Web3 | Identosphere Blogcatcher

How AI agents, stablecoins, and micropayments could rebuild the internet’s business model.

x402 vs. MPP is the wrong debate. The real question is who Cloudflare picks to issue the NET Dollar.

The Trump-backed DeFi project's new AgentPay SDK gives AI agents self-custodial wallets and policy-enforced spending on EVM chains.

A new taxonomy from the venture firm identifies seven barrier clusters keeping most traditional yield sources off-chain, and argues that stablecoin growth is pulling them closer.

The exchange is offering leveraged contracts on major technology stocks and ETFs.

The industry body co-authored a white paper with Boston Consulting Group outlining a "Gold as a Service" platform to standardize issuance and custody of digital gold.

The Stripe-owned wallet infrastructure provider has integrated Deframe's DeFi aggregation API, the latest in a string of yield-focused moves.

Liu also added "head of gaming" at Solana Foundation to her X bio, in what appears to be a pointed joke.

Coinbase International customers can now ape stock-linked perpetual futures with up to 20x leverage at any time.

Prediction market platform Kalshi has secured over $1 billion in its latest funding round, led by Coatue Management.

The raise was completed in April 2025, but is being disclosed now as the company gets a new CEO.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton has filed criminal charges against SMCI associates for illegally diverting billions of dollars in servers to China.

Starknet is leaning into privacy infrastructure as the race to differentiate from the Ethereum L1 intensifies.

Lawyers say the joint SEC-CFTC framework is the most significant crypto regulatory development in years. But who decides when a token sheds its investment contract status, and what happens to DeFi, are still unanswered.

The deal doubles the valuation from Kalshi's previous round in November.

The markets move fast, but we move faster. Catch the latest price action and top talking points in this week’s Pulse. Stay informed, stay ahead.

Grassroot Momentum

While the charts show a 12.31% recovery in weekly price and our masternode count begins to stabilize at 1,848, the true strength of PIVX lies in its utility.

Real adoption isn’t found on a price chart; it is found on the ground. This week, PIVX Africa proved what’s possible by bringing privacy and decentralized finance to a local football event in Oyo State, Nigeria. By integrating PIVX into a community that lives and breathes the sport, we are introducing real-world crypto usage and privacy awareness where it matters most. This is what grassroots adoption looks like: empowering people to transact freely and securely within their own vibrant, local ecosystems.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: The market is gaining ground, but masternodes are still clawing back. After the dip from 2,074 two weeks ago, we’ve seen a slight reversal. Four new nodes joined the network this week, bringing the number of active PIVX masternodes to 1,848. Price Check: It was a week of sideways movement for PIVX as the daily value settled around $0.09. A momentary break above $0.1 was met with a quick correction, but the underlying trend remains positive. The weekly average rose to $0.0903, marking a 12.31% recovery from last week’s $0.0804. Trading Buzz: We saw a general improvement in trading sentiment, though total volume couldn’t quite match the previous week’s surge. Weekly volume settled at $18.5 million, an 11.48% decrease from $20.9 million. However, the day-to-day engagement tells a more positive story, with daily volume holding steady above $2 million.

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 (Mar. 13th, 2026 — Mar. 19th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this conversation, Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies, discusses his new book Mobilize, his commission in the U.S. Army, and why he believes the most important thing America can do right now is inspire its latent heretics to step forward. He also breaks down how he thinks about the SaaS market under AI pressure, what the "alpha versus beta software" distinction means for which companies survive, and why he started a film production company.

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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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Bitcoin drops below $70,000 as the Fed raises its inflation forecast and oil-driven price pressures cloud the outlook for rate cuts.

How Convex Finance is still serving top farming opportunities four years after its peak.

Bezos is wooing Middle Eastern royalty and Asian financial giants to invest in his automated empire.

Hallucinated servers can be combined with Ethereum's onchain primitives to power new kinds of crypto apps.

The move would replace quarterly CELO grants to Opera, which each required Celo governance approval, to a one-time token payment for a three-year partnership.

The DeFi neobank will route customer deposits into a basis-trade vault powered by Superstate’s USCC fund.

The crypto exchange believes that laying off employees will better help it prioritize resources and drive efficiency.

Just months after an embarrassing pitch fixing scandal rocked the MLB, baseball is ready to embrace prediction market betting.

Europe's largest asset manager has launched its second on-chain fund, leveraging Chainlink oracles to publish NAV data.

The league also signed an information-sharing agreement with the CFTC, the first such deal between the derivatives regulator and a professional sports body.

Centrifuge's largest tokenized fund, JTRSY, is among the first of its products to adopt LayerZero.

The execution layer's launch comes alongside a DeFi stack, including a Bitcoin L1 DEX, permissionless smart contract deployment, and OP-20 token launches.

A new paper, “Some Simple Economics of AGI,” is making the rounds—Web3 with a16z we sat down with author Christian Catalini (MIT Crypto Economics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO of a16z crypto), in conversation with Robert Hackett, to unpack what AGI could mean for work and markets.

EPISODE NOTES: 

A hot paper — "Some Simple Economics of AGI" — has been making the rounds, so we sat down with the author, covering: 

Automation vs. verification: the key economic split  Why AI agents now feel like coworkers - What's happening to junior roles and the “codifier’s curse”  The “AI sandwich” structure for firms  The value of "meaning-makers," consensus, and status economies  Why crypto may become essential infrastructure for identity, provenance, and trust  Two possible futures: a hollow vs. augmented economy 

Featuring Christian Catalini (founder of MIT Crypto Economics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO of a16z crypto) in conversation with Robert Hackett, our discussion dives deep into how automation is reshaping labor markets, as well as the nature of intelligence. 

What do these changes mean for startups, the future of work, and your career?

 

 

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The Algorand Foundation has laid off a quarter of its staff, citing macroeconomic uncertainty and depressed crypto prices as conditions worsen across the industry.

Bitcoin slips 5% as rising U.S. wholesale inflation and ongoing geopolitical tensions weigh on investor sentiment.

Democrats are poised to upset the balance in Congress; which midterm races matter most for the crypto industry?

Visa Crypto Labs has launched an experimental product that lets AI agents make payments directly from the command line, without API keys or pre-funded accounts.

The perpetuals exchange is promoting WLFI's stablecoin as a trading asset ahead of the Aster Chain Layer 1 launch.

Stripe's highly anticipated L1 blockchain has finally arrived, and comes equipped with a new standard for agentic payments.

The campaign includes an open letter to the deans and faculty of major U.S. business and law schools, co-signed by 20+ leading DeFi orgs.

The crypto exchange's previously announced IPO is on pause, sources told CoinDesk.

The deal gives non-U.S. investors around-the-clock leveraged exposure to the world's most-tracked equity benchmark on Hyperliquid.

Trade[XYZ] is now the first and only officially licensed perpetual futures provider for the S&P 500 index.

Kraken has frozen its multibillion-dollar initial public offering plan, citing difficult market conditions just months after confidentially filing with the SEC.

The move follows the EF's first deployment into the DeFi lending protocol in October, and is part of its updated treasury policy.

The payments-focused L1 launches with a slew of fintech and TradFi partners, while MPP is aimed at enabling agentic commerce.

Attack poisoning is becoming one of the fastest-growing crypto scams. Attacks have grown in the past few years and have targeted even the most seasoned crypto whales. To put things in perspective, data suggests that users may have lost nearly $80 million to these attacks between July 2022 and June 2024.

In today’s “What Could Possibly Go Wrong” series, I’ll walk you through all you need to know about address poisoning and how to stay safe.

What is Address Poisoning?

As the name suggests, address poisoning is a deceptive tactic where an attacker contaminates your transaction history with a fraudulent address. These attacks work because the malicious address looks nearly identical to one you frequently use.

Unlike traditional hacks, this doesn’t involve stealing your private keys or compromising your wallet software. Instead, it is a social engineering attack that exploits a common user habit: copying addresses from recent transaction logs rather than verifying them from a primary source.

How Does Attack Poisoning Work?

The goal of the attacker is to wait for the moment you decide to move funds. They rely on the fact that most wallet interfaces truncate addresses (e.g., 0x123…4567) to save space. The image below is my dummy account on Phantom.

Phase 1: Surveillance

Attackers use automated bots to monitor “high-traffic” blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Tron. They look for active wallets moving significant amounts of stablecoins (USDT/USDC) or native tokens.

Phase 2: The Vanity Mirror

Once a target is identified, the attacker uses a Vanity Address Generator. They create a new address that matches the first 4–6 and last 4–6 characters of your frequent counterparty. For instance:

Real Address: 0x742d…4438f44e Poison Address: 0x742d…4638f44e (Note the subtle difference in the middle characters) Phase 3: The Dust Injection

The attacker sends a “dust” transaction (a negligible amount like 0.0001 tokens) or a zero-value transfer from the fake address to your wallet.

