lower transaction costs and more access to global finance as motivating factors.

As we move through 2026, the conversation around cryptocurrency has shifted from “if” privacy is needed to “how” it can be implemented responsibly. In this exclusive interview, we caught up with PIVX’s Business Development Lead, Jeffrey. He shares his unique perspective on the power of grassroots ambassador programs, the emerging role of Africa as a crypto powerhouse, and why configurable privacy is a trend to watch out for.

PIVX relaunched its Ambassadors Program last year. How has this grassroots expansion changed the way PIVX approaches business development compared to traditional VC-backed projects?

This has actually been an interesting topic with our partners, many of whom are inspired by our ambassador program and have reached out for help to set up their own. As we enter Q2 2026, I will be leveraging our ambassadors to collaborate with new and upcoming partners to deepen ties and potentially grow our footprint globally. Having an ambassador program is the best thing, in my opinion, to expand into regions that may need privacy and what PIVX has to offer.

If you could name one “hidden trend” that will define the rest of 2026 for privacy-focused assets, what would it be?

For me, this has to be configurable or optional privacy. Privacy coins have existed in the past. However, they mandated pure anonymity, which conflicts with those who want to display certain things publicly or have the option to provide a viewing key for a specific transaction. PIVX integrated zk-SNARKs (SHIELD) with the freedom of allowing balances or transactions to remain private or transparent. This means users can opt for selective disclosure to maintain compliance where necessary, whilst keeping all balances/transactions private from the public. They can also opt to use transparent transactions should they wish. This setup is the most optimal in today’s world that demands financial privacy whilst also compliance when necessary. Communities around projects like PIVX commonly discuss this approach, praising optional shielding, viewing keys for audits, and programmable privacy as the way to scale adoption without getting delisted or sidelined by strict regulatory environments.

Having travelled to several countries, where do you see the next “crypto capital” emerging in 2026?

I truly believe that Africa is the biggest emerging continent as a whole for crypto growth. South Africa, especially where numerous companies have started accepting crypto natively. It’s estimated that over 10% of the entire population of South Africa is using cryptocurrency, and when you travel there you can easily find major merchants online and in-store to spend your crypto or a wide variety of services and exchanges that assist in acquiring or using cryptocurrency.

As PIVX’s BD Lead, what is the single most important KPI you are tracking this year to measure “success” for the ecosystem?

I’m quite a nerd when it comes to the blockchain. I love to see activity! My favorite KPI then is to see inflows and outflows from new partner services. It shows the PIVX ecosystem is flourishing. For 2026, my focus will be on even more use cases for PIVX.

What has been the biggest challenge in 2025 for getting merchants to accept PIVX directly instead of converting to stablecoins?

This naturally has been payment processors not accepting PIVX. We did form a big partnership with the NOW group, which means that merchants can accept PIVX using NowPayments. However, the goal now is to get us on the top 3 cryptocurrency payment gateways. This will make the adoption of PIVX much smoother.

Is privacy a harder or easier “sell” in 2026 compared to five years ago?

I will be honest. If you are actively reading the news and keeping up with what’s happening in the financial world, you should be drawn to the idea of using privacy-protecting tools and cryptocurrencies like PIVX. Privacy will become the norm for adoption. We have seen countless issues over the past 5 years that make relying on transparent blockchains a liability. Privacy is becoming the norm.

If we sit down again in 2027, what is the one partnership or business milestone you hope to have checked off the list?

I have quite a few in mind. A major one would be a perpetual contract listing on Binance, as well as a USDC pair there. I am also aiming to expand PIVX into more regions where our ambassadors are located, namely the top exchanges in those regions.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

“Africa is the Biggest Emerging Continent for Crypto,” PIVX’s Lead Business Dev Says was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this feed drop from The Six Five Pod, a16z General Partner Martin Casado discusses how AI is changing infrastructure, software, and enterprise purchasing. He explains why current constraints are driven less by technical limits and more by regulation, particularly around power, data centers, and compute expansion.

The episode also covers how AI is affecting software development, lowering the barrier to coding without eliminating the need for experienced engineers, and how agent-driven tools may shift infrastructure decision-making away from humans.

Watch more from Six Five Media: https://www.youtube.com/@SixFiveMedia

 

Resources:

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado  

Follow Patrick Moorhead on X:  https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead

Follow Daniel Newman on X: https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV

 

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NYSE's major announcement presented a comprehensive vision for an equity tokenization platform. It's a big deal.