On networks like Ethereum, scammers can use the “transferFrom” function of a smart contract to make it appear as if you sent a transaction to them for 0 tokens. This ensures the fake address sits at the very top of your “Sent” history.

Phase 4: The Fatal Mistake

Next time you need to send funds to your friend or your exchange account, you glance at your history, see an address that starts and ends with the familiar characters, click “Copy,” and hit “Send.” Since the blockchain is irreversible, those funds are gone the moment the transaction is confirmed.

Let’s Talk Numbers

As of early 2026, address poisoning has become a multi-million dollar “lottery” for scammers. Security researchers have identified over 270 million poisoning attempts across Ethereum and BNB Chain alone. Other interesting stats worth mentioning include:

Up to 17 million individual wallets have been poisoned by at least one fraudulent transaction. Estimated losses from address poisoning and related phishing reached approximately $83.8 million in 2025. The average victim’s wallet balance in these campaigns is roughly $338,900, proving that scammers are specifically hunting high-net-worth individuals. But don’t assume you are still safe if you are a small-time player. When Experience Isn’t Enough 1. The $68 Million Whale (May 2024)

In one of the most famous cases, a sophisticated trader lost $68 million in Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) in a single transaction. The attacker had “poisoned” the trader’s history with an address matching the first and last digits of the victim’s own vault. In a rare turn of events, the attacker eventually returned the funds after a public bounty negotiation, but this is the exception, not the rule.

2. The $50 Million USDT Loss (December 2025)

A trader lost $50 million in USDT after copying a lookalike address from their transaction history. Despite offering a $1 million bounty for the return of the funds, the assets were quickly laundered through decentralized mixers, making recovery nearly impossible.

3. The DEA’s Test Failure (2023)

Even government agencies aren’t immune. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) lost over $55,000 in seized USDT to a poisoning attack. After sending a test transaction to a Marshals Service address, a scammer immediately “poisoned” the DEA’s history with a lookalike. The DEA agent copied the wrong address for the main transfer, sending the funds directly to the scammer.

How to Stay Safe

I know you’ve been safely using the same wallet address for five years and think you’d never be a victim. Well, better safe than sorry. For a start, you must treat your transaction history as a publicly editable, untrusted document. Here are some general tips on how to stay safe from address poisoning.

Never Copy from History: This is the number one rule. Always copy the destination address from the original source, such as your exchange’s “Deposit” page or your friend’s direct message. Use an Address Book: Most reputable wallets allow you to save “Verified Contacts.” Give them nicknames like “My Ledger” or “Binance Deposit.” When sending, select the name, not the hex string. The “Middle Character” Rule: Never verify an address by just the first and last 4 characters. Brute-forcing the ends is cheap; matching the middle 10 characters is computationally nearly impossible for scammers. Send a Test Transaction: For large sums, always send a tiny amount first. Confirm the receipt on the other end independently, then use the exact same address for the full amount. Leverage Security Features: Wallets like Trust Wallet now offer “Address Poisoning Protection” that uses APIs to flag known lookalike addresses before you hit send. If your wallet gives you a “Similarity Alert,” stop immediately.

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

How “Address Poisoning” is Emptying Crypto Wallets was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Partnering with Edra: Context for Agents at Scale

Eugen, Yannis and their team are turning enterprise knowledge into dynamic context that makes AI agents dramatically more effective.

By Luciana Lixandru Published March 18, 2026 TEAM EDRA.

Every company runs differently. Two businesses in the same industry will have their own escalation paths, and workarounds—their own tribal knowledge accumulated over years and stored, if anywhere, in the institutional memory of people who won’t always be there. When you drop a general-purpose AI into that environment, it starts from zero. The work of getting it up to speed (the forward-deployed engineers, manual documentation, consultants) is slow, expensive and has to be redone every time a process changes. Most companies are living this problem right now.

Eugen Alpeza spent seven years at Palantir, where he was instrumental in building the company’s U.S. commercial go-to-market motion, including starting Palantir’s work with AT&T, one of its largest and most complex deployments. In 2023, he took on the launch of Palantir’s AI Platform under CEO Alex Karp. Together with Yannis Karamanlakis, they created the Forward Deployed AI Engineer role at Palantir—designed to bridge AI research with real world production deployments. Yannis became the first Forward Deployed AI Engineer at the company, leading a team focused on taking LLMs from demos into production at scale. Yannis had already led a major pure AI commercial project, a recruiting search engine that increased placement rates for a staffing firm by 129%. The two left Palantir as close friends and co-founders. They had known each other for 13 years, since university, and had long planned to start a company together.

What Edra has built is elegant in its logic. Instead of asking humans to document processes, Edra analyzes the data a company already generates. Through support tickets, emails, logs, chat histories, it creates a living knowledge base that reflects how the business actually runs, not just how it was supposed to run on paper. As people use it, the system learns and improves on its own. And unlike black-box fine-tuning approaches, it is transparent and editable—you can see exactly what Edra has learned and why. From there, agent automation is straightforward. 

The early results are real. The first successful use cases are around automating IT service management and customer technical support, where the data is rich and the pain is acute. The early customers love it and are expanding aggressively. 

As always, our investments are all about people. When I first met Eugen and Yannis, what struck me was not only what they had built, but how they work together. Eugen is one of the most commercially gifted people I have met—someone who earns the trust of skeptical buyers and makes them believe. Yannis is technically exceptional, the kind of partner who makes the hardest things feel solid. Their dynamic as a founding duo is a genuine superpower.

We are thrilled to partner with Eugen, Yannis and the entire Edra team. 

Share Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share this on LinkedIn Share this via email Related Topics #AI #Funding announcement Partnering with Aspora: Diaspora Banking Goes Global By Luciana Lixandru, George Robson and James Flynn News Read Partnering with Robco By Luciana Lixandru, Shaun Maguire and Cornelius Menke News Read Partnering with Tacto: Future-Proof Supply Chains Luciana Lixandru, Julien Bek News Read JOIN OUR MAILING LIST Get the best stories from the Sequoia community. Email address Leave this field empty if you’re human:

The post Partnering with Edra: Context for Agents at Scale appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

Kraken Pro has rolled out its largest single margin leverage expansion, adding support across 44 trading pairs including stablecoins, gold tokens, BTC and ETH regional pairs, mid-cap assets, and DeFi blue-chips.

Tally, which served over one million users and processed $1 billion in payments, is winding down operations as demand for DAO tooling declines.

Ethereum's proposed Fast Confirmation Rule aims to slash L1-to-L2 bridge and exchange deposit times from minutes to just 13 seconds without requiring a hard fork.

Erik Torenberg sits down with Jacob Helberg to discuss AI, manufacturing, supply chains, and the new geopolitics of technology. Drawing on themes from Helberg’s book The Wires of War, they explore why hardware, industrial capacity, and secure supply chains have become central to both economic strength and national security.

They also unpack what it means to “win the AI race” — from model leadership and global adoption to energy, compute, tariffs, and reindustrialization in the U.S.

 

Resources:

Find Jacob Helberg on X: https://x.com/jacobhelberg

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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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Polymarket put prediction markets on the map. Here are four projects experimenting with what comes next.

NFT marketplace shelves March 30 TGE target with no new date, ends rewards campaign, and offers fee refunds.

The SEC has finally drawn clearer lines around crypto, defining what is and is not a security.

The SEC has issued an official interpretation clarifying the application of federal securities laws to crypto assets and transactions, marking a significant step in regulatory clarity for the industry.

As many as 10 applicants will receive $24k from the EF to advance the frontier of Ethereum-related academic research.

The oracle network's new composite index blends institutional and onchain data sources to produce a constantly updated crude oil reference price.

As Twitter debates paying writers, what can onchain infra do for independent publishing?

Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyBank, and Old National Bancorp are launching a tokenized settlement network built on ZKsync.

The Winklevoss-backed Zcash treasury company reported $4.8 million in net income in 2025, driven by unrealized gains on its ZEC holdings.

The popular Solana wallet can now partner with registered exchanges to offer in-app access to derivatives and event contracts without registering as a broker.

Elixir shuttered deUSD withdrawals in November after Stream’s insolvency raised concerns over $63M in collateral.

Bitrefill has disclosed a March 1 cyberattack, which targeted 18.5k purchase records and drained company funds.

Phantom has received the CFTC's sign-off to offer regulated derivatives trading without needing to register as a broker.