Regulators moved to block the prediction market platform after heavy election-related betting.

Corners is a new Base app that turns internet curation into onchain markets.

The oracle provider now offers 24/5 price streams for U.S. equities across 40+ chains.

Trump Media plans to distribute a rewards token to shareholders with the help of Crypto.com

Sourcegraph's CTO just revealed why 90% of his code now comes from agents—and why the Chinese models powering America's AI future should terrify Washington. While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI apocalypse scenarios, Beyang Liu's team discovered something darker: every competitive open-source coding model they tested traces back to Chinese labs, and US companies have gone silent after releasing Llama 3. The regulatory fear that killed American open-source development isn't hypothetical anymore—it's already handed the infrastructure layer of the AI revolution to Beijing, one fine-tuned model at a time.

 

Resources:

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At Zcash Foundation, our mission is to build and support infrastructure that ensures Zcash remains a secure, private, and decentralized financial system. As always, our focus remains unwavering: we are here to ship code that keeps Zcash running.

Today, we are proud to announce a significant addition to the Zcash ecosystem: a native Rust implementation of the Zcash DNS Seeder.

Why a New Seeder?

DNS seeders are a critical piece of “plumbing” for any decentralized network. When a new Zcash node starts for the first time, it has no idea where to find peers. The seeder provides an initial list of active, healthy nodes, allowing the new participant to join the network.

Historically, the ecosystem has relied on legacy implementations. By rewriting this tool in Rust, we achieve several key objectives:

Native Integration with Zebra: The new seeder leverages the zebra-network crate—the same battle-tested networking stack that powers our Zebra full node. This ensures that the seeder crawls the network using the exact same logic and protocol standards as the rest of our infrastructure. Memory Safety and Performance: The seeder uses a modern, lock-free architecture to serve DNS queries with minimal latency, even under high load. Built-in Resilience: The seeder includes per-IP rate limiting to protect against DNS amplification attacks, ensuring that our infrastructure cannot be weaponized against others. Shipping While it Matters

We believe that the best way to support Zcash is to shore up its weak spots. Peer discovery is often overlooked until it fails; by providing a modern, high-performance alternative, we are ensuring the Zcash network remains robust and accessible to everyone.

Features at a Glance

The new seeder is ready for production testing and includes several features designed for modern operators:

Active Network Crawler: Uses zebra-network for reliable peer discovery and management. Authoritative DNS Server: Serves A and AAAA records using the hickory-dns framework. Observability: Includes built-in Prometheus metrics for real-time monitoring of peer health and query volume. Docker-Ready: Ships with full Docker and docker-compose support for rapid, secure deployment. Looking Ahead

We invite the Zcash community and node operators to review the code and begin testing the new seeder on both Mainnet and Testnet. You can find the source code, documentation, and deployment guides in our GitHub repository. Please report any issues on the Github repository.

We remain committed to delivering the high-quality, open-source infrastructure that the Zcash community deserves. There is much more work to be done, and we’re getting after it.

The post Strengthening the Zcash Network: Announcing a Native Rust DNS Seeder appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Bankless Ventures investor Arnav Pagidyala on the predictions he's betting on in the new year.

Trusting the government to protect your fundamental rights to privacy and freedom? Think again!

In the early evening of January 13, 2026, the digital lights went out across Uganda. As the nation prepared for a high-stakes general election, the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) issued a directive to all telecommunications providers to suspend public internet access. By 6:00 PM, a country of 45 million people was plunged into a state-mandated information vacuum.

While the government framed the blackout as a precautionary intervention to curb misinformation, the reality on the ground told a different story.

The Law as a Weapon

Under President Yoweri Museveni, who has held power since 1986, the Ugandan government has mastered the art of using the law not as a shield for rights, but as a sword against dissent. In the 2026 cycle, we witnessed a three-pronged legal assault on privacy and information.

The UCC invoked broad “national security” mandates to justify the shutdown. Yet, international law, and Uganda’s own Constitution, requires that any restriction on expression be necessary and proportional. By implementing a blanket, indefinite blackout, the state bypassed these tests, essentially declaring that the government’s convenience outweighs the citizens’ constitutional right to access information.