The toolkit integrates with Coinbase's x402 protocol, giving platforms a way to verify a real person stands behind an automated agent — without revealing who that person is.

The move aims to integrate BVNK's infra into Mastercard's network to bridge on-chain payments and existing fiat rails.

The second-largest perpetual futures DEX by volume began the rollout of its mainnet, which uses ZK proofs to keep trades private.

Zcash Foundation is pleased to announce Zebra 4.2.0. This release expands RPC functionality, strengthens mempool policy compliance, and adds deeper state querying capabilities. This release also completes the migration to OpenRPC for API documentation and moves the Python QA test framework to the standalone integration-tests repository. 

What’s New in 4.2.0 RPC: A More Complete Interface gettxout: Query Unspent Outputs

We’ve added the gettxout RPC method along with the new OutputObject response type. This enables callers to look up unspent transparent outputs directly, a key capability for wallet integrations.

getblocksubsidy: Historical Subsidy Support

Zebra now includes Founders Reward addresses and pre-Canopy block subsidies. Please note that in order to provide accurate responses to queries to the getblocksubsidy RPC, we are still pending a fix to subtract the Founders’ Reward from the block subsidy.

rpc.discover: OpenRPC Service Discovery

Zebra now serves an rpc.discover endpoint that returns a machine-readable OpenRPC schema describing all supported RPC methods. The schema is generated at build time using build_rpc_schema() via the new openrpsee dependency, making it easy for clients and tooling to introspect Zebra’s RPC interface without consulting external documentation.

This replaces the previous OpenAPI specification, which was less suited to JSON-RPC APIs. This means that the openapi-generator tool and its associated Cargo features have now been removed from zebra-utils.

Mempool: Stronger Policy Compliance

We’ve implemented the remaining non-standard transaction filters, bringing Zebra’s mempool acceptance policy closer to full parity with zcashd.

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 out good first issues if you’re new to the project

Zebra is Zcash Foundation’s independent, consensus-compatible implementation of a Zcash node, written in Rust for performance and safety.

The post Zebra 4.2.0 Release appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Ripple is adding custody, payments, and brokerage tools for digital asset management in Brazil as it prepares to seek regulatory approval from the country's central bank.

Cari Network is building a bank-governed tokenized deposit platform on ZKsync's Prividium stack, offering US regional lenders an onchain payments rail with stablecoin-like speed and transferability.

Vishal Misra returns to explain his latest research on how LLMs actually work under the hood. He walks through experiments showing that transformers update their predictions in a precise, mathematically predictable way as they process new information, explains why this still doesn't mean they're conscious, and describes what's actually required for AGI: the ability to keep learning after training and the move from pattern matching to understanding cause and effect.

 

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

 

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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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Cango sold approximately $305 million in bitcoin holdings in February to repay debt and finance an artificial intelligence infrastructure transformation.

Crypto.com has partnered with KG Inicis to let foreign travelers pay for goods and services in South Korea using digital assets through the exchange's merchant network.

How crypto is opening private markets, IPOs, and capital formation to a much wider audience.

OpenSea is also ending its rewards campaign, offering fee refunds, and cutting token swap fees to 0% beginning March 31.

Total crypto capitalization is up 3.5%, with Layer 1s and memecoins leading the charge.

The platform’s overall on-chain RWA value crossed the $1 billion milestone for the first time last August on the back of institutional demand for its JAAA fund.

While Aave blamed an illiquid market, CoW Swap identified a stale gas ceiling, silent solver failures, and a possible mempool leak that turned a bad trade into the worst execution loss in DeFi history.

Aave will deploy a new feature called Aave Shield to provide greater protections for users of its token swap interface.

The Trump family-backed protocol's "Super Node" tier promises partnership discussions with the WLFI team.

The Susquehanna-backed crypto lender was last reported as seeking a buyer after it suspended withdrawals and deposits last month.

A leaked document suggests Hayden Davis structured $5M in payments around Argentine President Javier Milei’s promotion of the LIBRA memecoin.

The deal values Abra at $750 million pre-money.

On-chain data shows that two early crypto investors purchased millions of dollars worth of ETH today, while Bitmine continued its weekly purchases.

Strategy and Bitmine both announced fresh crypto buys today, while Metaplanet revealed its latest capital raise.

The SEC has closed its civil enforcement lawsuit against DeSo creator Nader Al-Naji, ending a case that accused him of wire fraud and selling unregistered securities.

In this episode, originally aired on Big Technology Podcast, Olivia Moore discusses whether AI startups can compete with the big chatbots, why American sentiment toward AI is so negative, and what she learned from giving LLMs personality tests. She also breaks down where ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are diverging, why Open Claw signals a new wave of agentic products, and what makes memory the most underrated feature in consumer AI.

 

Resources:

Follow Olivia Moore on X:  https://x.com/omooretweets

Follow Alex Kantrowitz on X:  https://x.com/Kantrowitz

List to Big Technology Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLADd6sStSis77HKfbf4KCY6SvthfxeUgn

 

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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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Australia's Senate Economics Legislation Committee has endorsed proposed legislation to modernize the country's digital assets regulatory framework.

The FATF's latest report pivots regulatory focus from deposit/withdrawal monitoring to tracking peer-to-peer transactions across personal wallets, with issuers now expected to freeze illicit assets on-chain.

Synthetix has extended its sUSD deposit rewards campaign on Infinex for 8 weeks, supporting peg stability as the protocol enters its mainnet public launch phase.

BlockFills has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US after suspending deposits and withdrawals last month amid poor market conditions.

Aave is rolling out a new protective feature called 'Aave Shield' after a trader lost $50 million swapping USDT for AAVE due to illiquid market conditions.

The Spark Foundation has proposed re-enabling WBTC as collateral on SparkLend and adding new rate limits and pools to its liquidity layer following a 1.5-year operational review.

The SEC and CFTC have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a unified regulatory approach to digital assets.

A threat actor bypassed Venus Protocol's supply caps using Thena tokens to borrow multiple assets in what analysts suspect was a flash loan or price manipulation attack on BNB Chain.

Marc Andreessen joins David Senra for a conversation about entrepreneurship, history, and what drives some of the world’s most ambitious builders.

In this conversation with David, Marc reflects on patterns he’s seen across great founders, why many of them focus relentlessly on building rather than introspection, and how technology and entrepreneurship continue to shape the future.

 

Resources:

David Senra

Website: https://www.davidsenra.com

X: https://x.com/davidsenra

Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/ma...

Marc Andreessen

X: https://x.com/pmarca

a16z: https://a16z.com/author/marc-andreessen

Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com

 

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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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Most people would say that nothing has fundamentally changed.

They wake up, tap a screen, pay for coffee, scroll past the news, and move on with their day. Money flows invisibly now — frictionless, silent, obedient. A card here, a phone there. No coins to count, no notes to fold, no signatures to leave behind. It all feels lighter than it used to. Cleaner. More efficient.

And yet, if one pauses for a moment — really pauses — there is a curious sensation that was not always there. A sense that each step leaves a trace, even when the ground looks untouched. That the path, once open and forgiving, has narrowed without anyone quite noticing when or how.

No gates were erected. No proclamations were read aloud. Nothing was taken by force. Instead, small conveniences accumulated. Safeguards were introduced. Forms were signed. Permissions were granted. Each change reasonable in isolation. Each step justified. Each one easy to accept.

It is only in retrospect that one realizes the forest has grown darker.

What once felt like freedom now feels conditional. What once required no explanation now quietly demands one. And somewhere along the way, agency — that subtle, deeply human sense of acting without being observed, measured, or permanently recorded — began to feel less like a right and more like an inconvenience.

Most will say this is progress.

Others may sense, as they walk, that unseen eyes have learned the paths far better than those who still travel them.

* * *

There was a moment, not so long ago, when a small flame flickered at the edge of this forest.

It did not arrive with banners or slogans. There were no marketing departments, no press conferences, no polished faces promising a better tomorrow. It arrived quietly, almost shyly, in the form of an idea — a handful of pages published by an unknown author at a time when trust in institutions had already begun to fracture.

Bitcoin.

To some, it was merely a technical curiosity. To others, a speculative toy. But to those who had learned to read between the lines of history, it was something else entirely: a refusal. A system that did not ask who you were. A network that did not require permission. Money that moved according to rules, not discretion.

For the first time in generations, it seemed possible to step off the well-lit road and still carry value with you.

Bitcoin was not born out of greed, as many later claimed. It was born out of memory. The memory of bank failures, of frozen accounts, of promises rewritten after the fact. It was an attempt — imperfect, audacious — to separate money from the moods and interests of those who wielded power over it.

For a while, the light was enough.