Prior to the total blackout, the government targeted alternative lifelines. Elon Musk’s Starlink was deactivated in early January under the guise of licensing requirements. While regulatory compliance is a standard legal hurdle, the timing suggested a strategic move to eliminate any platform the state could not directly throttle or monitor.

New directives issued just days before the vote banned the live streaming of unlawful processions and violent incidents. By making it a crime to record and share real-time evidence of state-led repression, the government effectively legislated away the public’s right to bear witness.

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the 2026 shutdown was the preceding campaign of deception. As recently as January 5, the Ministry of ICT publicly dismissed rumours of a blackout as false and misleading. By promising transparency and then delivering a blackout, the state didn’t just violate privacy; it destroyed the fundamental trust required for a functional democracy.

PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

How Uganda’s 2026 Election Redefined State Overreach was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hinkal’s newest feature lets you send crypto privately from your existing Ethereum wallet.

The a16z AI Apps team outlines how they are thinking about the AI application cycle and why they believe it represents the largest and fastest product shift in software to date. The conversation places AI in the context of prior platform waves, from PCs to cloud to mobile, and examines where adoption is already translating into real enterprise usage and revenue. They walk through three core investment themes: existing software categories becoming AI-native, new categories where software directly replaces labor, and applications built around proprietary data and closed-loop workflows. Using portfolio examples, the discussion shows how these models play out in practice and why defensibility, workflow ownership, and data moats matter more than novelty as AI applications scale.

 

Resources:

Follow  Alex Rampell on X: https://twitter.com/arampell

Follow Jen Kha on X: https://twitter.com/jkhamehl

Follow David Haber on X: https://twitter.com/dhaber

Follow Anish Acharya on X: https://twitter.com/illscience

 

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Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures/ for more information.  A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://a16z.com/portfolio

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Iranians building freedom technology across the globe are watching freedoms disappear at home.

The first federally chartered U.S. digital asst bank also wants to IPO in 2027.

Crypto is closer than ever to mass adoption, but its founding values aren’t embedded in every blockchain.

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol gives AI agents a shared language for shopping.

Novogratz doesn't believe crypto legislation needs to be perfect to move forward.

David Solomon confirmed GS is checking out crypto-adjacent technologies, but downplayed any near-term plans.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps accounted for about half of all crypto inflows in Q4 2025.

The Stanford PhD who built DSPy thought he was just creating better prompts—until he realized he'd accidentally invented a new paradigm that makes LLMs actually programmable. 

While everyone obsesses over whether LLMs will get us to AGI, Omar Khattab is solving a more urgent problem: the gap between what you want AI to do and your ability to tell it, the absence of a real programming language for intent. He argues the entire field has been approaching this backwards, treating natural language prompts as the interface when we actually need something between imperative code and pure English, and the implications could determine whether AI systems remain unpredictable black boxes or become the reliable infrastructure layer everyone's betting on.

 

Follow Omar Khattab on X: https://x.com/lateinteraction

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

 

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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It was a slight red day for tokens, but many crypto stocks got hammered.

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework is putting gold and Tesla stock into the mix for perps traders.

Base’s pivot mirrors Farcaster’s wallet shift and signals crypto’s broader return to finance.

In this episode, recorded live at Buidl Europe 2026, host Sebastian Couture leads a panel with Ben Lakoff (Bankless Ventures), Richard Muirhead (Fabric Ventures), Aurora Orellana (G20 Strategies), and Matthew Arrow (Dark Forest). Together, they tackle the existential question facing the industry: can Cypherpunk values like self-custody and permissionless survive as multi-billion dollar institutions become the primary drivers of adoption?

The discussion delves into the tension between individual sovereignty and the regulatory reach of organizations like the FATF, which they describe as a "Goliath" accountable to no one. They explore the concept of the "DeFi Mullet" a centralized user interfaces powered by decentralized backends and how privacy tech is becoming essential not for institutions seeking defensible competitive moats. Finally, the conversation looks at how global competition between jurisdictions will define the next decade of financial freedom and what it truly means to be a Cypherpunk in 2026. 

Topics

00:00 Intro & Context 04:15 Cypherpunk Values in an Institutional World 09:30 Permissionless Deployment & Self-Custody 15:00 The Regulatory Spectrum: KYC vs. Freedom 21:45 The FATF & Global Financial Surveillance 27:10 Jurisdictional Competition & Portability 35:20 Selling Privacy to Institutions vs. Individuals 42:15 The DeFi Mullet & Atomic Settlement 49:00 Barriers to Entry: Legacy Mainframes & Career Risk 55:30 What it Means to be a Cypherpunk in 2026

Links

Ben Lakoff on X: https://x.com/benlakoff Richard Muirhead on X: https://x.com/RichardMuirhead Matthew Arrow on X: https://x.com/mattarrow  Bankless Ventures: https://bankless.ventures/ Fabric Ventures: https://www.fabric.vc/ Gnosis: https://gnosis.io/

Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io

IBKR clients can now fund their brokerage accounts using USDC.

Newrez now includes crypto assets in its loan eligibility calculations.

The ETH treasury firm is now an investor in MrBeast's media and consumer empire.

Product lead Nikita Bier announced X had revoked API access for apps rewarding posts, citing AI spam surge.

a16z cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz join a16z general partner Erik Torenberg and Not Boring founder Packy McCormick for a conversation on how the media and information ecosystem has changed over the past decade. The discussion breaks down the shift toward a more open and decentralized speech environment, the rise of writer- and creator-led platforms like Substack, and the erosion of centralized media gatekeepers. Marc and Ben also tie these dynamics to their investing worldview, outlining how supply-driven markets, major technological step changes, and reputation-driven venture platforms shape outcomes in the AI era.

Timecodes: 

00:00  Introduction
00:46  How the media ecosystem is changing
4:20  Why a16z invested in Substack
6:28  Supply-driven markets and new content creation
8:07  Why writers felt trapped by media companies
10:09  Databricks and the 10x cloud multiplier
13:58  Long-form podcasting proves demand
15:40  What the new fund signals about the future
16:24  AI as a universal problem solver
18:49  Why market sizing is broken
20:45  Go-to-market, policy, and platform power
22:37  Turning inventors into confident CEOs
25:58  Borrowing power to scale faster
27:29  Building dreamers, not killing dreams
30:46  Reputation as a core competitive advantage
35:57  Taking arrows in public
38:56  Avoiding big company failure modes
40:39  Autonomous teams inside a16z
41:54  Venture capital as the last job
46:01  Why intangibles matter more than ever
48:17  Original thinkers with charisma
50:06  Why Zoomers are different

Resources: 

https://www.notboring.co/p/a16z-the-power-brokers

https://www.a16z.news/p/firm-fund

Follow Marc Andreessen on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

 

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Brian Armstrong just yoinked his company's support for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

With Trump teeing up a personally controlled Federal Reserve, hard money seems like an easy bet, but Bitcoin and gold aren't behaving the same.

The $20M Series A round was led by Castle Island Ventures.

There will be no enforcement actions brought against the Zcash Foundation.

2026: This is AGI By Pat Grady and Sonya Huang Published January 14, 2026 Saddle up: Your dreams for 2030 just became possible for 2026.

Years ago, some leading researchers told us that their objective was AGI. Eager to hear a coherent definition, we naively asked “how do you define AGI?”. They paused, looked at each other tentatively, and then offered up what’s since become something of a mantra in the field of AI: “well, we each kind of have our own definitions, but we’ll know it when we see it.”

This vignette typifies our quest for a concrete definition of AGI. It has proven elusive.

While the definition is elusive, the reality is not. AGI is here, now.

Coding agents are the first example. There are more on the way.

Long-horizon agents are functionally AGI, and 2026 will be their year.

Blissfully Unencumbered by the Details

Before we go any further, it’s worth acknowledging that we do not have the moral authority to propose a technical definition of AGI. 

We are investors. We study markets, founders, and the collision thereof: businesses.

Given that, ours is a functional definition, not a technical definition. New technical capabilities beg the Don Valentine question: so what? 

The answer resides in real world impact. 

A Functional Definition of AGI

AGI is the ability to figure things out. That’s it.*

*We appreciate that such an imprecise definition will not settle any philosophical debates.  Pragmatically speaking, what do you want if you’re trying to get something done? An AI that can just figure stuff out. How it happens is of less concern than the fact that it happens.

A human who can figure things out has some baseline knowledge, the ability to reason over that knowledge, and the ability to iterate their way to the answer. 