People spoke of sovereignty, of censorship resistance, of a future where value could no longer be diluted by decree or seized by keystroke. It felt, briefly, as though the forest itself had been mapped — that the shadows could be held at bay simply by making everything visible.

But forests have a way of adapting.

What was first celebrated as transparency slowly revealed another face. Every step recorded. Every path preserved. Every movement etched permanently into an ever-growing ledger — open not just to friends and fellow travelers, but to anyone patient enough, clever enough, or well-resourced enough to watch.

The light had illuminated more than intended.

And somewhere beyond the trees, unseen figures began to take notes.

* * *

None of this happened abruptly.

That is the detail most often overlooked.

Had the changes arrived all at once, they would have been resisted. Had someone announced that every financial action would one day be recorded, analyzed, and potentially interpreted out of context, there would have been outrage. There would have been debates, protests, refusals.

Instead, the temperature rose by degrees.

Each new measure arrived wrapped in reassurance. Safety. Stability. Responsibility. Compliance. Each one addressed a problem few denied existed. And so each step felt reasonable — even necessary — when viewed on its own.

A little identification to prevent fraud.

A little monitoring to stop crime.

A little data retention for efficiency.

Who could object?

And yet, with every concession, something subtle shifted. The burden moved. It was no longer the institution that had to justify its power, but the individual who had to justify their privacy. Silence became suspicious. Anonymity, once ordinary, began to look like defiance.

Agency was not revoked. It was reframed.

To act freely became a risk. To remain unobserved became an anomaly. And what had once been a right slowly transformed into a privilege — granted conditionally, revoked quietly, and rarely discussed in those terms.

This is how systems change without appearing to do so.

By the time the water feels uncomfortably warm, it has already been warm for quite some time.

Most people adapt. They always do. Habits adjust. Expectations recalibrate. What once felt intrusive becomes background noise. A new normal settles in, and memory does the rest — smoothing over the edges, rewriting the past as naïve.

After all, nothing terrible happened yesterday. Or the day before. Or the day before that.

And so the thought never quite forms that the forest itself has been altered — not by force, but by patience.

Only later, often much later, does the realization surface: that the freedom once taken for granted is now something one must actively explain, defend, or justify.

And by then, the exits are harder to find.

* * *

Curiously, as the watching grew more precise, the stories told about it grew simpler.

Attention was drawn, again and again, toward familiar villains. Shadowy figures. Dark markets. Illicit trades whispered about with theatrical seriousness. Money laundering. Drugs. Trafficking. The implication was always the same: if one had nothing to hide, one had nothing to fear.

It was a comforting narrative. Neat. Moral. Reassuring.

And above all, useful.

For while the spotlight lingered on these dangers, something else unfolded in plain sight. The largest flows of illicit money did not vanish. They did not retreat into the shadows. They moved, as they always had, through institutions with polished facades and compliance departments large enough to absorb penalties as routine expenses. Fines were issued. Press releases published. Business continued.

The machinery of surveillance did not dismantle power. It organized it.

Ordinary people, meanwhile, learned a new reflex: to explain themselves preemptively. A transaction delayed. An account flagged. A question asked by an algorithm with no face and no patience. Proof demanded not because guilt was suspected, but because procedure required it.

The burden of proof had shifted — quietly, decisively.

Privacy was no longer a default condition of life. It became an exception that required justification. And justification, once normalized, has a habit of expanding its demands.

What made this misdirection so effective was not deception, but plausibility. Crime exists. Abuse exists. Few would deny it. And so the net was cast ever wider, not to catch the powerful — who know how to step around it — but to ensure that the compliant remained legible, predictable, and manageable.

Surveillance, it turned out, was never designed to see everything.

It was designed to see you.

Those who caused the greatest harm were too large to monitor meaningfully and too entangled to confront directly. Those with the least power, on the other hand, were easy to observe, easy to catalogue, and easy to discipline — all in the name of order.

And so the forest filled with noise. Warnings shouted from one direction. Threats exaggerated in another. While the real change — the normalization of permanent observation — settled in quietly, almost politely, like fog.

By the time one noticed that the rules applied unevenly, the rules had already become habit.

And habit, once formed, rarely feels like coercion.

* * *

There is another reason the forest has grown so dense, though it is spoken of far less openly.

At its core, it is not a story about morality or safety, but about trust — and the slow erosion of it.

For more than a century, modern money has rested on promises. Promises that value would be preserved. That purchasing power would remain broadly stable. That debt could grow without consequence. These promises held, for a time, because belief held. And belief, once strong enough, can carry a system astonishingly far.

But belief, unlike mathematics, decays.

Since the early twentieth century, and especially since money severed its last tangible anchors, currencies have relied increasingly on confidence rather than constraint. The result has been predictable, if uneven: a steady loss of purchasing power, punctuated by crises, rescues, and ever-larger interventions designed to buy time.

More debt. More liquidity. More complexity.

What cannot continue indefinitely, eventually does not.

As promises strain, oversight increases. As trust thins, control expands. When a system begins to sense its own fragility, it does not loosen its grip — it tightens it. Not out of malice, but out of necessity.

This is where surveillance finds its true purpose.

It is not merely about crime. It is about manageability. A highly indebted system cannot tolerate unpredictability. It cannot afford large numbers of people acting outside approved channels, beyond measurement, beyond reach. Every untracked transaction is not just a risk — it is a variable. And variables, in fragile systems, are dangerous.

So visibility becomes policy.

Money must be traceable. Behavior must be legible. Movement must be recorded. Not because everyone is suspected of wrongdoing, but because uncertainty itself has become the enemy.

This is why, as currencies weaken, real assets grow more attractive. Gold. Land. Commodities. And, increasingly, Bitcoin. Not as ideology, but as instinct. People sense — long before they articulate — when abstraction is failing them.

They move toward things that cannot be diluted by decree.

Yet even here, the pattern repeats. As capital seeks refuge, the gaze follows. New rules. New disclosures. New frameworks. The forest extends its boundaries to wherever value attempts to rest.

The problem is not that people are losing faith.

The problem is that the system cannot survive a mass loss of faith — and knows it.

And so, the response is not renewal, but observation. Not reform, but oversight. A tightening web designed to ensure that when trust finally falters, movement can still be guided, slowed, or stopped.

Seen this way, the rise of financial surveillance is not an anomaly.

It is a symptom.

* * *

At this point, the question is no longer technical.

It is philosophical.

What does it mean to live in a world where nothing is allowed to fade?

Human beings are not static creatures. We change our minds. We grow. We contradict ourselves. We experiment, fail, retreat, and try again. Much of this happens privately — not because it is shameful, but because it is unfinished. Context matters. Timing matters. Forgiveness matters.

A system that remembers everything denies all three.

Total visibility does not create honesty. It creates rigidity. When every action is recorded permanently, behavior adapts — not toward virtue, but toward safety. People stop acting from conviction and start acting from calculation. They choose what will look acceptable tomorrow rather than what feels right today.

This is not morality. It is risk management.

Privacy, in this sense, is not secrecy. It is breathing room. The space in which thought can form before being judged. The ability to act without immediately becoming a data point in someone else’s model of who you are.

Without that space, agency withers.

When financial behavior is fully exposed, it becomes interpretable — and interpretation is power. Not just by states, but by institutions, platforms, and systems whose incentives are opaque and whose judgments are irreversible. A transaction ceases to be an action and becomes a statement. A preference. A signal. Something to be categorized.

And once categorized, rarely reconsidered.

This is where the danger lies — not in observation itself, but in permanence combined with asymmetry. Those who observe are not observed in return. Those who interpret are not interpreted. The ledger is open, but only in one direction.

In such a world, innocence is no longer presumed. It is provisional.

Privacy, then, is not about hiding wrongdoing. It is about retaining the right to exist without constant narration. To support a cause without being labeled. To explore ideas without being profiled. To move through life without every choice being weighed against a future you cannot yet see.

A society that abandons privacy does not become safer.

It becomes brittle.

Because brittle systems fear deviation. They punish ambiguity. They confuse conformity with stability. And when pressure mounts — as it always does — they fracture suddenly, violently, and without grace.

This is why financial privacy matters more, not less, in uncertain times like these.

Not because people are worse than before, but because they are human — and humans require room to change without being frozen in place by records that never forget.

To protect privacy, then, is not to resist society.

It is to protect the conditions under which society remains alive.

* * *

By now, it should be clear that privacy cannot be an illusion.

It cannot be something that exists only at the discretion of intermediaries, nor something that quietly degrades when it becomes inconvenient for those in power. In increasingly hostile environments, performative privacy — privacy that exists in theory but collapses under pressure — offers little protection at all.

This is where an important distinction must be made.