An AI that can figure things out has some baseline knowledge (pre-training), the ability to reason over that knowledge (inference-time compute), and the ability to iterate its way to the answer (long-horizon agents).

The first ingredient (knowledge / pre-training) is what fueled the original ChatGPT moment in 2022. The second (reasoning / inference-time compute) came with the release of o1 in late 2024. The third (iteration / long-horizon agents) came in the last few weeks with Claude Code and other coding agents crossing a capability threshold.

Generally intelligent people can work autonomously for hours at a time, making and fixing their mistakes and figuring out what to do next without being told. Generally intelligent agents can do the same thing. This is new. 

What Does It Mean to Figure Things Out?

A founder messages his agent: “I need a developer relations lead. Someone technical enough to earn respect from senior engineers, but who actually enjoys being on Twitter. We sell to platform teams. Go.”

The agent starts with the obvious: LinkedIn searches for “Developer Advocate” and “DevRel” at competing companies — Datadog, Temporal, Langchain. It finds hundreds of profiles. But job titles don’t reveal who’s actually good at this.

It pivots to signal over credentials. It searches YouTube for conference talks. It finds 50+ speakers, then filters for those with talks that have strong engagement.

It cross-references those speakers with Twitter. Half have inactive accounts or just retweet their employer’s blog posts. Not what we want. But a dozen have real followings — they post real opinions, reply to people, and get engagement from developers. And their posts have real taste. 

The agent narrows further. It checks who’s been posting less frequently in the last three months. A drop in activity sometimes signals disengagement from their current role. Three names surface.

It researches those three. One just announced a new role — too late. One is a founder of a company that just raised funding — not leaving. The third is a senior DevRel at a Series D company that just did layoffs in marketing. Her last talk was about exactly the platform engineering space the startup targets. She has 14k Twitter followers and posts memes that actual engineers engage with. She hasn’t updated her LinkedIn in two months.

The agent drafts an email acknowledging her recent talk, the overlap with the startup’s ICP, and a specific note about the creative freedom a smaller team offers. It suggests a casual conversation, not a pitch.

Total time: 31 minutes. The founder has a shortlist of one instead of a JD posted to a job board.

This is what it means to figure things out. Navigating ambiguity to accomplish a goal – forming hypotheses, testing them, hitting dead ends, and pivoting until something clicks. The agent didn’t follow a script. It ran the same loop a great recruiter runs in their head, except it did it tirelessly in 31 minutes, without being told how.

To be clear: agents still fail. They hallucinate, lose context, and sometimes charge confidently down exactly the wrong path. But the trajectory is unmistakable, and the failures are increasingly fixable.

How Did We Get Here? From Reasoning Models to Long-Horizon Agents

In last year’s essay, we wrote about reasoning models as the most important new frontier for AI. Long-horizon agents push this paradigm further by allowing models to take actions and iterate over time.

Coaxing a model to think for longer is not trivial. A base reasoning model can think for seconds or minutes.

Two different technical approaches seem to both be working and scaling well: reinforcement learning and agent harnesses. The former approach teaches a model intrinsically to stay on track for longer by poking and prodding it to maintain focus during the training process. The latter designs specific scaffolding around the known limitations of models (memory hand-offs, compaction, and more). 

Scaling reinforcement learning is the domain of the research labs. They have made exceptional progress on this front, from multi-agent systems to reliable tool use. 

Designing great agent harnesses is the domain of the application layer. Some of the most beloved products on the market today are known for their exceptionally engineered agent harnesses: Manus, Claude Code, Factory’s Droids, etc.

If there’s one exponential curve to bet on, it’s the performance of long-horizon agents. METR has been meticulously tracking AI’s ability to complete long-horizon tasks. The rate of progress is exponential, doubling every ~7 months. If we trace out the exponential, agents should be able to work reliably to complete tasks that take human experts a full day by 2028, a full year by 2034, and a full century by 2037. 

So What?

Soon you’ll be able to hire an agent. That’s one litmus test for AGI (h/t: Sarah Guo).

You can “hire” GPT-5.2 or Claude or Grok or Gemini today. More examples are on the way:

Medicine: OpenEvidence’s Deep Consult functions as a specialist Law: Harvey’s agents function as an Associate Cybersecurity: XBOW functions as a pen-tester DevOps: Traversal’s agents function as an SRE GTM: Day AI functions as a BDR, SE, and Rev Ops leader Recruiting: Juicebox functions as a recruiter Math: Harmonic’s Aristotle functions as a mathematician  Semiconductor Design: Ricursive’s agents function as chip designers  AI Researcher: GPT-5.2 and Claude function as AI researchers 

From Talkers to Doers: Implications for Founders

This has profound implications for founders. 

The AI applications of 2023 and 2024 were talkers. Some were very sophisticated conversationalists! But their impact was limited.

The AI applications of 2026 and 2027 will be doers. They will feel like colleagues. Usage will go from a few times a day to all-day, every day, with multiple instances running in parallel. Users won’t save a few hours here and there – they’ll go from working as an IC to managing a team of agents. 

Remember all that talk of selling work? Now it’s possible. 

What work can you accomplish? The capabilities of a long-horizon agent are drastically different than a single forward pass of a model. What new capabilities do long-horizon agents unlock in your domain? What tasks require persistence, where sustained attention is the bottleneck?

How will you productize that work? How will your application interface evolve in your domain, as the UI of work grows from chatbot to agent delegation?

Can you do that work reliably? Are you obsessively improving your agent harness? Do you have a strong feedback loop?

How can you sell that work?Can you price and package to value and outcomes?

Saddle Up!

It’s time to ride the long-horizon agent exponential.

Today, your agents can probably work reliably for ~30 minutes. But they’ll be able to perform a day’s worth of work very soon – and a century’s worth of work eventually.

What can you achieve when your plans are measured in centuries? A century is 200,000 clinical trials no one’s cross-referenced. A century is every customer support ticket ever filed, finally mined for signal. A century is the entire U.S. tax code, refactored for coherence.

The ambitious version of your roadmap just became the realistic one.

Thanks to Dan Roberts, Harrison Chase, Noam Brown, Sholto Douglas, Isa Fulford, Ben Mann, Nick Turley, Phil Duan, Michelle Bailhe, and Romie Boyd for reviewing drafts of this post.

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On August 31, 2023, Zcash Foundation received a subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in connection with an inquiry designated “In the Matter of Certain Crypto Asset Offerings (SF-04569)”.

We are pleased to announce that the SEC has concluded its review and informed us that it does not intend to recommend any enforcement action or other changes against Zcash Foundation regarding this matter. This outcome reflects our commitment to transparency and compliance with applicable regulatory requirements. Zcash Foundation remains focused on advancing privacy-preserving financial infrastructure for the public good.

The post Notice Concluding SEC Investigation appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Monero surged past $700 on Wednesday, as XMR overtakes ZEC as the premier privacy coin play following internal strife at Zcash.

Blues Makes Every Thing Smarter

Ray Ozzie and his team built a low-cost, easy-to-use solution to connect any device to the cloud.

By Roelof Botha Published January 14, 2026 BLUES FOUNDER RAY OZZIE.

“No one can do what Blues can do!”

That’s the kind of effusive praise I’ve heard again and again when I talk to customers about Blues. In 2024, I had the privilege of assuming a role on the company’s board on behalf of Sequoia. I’d been enthusiastic about Blues’ future since our partnership began four years earlier, but I wanted to deepen my understanding of the company and its value proposition. So I organized a series of calls to hear first hand from customers—and my enthusiasm rose dramatically.

Customers loved Blues. They emphasized the product’s flexibility, affordability and ease-of-use. They also complimented the team’s professionalism and responsiveness.

These customers were from a diverse range of industries, testament to the breathtakingly broad use cases for Blues’ products. A flower grower tracking greenhouse temperatures. A shipping business monitoring air currents for ideal travel routes. Enabling remote healthcare across underserved areas of the Caribbean. Smart cranes. Smart port-o-potties! The list goes on and on, from industrial to retail to energy. 

This scale of connectivity was not always possible. But this idea has been brewing in Blues founder Ray Ozzie’s imagination for many years. Ray is a visionary technologist who rebuilt low-connectivity sync. Earlier in his career, he served as Microsoft’s CTO and chief software architect, and before that he founded Lotus Notes. Ray and his team believe not just smart phones and cars but most products in the world should be connected to the cloud—and they understood the barriers to that vision were a mix of technical complexity, business model complexity and overall cost. Blues solves these challenges, one by one, empowering companies to focus on what matters most: growing their business. 