There is a profound difference between privacy that is optional by design and privacy that is conditional by permission. The former preserves agency; the latter merely postpones its loss. When a system allows individuals to choose transparency or discretion — without intermediaries, without approvals, without explanations — optionality becomes strength, not compromise.

Choice, after all, is the essence of agency.

The danger lies not in optional privacy itself, but in systems where privacy can be weakened, overridden, or retroactively withdrawn. Where today’s assurances quietly give way to tomorrow’s policy updates. Where discretion exists only until it attracts attention.

True financial privacy must therefore be available when needed, uncompromised when chosen, and indifferent to who is asking. It must function the same way for the compliant and the controversial, for the ordinary citizen and the inconvenient one. It must not rely on trust in institutions, personalities, or promises of restraint.

It must be structural.

This is the context in which PIVX was built.

From the beginning, PIVX treated privacy not as an all-or-nothing mandate, but as a sovereign choice. Users can transact transparently when they wish to be seen, and privately when they do not — without requesting permission, without exposing intent, and without leaving a permanent trail behind them when privacy is chosen.

Equally important is what PIVX did not become.

It did not place its future in the hands of venture capital, where timelines shorten and principles soften. It did not depend on opaque funding or growth narratives that demand compromise when scrutiny intensifies. Instead, it grew deliberately, sometimes quietly, sustained by a community bound less by hype than by conviction.

Some members are deeply technical, fluent in cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs. Others simply understand — instinctively — that something essential is being lost, and that it is worth protecting. What unites them is not identity, ideology, or status, but a shared refusal to accept total visibility as the price of participation.

In the PIVX community, it does not matter who you are, what you believe, or where you come from. Those distinctions fade, because they are irrelevant. Privacy, when it is real, protects everyone equally.

This is not rebellion.

It is preservation.

In a world that increasingly demands to know everything, choosing when not to reveal yourself is a quiet act of self-respect. A way of drawing a boundary where boundaries have become unfashionable. A reminder that agency does not disappear on its own — it is surrendered, unless someone decides otherwise.

The forest is darker now. The paths more closely watched.

But even here, even now, there remain ways to walk without leaving your entire life carved into the ground behind you.

And sometimes, choosing that path is not about hiding.

It is simply about remaining human.

* * *

At some point, the illusion breaks.

Not with a single catastrophe, but with a quiet accumulation of contradictions. A society that speaks endlessly of freedom, yet grows increasingly intolerant of unobserved action. A system that claims neutrality, yet remembers everything. A public discourse that praises transparency — but only when it flows in one direction.

This is the macro fracture.

It becomes visible when ordinary people are told they have nothing to hide, while being asked to explain more and more of themselves. When compliance is framed as morality. When opting out is quietly redefined as suspicion. The forest does not attack — it presses inward, branch by branch, until movement itself feels constrained.

And here lies the most misunderstood point:

this is not about secrecy.

It is about choice.

Privacy, in its original sense, was never an act of defiance. It was a default state — the space in which dignity, dissent, generosity, and conscience could exist without external permission. Only when observation becomes total does privacy suddenly appear radical.

A mature society does not demand invisibility.

Nor does it demand exposure.

It allows both — consciously, situationally, humanely.

This is where many well-intentioned solutions falter. They swing from full compliance to total obscurity, replacing one rigidity with another. But rigidity is precisely what breaks under pressure. Systems survive not by forcing uniform behavior, but by respecting context.

The ability to choose when to be seen, and when not to be.

Optional privacy is not a loophole. It is a boundary.

Not a weapon, but a safeguard.

Not an escape from the system, but a correction to its imbalance.

In a world that increasingly treats every transaction as a declaration, the quiet right to act without broadcasting oneself becomes an act of self-respect. And self-respect, once eroded, is remarkably difficult to restore.

This is not darkness for darkness’ sake.

* * *

And then, almost unnoticed, something different appears.

Not a flare fired into the sky. Not a shouting guide demanding allegiance. Just a structure that seems oddly… prepared. As if it had been designed by people who assumed the forest would grow darker, not lighter.

PIVX does not promise salvation. It does not claim to fix politics, cleanse institutions, or outpace history. That would be naïve. What it offers is more restrained — and therefore more powerful.

It offers agency.

In a world where financial behavior is increasingly treated as identity, PIVX restores the separation. Not by forcing everyone into invisibility, but by refusing to collapse all human action into a single, permanently observable layer.

You can transact openly when openness serves you.

You can transact privately when discretion is wisdom.

The choice is yours — not embedded in ideology, but in design.

This matters more than it first appears.

Because systems that force privacy attract pressure.

Systems that forbid privacy attract control.

But systems that make privacy optional, deliberate, and personal are far harder to capture — precisely because they do not threaten by default.

There is no venture capital timeline whispering urgency.

No opaque benefactor shaping direction from behind the curtain.

No quiet compromise justified as “necessary for adoption.”

Instead, there is something almost unfashionable: a community that understands what it is protecting, even if not everyone can explain the mathematics behind it. Developers who build because the problem is real. Users who stay because the principle matters.

What unites them is not rebellion, nor profit, nor fear.

It is the shared intuition that a world without private space is not efficient — it is brittle. And brittle systems do not bend when history shifts. They shatter.

In that sense, PIVX is not competing with other coins.

It is standing apart from a trend: the steady normalization of permanent exposure.

Here, skin color is irrelevant. Belief systems dissolve. Status evaporates. There are no favored identities, no protected classes, no algorithmic hierarchies. Only individuals — equal in their right to transact without being profiled, scored, or archived for future judgment.

This is not about hiding from the world.

It is about remaining human within it.

And as the forest grows quieter, as the watchers multiply, as the light becomes harsher rather than clearer, the reader finally understands:

The most radical act left is not resistance.

It is self-possession.

And that, quietly, deliberately, is what PIVX was built to preserve.

* * *

History rarely announces its turning points.

They are recognized only later, when people look back and ask themselves when exactly things became irreversible. When convenience quietly replaced consent. When safety was traded for supervision. When agency was surrendered not by force, but by fatigue.

Most people do not lose their freedoms in chains.

They lose them in forms.

In defaults.

In systems that work just well enough to discourage questioning.

And yet, throughout history, there has always been a minority who sensed the shift early. Not because they were paranoid, but because they were attentive. They noticed when boundaries blurred. When temporary measures hardened into permanent architecture. When “just this once” became the rule.

These people were not heroes. They were gardeners of margin. Keepers of space. They understood that what disappears first in any centralized system is not wealth — but optionality.

The ability to act differently tomorrow.

PIVX belongs to that lineage. Not as a rebellion against society, but as a quiet refusal to let the human being be reduced to a data point. It does not demand belief. It does not require trust in leaders, foundations, or promises of future reform.

It simply works — and keeps working — regardless of who is in power.

In the years to come, many systems will claim to protect you.

Few will allow you to protect yourself.

That distinction matters.

Because when financial privacy is gone, it does not return with apologies. Once every transaction is indexed, correlated, and interpreted by machines, the past becomes a permanent liability. Not just for criminals — but for dissidents, minorities, journalists, donors, helpers, and ordinary people who once made perfectly reasonable choices under different circumstances.

The forest does not need villains.

It only needs momentum.

And so this is not a call to panic.

Nor a plea to abandon the world.

It is a reminder — calm, firm, and sober — that agency, once surrendered, must be rebuilt at great cost.

PIVX exists because some people refused to wait until that cost became unbearable.

Not to hide from the future.

But to enter it standing upright.

With choice intact.

With dignity preserved.

With the quiet knowledge that some things are worth defending before they are missed.

And when the forest grows darker — as forests sometimes do — it helps to know that not every path was closed.

Some were protected.

PIVX Voices ~ Should you wish to write for PIVX please reach out to Sapentia at Discord.PIVX.org
PIVX. Your Rights. Your Privacy. Your Choice.

They Didn’t Take Our Money — They Took Our Choice was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Ethereum Foundation completed a $10.2 million over-the-counter sale of 5,000 ETH to BitMine at $2,042.96 per token as part of treasury management.

Two Formula One races in the Middle East face cancellation due to ongoing regional conflict, threatening major cryptocurrency sponsorship deals with F1 teams.

The Ethereum Foundation's 'EF Mandate' feels like an out-of-touch return to vibes over pragmatic vision.

Sky is now the fourth-largest DeFi protocol as RWA-backed yields drive inflows.

Bitcoin has surpassed 20 million coins mined—over 95% of its 21 million total supply—but most current miners may not survive to see the final 1 million coins extracted by 2140.

Senator John Thune said the crypto-focused CLARITY Act faces further delays due to unresolved disagreements between banks and stablecoin issuers.

Five theoretical x402 products worth building.

The EF is reframing Ethereum's global value with a new mandate, but some in the community are worried the Foundation is repeating old mistakes.

The Strategy-issued credit instrument closed 26 cents below its $100 target price and failed to trade the key threshold for the first time in more than two weeks.

Bitcoin is trading around $71,000 after reaching $74,000 earlier today.

TAO, FET, and RENDER led the AI sector higher amid improving market sentiment.

The top 297 holders of Official Trump are being invited to a conference and gala at Mar-a-Lago in April, with some eligible for a VIP reception with the President.

The document articulates and reaffirms the purpose and "promise of Ethereum," as well as the EF's role in the ecosystem.

Major crypto conferences have been postponed amid ongoing drone strikes and airspace restrictions across the Gulf.

Donald Trump's memecoin registered a new all-time low just hours before yesterday's announcement.

The feature lets tokenized agents direct onchain revenue toward buying back and burning their own tokens.

Heathcote will give up day-to-day responsibilities, but remain engaged with Tether in a non-executive, advisory role.

The EF formalized its mandate, outlining its guiding principles and role as a steward of Ethereum.

Day-one trading volume for ETHB on Nasdaq reached over $16.5 million.

We’ve rounded up the biggest talking points and price actions you actually need to know. Dive into this week’s Pulse and stay ahead of the curve.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: Market’s green, but the nodes are seeing red. The number of active PIVX masternodes dipped from 2,074 to 1,844 this week. That’s 230 nodes offline with zero technical catalyst. I believe someone is either locking in some profits or a VPS may have gone offline. Price Check: PIVX experienced a tighter trading range this week, with its Daily USD Value fluctuating between $0.08 and $0.09. There was a spike above $0.1 within the week. However, the macro view shows a continued slide; the weekly price average fell from $0.0837 to $0.0804, a 3.94% contraction. Trading Buzz: Trading dynamics shifted dramatically this week. Despite a lower daily USD value, volume surged by 40.27% to reach $20.9 million. This inverse correlation is a high-signal indicator that buyers are stepping in to absorb the sell-side pressure.

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 (Mar. 6th, 2026 — Mar. 12th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This conversation with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and acting director of the Defense Innovation Unit, was recorded at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. Michael walks through how he inherited a department running 14 undefined technology priorities, cut them to six, and made applied AI number one. He also gives the first detailed account of why commercial AI contracts written under the previous administration created a vendor-lock crisis that put active military operations at risk.

 

 

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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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BTC, ETH, and major altcoins are mostly unchanged over the past 24 hours.

The unnamed swapper confirmed slippage warnings and made the transaction using their mobile device.

BlackRock’s iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHB) puts Ethereum's 'internet bond' innovation on Wall Street's radar.

The pioneering Web3 attendance protocol will stop onboarding new issuers on March 16, as its team turns its attention to building open infrastructure for digital collectibles.

The massive transaction routed through CowSwap on Ethereum resulted in a 99.9% loss.

With the restaking sector in a slump, the protocol is betting that institutional distribution can reignite growth.

Vitalik postulates that the crypto industry is on the precipice of achieving new types of real-world adoption.

A quick tour of Slab, an app for collecting and trading Pokémon cards on Base, ApeChain, and Monad.

BSC recently became the largest network by registered AI agents using the ERC-8004 standard, while on-chain agent activity in the ecosystem is also rising.

The financial regulator warns that exchanges should avoid listing contracts that could be easily manipulated, such as sports-related markets.

The strategic investment is the latest in a string of Bitcoin infrastructure bets by the stablecoin giant.

The TradFi giant's iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF is its first yield-bearing exchange-traded product.

As perpetual futures positions shrink to just 11% of USDe's backing, the protocol argues its unstaking delay no longer reflects the liquidity available to meet redemptions.

The agency issued an advance rulemaking notice and a staff advisory encouraging innovation.

The much-anticipated staked ETH ETF goes live on Nasdaq today, combining spot ETH exposure with staking rewards in a single fund.

The new product, EarnUSD, lets users earn yield on their USDC and USDT.

Op Labs' CEO said the move was not about finances, and that the firm has "years of runway."

This conversation with Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of Palantir, was recorded at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. Karp discusses the role of technology in modern warfare, Silicon Valley's obligations to national defense, and why he believes America's single greatest competitive advantage is its ability to cultivate and protect unconventional talent.

 

 

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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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… and other musings from our Risk Club Dinner in Lisbon we hosted in partnership with Ricardo Sequerra Amram at Point Nine Capital.

Portuguese real estate woes as a proxy for where we are geopolitically

Portugal is about as far from active conflict zones as you can get while staying on the continent — neutral twice in the World Wars, Atlantic-facing, welcoming to expat families. Thousands of American families are moving there every year and the supply of homes cannot keep pace with demand.

In an era of geopolitical upheaval, many people who can afford to move here are doing so. Remote work has decoupled talent from geography — especially when you might just be co-working with your AI agents. And the countries that make it easy to arrive — a clear path to residency, a functioning bureaucracy, quality of life — may well pull ahead of the ones that don’t. Countries actively hostile to immigration were among our short positions for a reason.

But…what if AI agents start optimizing for geopolitical safety when they allocate capital they are tasked to manage? Could we expect them to start buying real estate in places like Portugal? Will there be tension between expats, locals and AI agents in these safe-haven places?

As international pressure for a Ukraine ceasefire intensifies, the conversation turned to what any agreement needs to include

When the war started, millions of Ukrainians fled for their safety — among them a significant portion of the country’s top technical talent. These people want to go home. And the country needs them to return in order to rebuild. But what conditions would make that a rational choice for people who, rightly, sought safety for their families?

At the table, we talked about explicit non-conscription protections for returnees and possibly a credible multinational security presence as the necessary conditions for ceasefire and, eventually, recovery. Longer term, reconstruction in Ukraine would be a greenfield investment opportunity — with a highly educated diaspora ready to return and a potential EU accession path that would unlock capital to rebuild the nation in a way that could rival Poland’s post-1989 transformation.

European defense has come up at every dinner we’ve hosted this year

In Lisbon, we talked at length about the capabilities of European armies vis a vis the realities of the modern battlefield. Case in point: Germany is still producing Leopard 2 tanks — €10 million assets that are functionally obsolete in a war waged on €500 DJI drones and intelligence.

With the US signalling ambiguity about Article 5 compliance, the continent has little choice but to prepare for a post-NATO world — ironically, making that world all the more likely. Because if you are not actively working to affirm that the alliance holds, then you are (intentionally or not) building for its fallout.

As investors, we follow specific areas of defense closely but we’ve been in this space long enough to know that the best signals come from the founders themselves. We keep conversations like this going because we want to hear how they see the future and what they think it will take to keep everything from unravelling. Then we back them.

Bullish on India, bearish on manufacturing exposed to robotics

The table was bullish on India (manufacturing shift, consumer market growth, early tech adoption), the US (hard to bet against in an AI-dominated world, despite everything), and Switzerland (neutral positioning, financial infrastructure, talent concentration). Bearish on manufacturing economies exposed to robotics disruption, emerging markets without resource backing, and countries actively hostile to immigration.

Several policy proposals echoed themes from prior dinners: universal capital ownership from birth, higher inheritance taxes, global taxation modeled on the US approach. One idea we hadn’t heard before was publishing all government spending on a public blockchain — every transaction from any public actor, immutable and accessible, making data manipulation structurally impossible.

BlueYard Capital hosts regular Risk Club dinners across Europe and the US. The conversations are off the record; these notes reflect themes and ideas. We’re looking for the next generation of founders making civilizational bets. If that’s you — or if you’re an investor, policymaker, or operator thinking about these questions — we’d love to talk.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article has been prepared solely for informational purposes and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any entity managed by BlueYard Capital (“BlueYard”). Any reference to a specific company or security does not constitute a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, or directly invest in the company or its securities. It may not be modified, reproduced, or redistributed in whole or in part without the prior written consent of BlueYard. Portfolio company information presented herein is for informational purposes only and not intended to be a guarantee of certain investment results. BlueYard does not represent that the information herein is accurate, true, or complete, makes no warranty, express or implied, regarding the information herein and shall not be liable for any losses, damages, costs, or expenses relating to its adequacy, accuracy, truth, completeness, or use. All other company, product and service names or service marks of others and their use does not imply their endorsement of, or an association with this program.

ETH and SOL gained 1% while XRP is flat on the day.

An analysis from WuBlockchain shows basis trade capital at record lows as hedging crowds out leveraged longs, pushing derivatives markets toward an unusual equilibrium.