They’ve built integrated hardware (Notecard) and cloud software (Notehub) that enables a plug-and-play solution: a cheat code for any developer looking to turn physical products into data-driven, intelligent services. Each Notecard is equipped with top-tier security, runs on minimal power and offers flexible connectivity across cellular, satellite, Wi-Fi and long range. The Notehub, meanwhile, is a cloud-based control center for instant and secure data routing and fleet management. 

Together, these tools put developers in the driver’s seat. Instead of trying to build for the countless use cases themselves, Ray and his team have given innovators exceptional technology and empowered them to solve their own problems—across a staggering range of applications, with a single API. And as more and more people build with Blues, they form an entire ecosystem of specialists helping each other connect to the cloud.

It is remarkable to see the creativity of applications built on Blues, and we at Sequoia can’t wait to see what users dream of next. We share the enthusiasm of Blues customers and decided to double-down on our partnership, leading their most recent financing. We believe in Ray and his team, and in their mission to make every thing connected and smarter.

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a16z General Partner Alex Rampell joined the Technology Brothers Podcast Network following the announcement of Andreessen Horowitz’s new fund to discuss what drives founders to build enduring companies. Drawing on his journey from early software entrepreneur to leading a16z’s apps fund, Alex shared how high agency, deep historical understanding, and the ability to attract talent, capital, and customers separate great founders from the rest. He reflected on motivation beyond money, explaining why “revenge or redemption” often fuels the resilience required to push through the hardest moments of company building.

 

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The Senate's draft crypto market structure bill is here, and it makes some controversial concessions. Let's dig into the details.

TokenWorks continues iterating on its strategy token model, with IndexStrategies on the horizon.

JPM's CFO associates risk with yield-bearing stablecoins.

Crypto price tracker CoinGecko is reportedly exploring a sale after hiring investment bank Moelis to advise it.

Polygon Labs acquires Coinme and Sequence for over $250M to build regulated stablecoin payments infrastructure via its Open Money Stack toolkit.

When you open a Zcash wallet or start a Zcash node for the first time, it needs to locate and connect to other computers on the network. This is where DNS seeders come in. They are like a phonebook for the Zcash network; they help new nodes find their first connections so they can start sending and receiving transactions.

Until recently, the Zcash network relied on a small number of DNS seeders operated by Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash Foundation (ZF) and Jack Grigg (AKA str4d), who is a Zcash Core Developer and former ECC employee. 

On January 8th, the DNS seeders operated by ECC stopped responding. It’s likely that ECC seeders going offline resulted in slower than usual bootstrapping for new Zcash clients, as they would time-out when attempting to connect to the offline ECC seeders. While the Zcash network itself continued to operate normally, this reduced the number of available seeders and created a need for additional infrastructure to ensure reliable peer discovery for users.

What We Did

In response, ZF deployed five new DNS seeders across multiple regions:

United States: South Carolina and Oregon Europe: Belgium, Germany, and Finland

Combined with ZF’s existing seeder in Iowa, this brings the total number of ZF-operated seeders to six. These seeders are now live and helping nodes connect to the Zcash network.

Why This is Important

Having multiple DNS seeders in different geographic locations is important for two reasons:

Reliability. If one seeder goes offline, others are available to help users connect. This ensures that wallets and nodes can always find peers on the network, even during outages.

Performance. Users in Europe can now connect to seeders that are geographically closer to them, which can improve startup times for wallets and nodes.

Our Commitment to the Ecosystem

This work is part of Zcash Foundation’s ongoing commitment to supporting the Zcash network’s infrastructure. As one of the primary organizations in the ecosystem responsible for maintaining and developing Zcash, we take our role seriously. When we identified a gap in the network’s infrastructure, we moved to address it.

The Zcash network’s strength comes from its decentralization; no single organization controls the network, and multiple independent parties contribute to its operation. By expanding our seeder infrastructure, we are helping to ensure that the network remains resilient and accessible to users around the world.

Looking Ahead

We are considering additional deployments in other regions to further improve coverage and reliability. Shielded Labs is working to deploy additional seeders as well. If you operate Zcash infrastructure and would like to coordinate on network resilience, we welcome collaboration; please contact us via Discord or utilize this Docker image with a README to spin up a seeder on your own.