The FDIC is proposing a rule change to clarify that stablecoin holders will not be eligible for deposit insurance.

The Trump-appointed attorney (and Gary Gensler predecessor) won't stop prosecuting crypto privacy developers.

The world's top Bitcoin mining pool operator expands into privacy coins as ZEC surges 600% year-over-year.

A new OpenClaw skill from CoinFello addresses a key security issue with AI agents using crypto.

The token buyout plan offers ACX holders equity or a cash exit at a 25% premium.

The chip vulnerability makes it possible for hackers to decrypt affected Android smartphones, and steal data — including crypto wallet private keys.

Risk Labs wants to convert Across into a private company, offering ACX holders the option to swap tokens for equity or sell into a buyout.

Binance is facing renewed scrutiny in Washington as the DOJ reportedly launches a new investigation into the embattled crypto exchange.

The initiative brings together a broad spectrum of well-known, global crypto firms and blockchain projects including Circle, Solana, Binance, Polygon, and Ava Labs.

While the bank has yet to confirm its plans, the move could mark a first step toward launching its own USD stablecoin.

In a stunning display of “better late than never,” the U.S. Treasury has released a report acknowledging that crypto users might want privacy for reasons other than buying a private island with stolen loot.

Privacy Needs are Legitimate

The Department’s new narrative is a complete 180-degree turn from the days when they acted like Tornado Cash was the root of all evil. It has now admitted that there are many reasons why an ordinary person or business would want to keep their transactions off a public ledger.

It took them years to realize that lawful users need to protect personal wealth from public view, secure business payments from competitors, and keep charitable donations or consumer spending private. Well, this change in language puts lawful privacy use into the official record alongside the risks of illicit finance.

On the flip side, the department maintains that criminals and state-backed groups use mixers to hide stolen funds. Notably, North Korean hackers looted $2.8 billion in digital assets between January 2024 and September 2025. These actors are described as “particularly adept” at using mixers and cross-chain bridges to launder funds before investigators can react.

As a result, the department is drawing a new line between illicit concealment and supervised privacy. Put differently, the government can accept some forms of confidentiality if the service providers remain transparent to the state. This points to a future where privacy tools operate within a regulated U.S. crypto market rather than being treated as inherently suspicious.

A Government-Approved Kill Switch

To balance this new stance toward privacy, the Treasury is asking Congress for stronger enforcement tools. One major recommendation is a “hold law” that would allow financial institutions to freeze suspicious digital assets during short investigations temporarily.

The department also wants lawmakers to define which actors in the decentralized finance space should be required to follow anti-money laundering rules, ensuring that as privacy grows, oversight remains possible.

Institutional FOMO Drives the Change

Why the sudden change in tone? Look no further than the $1.7 billion that flooded into Bitcoin ETFs in early 2026.

Now that Wall Street is at the party, the Treasury has realized that big banks don’t play well with total transparency. The White House’s 2025 executive orders basically told agencies to stop being a drag on the industry.

The debate has officially shifted from “Is crypto for criminals?” to “How do we make crypto work for BlackRock while still pretending we can catch the hackers?”

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

A New Chapter for Crypto Privacy? was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this episode, previously aired on Cheeky Pint, Garrett Langley describes how a stolen gun in his Atlanta neighborhood led him to build Flock Safety, now deployed in more than 6,000 cities and involved in clearing over a million crimes last year. He covers how the product has evolved from license plate cameras to drones, real-time 911 integration, and an AI-powered orchestration layer for city safety.

 

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Today we’re adding NEAR Intents to Brave Wallet in our latest browser release (v1.88). The Brave Wallet enables multi-chain access right from the Brave browser, and NEAR Intents is the first swap provider that ties together nearly all of our supported blockchains: Bitcoin, Solana, Zcash, Cardano, and EVM (including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, etc).

NEAR Intents connects any chain, any asset, and any agent, and has executed over 19 million swaps and over $14 billion in all-time volume across 35 chains. NEAR Intents uses a novel transaction architecture to abstract away cross-chain complexity and maximize performance, security, and efficiency for DeFi apps, AI agents and end users.

This major step for Brave Wallet enables any-to-any chain swaps without the complexity that comes with traditional bridges. Brave Wallet users now have a decentralized way to swap assets like BTC and ZEC that traditionally lack DEX options. 

For instance, users could swap assets from: 

Transparent ZEC to any chain Any chain to transparent ZEC Shielded ZEC to any chain Any chain to shielded ZEC

Additionally, if the user is spending shielded ZEC, they are always returned back to the shielded pool in case of a refund. Shielded transactions use zero-knowledge proofs to hide the sender, receiver, and amount of a transaction from the public blockchain. Shielded transactions with Zcash in Brave Wallet give users a way to send and store crypto privately.

James Mudgett, VP of Web3 at Brave, said, “The integration of NEAR Intents marks a big step in Brave Wallet’s mission to make moving assets across blockchains simple, secure, and most importantly, intuitive, for everyone. Users can now move a wide variety of assets across chains, from Bitcoin and Zcash to Solana, Cardano, and the EVM ecosystem, all without bridges or manual gas handling. It’s a major step toward making cross-chain interaction feel natural and frictionless. For users, it means moving value anywhere becomes as easy as sending a message, and for the ecosystem, it’s another stride toward making Web3 truly accessible to everyone.”

Alex Shevchenko, CEO of the team behind NEAR Intents, Defuse Labs, said, “Brave sits at the heart of Web3, connecting hundreds of millions of users to the next generation of digital finance. Integrating NEAR Intents into Brave unlocks the freedom to trade seamlessly across chains for anybody with access to a browser, anything from Bitcoin to Shielded Zcash. It’s a powerful example of how intent-based infrastructure can redefine access, simplify complexity, and put privacy back into the hands of users.”

Adding NEAR Intents to Brave Wallet is the latest step in the longstanding collaboration between Brave and NEAR.

About Brave Wallet

Brave Wallet is the secure, multi-chain crypto wallet built directly into the Brave browser, no extensions required. With Brave Wallet, users can manage tokens and NFTs; connect to DApps and onramp to Web3; and explore decentralized finance, social media, gaming, and more. Brave Wallet users can connect other “hot” wallets, or “cold” wallets like Ledger & Trezor. They can buy, store, send, and connect to DApps on Solana, Ethereum, Cardano and EVM chains, and the Filecoin chain. 

Brave is a driving force leading the way for Web3 adoption, directly supporting Web3 into the broader Web through its privacy-preserving browser, independent search engine, and browser-native, multi-chain crypto wallet. Brave currently has 110 million monthly active users. Learn more at brave.com.

About NEAR Intents:

NEAR Intents is the universal liquidity protocol powering one-click cross-chain swaps and unified liquidity for onchain markets and tokenized assets. Using a novel intent-based transaction infrastructure that empowers users to express outcomes instead of managing routes, bridges, and liquidity sources, NEAR Intents unlocks frictionless cross-chain swaps for DeFi users, autonomous trading for AI agents, and broad distribution for blockchains, dApps, and asset issuers. NEAR Intents has powered billions of dollars in volume across leading chains and assets and is now natively integrated into major DeFi protocols, wallet providers, traditional financial systems, and AI platforms, bringing instant and verifiable execution to global markets. Learn more at https://intents.near.org/.

Aave has attracted nearly $800 million in deposits since launching on Mantle a month ago.

A federal court has denied Kalshi's request to enjoin Ohio regulators from enforcing state gambling laws.

The prediction market is deploying AI-powered surveillance tools as the industry faces mounting scrutiny over insider trading and market manipulation.

The Bank Policy Institute is reportedly weighing filing a lawsuit against the OCC over it granting more bank trust charters to crypto firms.

These ultra-small, gas-free USDC transactions are designed for use by AI agents.

The Immersive Computing Stack is a map for where online experiences are heading.

The foundation behind Solana liquid staking protocol Jito acquired SolanaFloor just two weeks after the media outlet announced it was shutting down.

Total crypto capitalization is up another 3% to $2.49 trillion.

The report notes that AI, digital identity systems, blockchain analytics, and APIs can be harnessed to fight financial crime.

Palantir and TWG AI have developed tools to help Polymarket prevent, identify, and report suspicious trading activity.

A U.S. federal prosecutor has requested to retry the co-founder of the privacy-focused crypto protocol months after he received a mixed verdict.

Partnering with Scanner: Every Log Tells a Story—If You Can Find It Fast Enough

Cliff and Steven are making petabytes of security data searchable in seconds, and opening the door to a new era of AI-driven security operations.

By Bogomil Balkansky Published March 10, 2026 Steven and Cliff.