For technical details about this deployment, the infrastructure code is available in our public repositories.

The post Expanding Zcash Network Infrastructure: New DNS Seeders Launched in the United States and Europe appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Partnering with Sandstone: An AI-Native Platform for In-House Legal Teams

Nick and Jarryd are empowering in-house legal teams to streamline and scale their operations.

By Bogomil Balkansky Published January 13, 2026 TEAM SANDSTONE.

The first sentence of my Sequoia profile reads: “Happenstance has been a theme in my life—that, and being open to opportunities.”

Partnering with Sandstone is Exhibit A.

I was introduced to CEO Nick Fleisher by Genevieve Forslund from our talent team. She had flagged Nick as an up-and-comer—someone we should consider either for Sequoia itself or for one of our portfolio companies. She also introduced him to the CEO of a cybersecurity company we’d partnered with.

That CEO fell in love with Nick immediately and gave me explicit marching orders: “Your mission is to help close Nick.”

I happened to be spending a month in New York. Over a few Negronis, I got to know him.

What stood out right away was Nick’s intensity—the hunger to achieve. As a McKinsey alum, I was especially impressed that he made engagement manager at the firm in just 18 months by, in his words, “hacking the system.” McKinsey is famously time-based, but Nick figured out that early specialization—becoming a true domain expert—was the fastest way to short-circuit the ladder. His trampoline was legal tech, which also turned out to be the preamble to his founder story.

At the time, I was very much in pitch mode, trying to recruit him to our cybersecurity portfolio company. Nick’s verdict: “If I were to take a job, this would be the one. But I really want to try my luck starting my own company.” Fair enough, I thought. And of course, the next best thing to recruiting Nick into a portfolio company was partnering with him on his own entrepreneurial journey.

My first question was simple: “What will the company do?”

“Legal tech,” he replied. He told me he’d spent his entire McKinsey career serving general counsels and overlooked mid-market in-house legal teams. Nick knew that AI could give these understaffed and overworked teams real leverage.

That’s where the serendipity kicked in.

Back in 2019, before joining Sequoia, I had seriously considered starting a legal tech company myself. I had just left Google, and I was traveling the world, plotting my next move. The idea came from my time at VMware, where it had taken a team of 10 people to manually extract 62 key terms from licensing contracts. That stuck with me.

I started calling GC friends in the Valley and quickly realized: everyone was doing some version of this. Spreadsheets as databases. Manual toil everywhere. The MVP became obvious—use ML to extract key contract terms and populate a searchable system. This was pre-LLMs, but even then it felt doable. 

Had I started that company, it could easily have evolved into Sandstone: an AI-native workflow engine for in-house legal teams. Sandstone learns from a company’s legal intelligence to execute work and simplify business operations, transforming their roles from reactive to strategic.

At Sequoia, we often talk about the idea of a prepared mind—doing the work on big market shifts before the opportunity shows up. In a sense, I’d been preparing for Sandstone for years. Happily, so had Nick. When he told me his idea, I dusted off my 2019 Product Requirements Document and sent it to him. That may have sealed the deal.

Historically, legal tech hasn’t been an easy market. But AI has fundamentally changed the dynamics. We’re now seeing multiple legal AI companies scaling quickly, driven by two forces:

Law is the perfect LLM use case—the profession is based on text in, text out. AI is most powerful when it automates expensive human toil, and few professions rely so heavily on highly trained people doing repetitive work.

Before Sandstone, Sequoia had already partnered with Harvey (AI lawyer), Crosby (AI-enabled law firm), and Ironclad (AI contracting and contract lifecycle management), so we’d seen these dynamics play out firsthand.

Two months after meeting Nick, we led Sandstone’s pre-seed. Along the way, we got to know his co-founder Jarryd Strydom—another McKinsey alum, and a rare combination of attorney and builder.

Nick and Jarryd accelerated from a standing start. They built the MVP in weeks, put it in front of customers immediately, and recruited an outstanding founding team that matches their intensity. The energy in their Brooklyn office is palpable, and it comes from the top. One of my favorite anecdotes: after a dinner together in NYC, we wrapped around 11pm—and both Nick and Jarryd went straight back to the office.

That speed and execution gave us the conviction to double down and lead Sandstone’s seed round.

And this is just the beginning. Sandstone is well on its way to transforming how legal teams operate and how business gets done.

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