A while back, I was deep in research on the next generation of security infrastructure, talking to CISOs and security engineers at some of the most technically sophisticated companies in Silicon Valley. I asked them all the same question I’d asked a decade earlier when I worked in enterprise software: What’s your biggest headache? The consistency of their answers surprised me. “We drown in logs we can’t afford to keep,” as one security leader put it, “and go blind on the logs we can’t afford to search.”

Enterprise security today is a story of impossible choices. The tools that teams rely on generate enormous amounts of log data—every API call, every login event, every network connection. To investigate cyber threats, they need all of it, often going back a year or more. But storing everything in a SIEM like Splunk is prohibitively expensive; costs could easily consume 15% of a CISO’s entire budget. Instead, companies make a compromise: they keep only the most recent 10 to 30 days of logs in their SIEM and park the rest in Amazon S3, where storage is cheap, but the data is effectively frozen. When a breach, a compliance audit, or a forensic investigation happens, security teams discover too late that the evidence they need is out of reach, opaque and unsearchable. 

I first heard about Scanner from a member of the security team at Temporal, one of our portfolio companies, who called it, “crazy fast.” I looked into it, and reached out to Cliff Crosland right away.

What Cliff and his co-founder Steven Wu have built is elegant in its insight. They asked: what would a log search engine look like if you designed it from scratch for object storage? The answer was a purpose-built inverted index that maps field values directly to file regions in S3. Rather than combing through billions of rows, Scanner narrows each query to only the relevant slices of data. A petabyte of logs becomes interactive. Queries that took hours now run in seconds. And a streaming detection engine runs hundreds of detection rules continuously across tens of terabytes a day, without re-scanning the world for each one.

Cliff and Steven are exactly the kind of founders we look for. Both Stanford CS alums, they were engineering leads together at Accompany (acquired by Cisco), where they built core data infrastructure under demanding, production-scale conditions. They have an obsession with performance that borders on the philosophical; they don’t tolerate systems that feel slow. And they have the expertise to build something better.

What’s most striking about Scanner isn’t the technology—though that is genuinely impressive. It’s the customers. The companies using Scanner today read like a who’s who of the cloud native world: Notion, Ramp, Benchling, Confluent, Lemonade, BeyondTrust. And they’re not just using it—they love it. Benchling replaced another product after a forced tenfold price increase, and their head of security engineering called it one of the best technical decisions their team had made. Ramp started with security logs and then expanded to application logs, reducing their SIEM bill in the process. Notion’s detection and response team built an internal AI agent that autonomously runs security investigations using Scanner. 

That last example signals what’s to come. We are entering a new era of security operations, where AI agents will do much of the investigative work that today consumes hours of human time. But agents need to rapidly iterate, ask questions and follow threads; queries can’t take minutes, much less hours. Scanner’s speed is enabling these agentic security workflows across a wide range of companies: within weeks of their MCP release, nearly a third of Scanner’s customers were already using it in production, and agents now account for 80% of queries on the platform. That is not a prototype or a promising beta. That is the future arriving ahead of schedule.

Sequoia is proud to lead Scanner’s Series A, and we’re thrilled to partner with Cliff, Steven and their team as they work to transform a market overdue for reinvention. Scanner is winning hearts and minds among the most technically forward organizations today, and together, they will define the next decade of security infrastructure.

Share Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share this on LinkedIn Share this via email Related Topics #AI #Funding announcement Partnering with Sandstone: An AI-Native Platform for In-House Legal Teams By Bogomil Balkansky News Read Partnering with Traversal By Bogomil Balkansky and Charlie Curnin News Read Partnering with FastAPI Labs: Simplified App Deployment By Bogomil Balkansky and Lauren Reeder News Read Partnering with Apex Security: The AI-Empowered Future, Secured By Bogomil Balkansky News Read JOIN OUR MAILING LIST Get the best stories from the Sequoia community. Email address Leave this field empty if you’re human:

The post Partnering with Scanner: Every Log Tells a Story—If You Can Find It Fast Enough appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

Federal prosecutors have submitted a retrial request in their case against Storm for charges of sanction evasion and money laundering.

Wall Street’s biggest institutions are planning to go on the offensive as Trump-era regulators continue opening the banking system to crypto firms.

Starknet has launched the STRK20 token standard, aimed at integrating privacy features into ERC-20 tokens on its platform. This development emphasizes the growing trend of privacy in blockchain transactions.

Anish Acharya speaks with Olivia Moore about the latest edition of the a16z Top 100 AI Apps report. They cover why ChatGPT is still 30 times bigger than Claude on web, how the three major platforms are specializing for different users, what global adoption data reveals about cultural attitudes toward AI, and why agents, memory, and voice are about to change everything.

 

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Do crypto mining stocks have a new catalyst to entice AI infra investors?

The PENGU token is up 7% in the past 24 hours.

The Trump administration's cybersecurity framework names cryptocurrency and blockchain as technologies requiring federal protection, a first for a U.S. presidential strategy document.

Amid a serious dry spell for NFT products, the project is launching a new gaming title.

To combat the illicit finance risks posed by mixers, Treasury wants to implement digital identity and AI surveillance frameworks.

Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant, cryptographic record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf.

Strategy just bought nearly 6x more BTC than last week, while Tom Lee's Bitmine also purchased more ETH than usual.

Nasdaq anticipates its tokenization services will be operational in first half of 2027.

In August 2025, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned that there was a 20% chance that quantum computers would crack cryptography by 2030, four years from now. Although some forecasts predict that “Q-Day” will happen around 2040, the clock is ticking, and there has been significant progress in quantum computing.

Q-Day is the hypothetical moment when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to shatter the cryptographic foundations of the modern world. For PIVX, a cryptocurrency built on the pillars of security and privacy, this raises a critical question: Is PIVX quantum-resistant or ready for the quantum age?

The Quantum Threat: Shor’s and Grover’s Algorithms

To understand PIVX’s position, we must look at the two primary quantum “weapons” that threaten cryptocurrencies. First is Shor’s Algorithm. This is the existential threat. It can solve the mathematical problems behind Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), the tech PIVX uses to authenticate transactions, in hours or days rather than billions of years.

The second is Grover’s Algorithm, a lesser threat that targets hash functions. It effectively halves the security of a hash (e.g., a 256-bit key becomes as secure as a 138-bit key), which is significant but not yet catastrophic.

The Vulnerability Profile of PIVX Addresses

PIVX uses a hybrid security model that results in varying levels of risk across its four primary address structures.

Transparent Addresses: These addresses follow a security model similar to Bitcoin, where the public key is only revealed to the network during a spend. If an address remains “pristine” and has never sent a transaction, it is protected by a cryptographic hash that even a quantum computer using Grover’s Algorithm would struggle to break. This results in a low vulnerability level for pristine addresses, though the risk becomes high if an address is reused. Cold Staking Addresses: While the staker keys are frequently active and therefore face a high vulnerability, the owner keys that actually control the funds can be kept in a pristine state, maintaining a variable risk level depending on user behaviour. Exchange Addresses: These addresses use the EXM prefix and are frequently reused for multiple incoming and outgoing transactions. Because they constantly reveal their public keys to the network, they currently carry a high vulnerability level in a post-quantum world. SHIELD Private Addresses: SHIELDED addresses utilize advanced zk-SNARKs technology based on the Sapling protocol. While the underlying curves like BLS12–381 are theoretically breakable by Shor’s Algorithm, they require roughly 3,457 logical qubits to crack. Consequently, they offer high security for funds and low vulnerability for privacy, as past transaction history remains shielded. The PIVX Advantage

No major cryptocurrency is fully quantum-resistant today, and PIVX is no exception. However, it is uniquely positioned to weather the storm better than most. In my opinion, breakthroughs in quantum computing will likely hit higher-value targets like Bitcoin first, giving the PIVX community a canary in the coal mine to trigger emergency upgrades.

Secondly, PIVX has a 1-minute block time compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. This significantly narrows the window for “short-range” attacks where an attacker tries to crack a key between the time a transaction is broadcast and when it is confirmed.

How to Protect Your PIVX Today

While experts suggest that “Q-Day” could arrive anytime between the late 2020s and 2040s, PIVX users can take proactive steps today to minimize their risk before protocol-level quantum resistance is fully implemented.

The most effective defence begins with avoiding address reuse, which ensures that a transparent address never sends a transaction twice and prevents a public key from being permanently exposed to the network.

For long-term storage, keeping funds in pristine transparent addresses that have never broadcast a transaction provides a powerful layer of protection, as these funds remain hidden behind cryptographic hashes that are difficult even for quantum machines to decipher.

Furthermore, utilizing SHIELD-to-SHIELD transactions and keeping those shielded addresses secret maintains long-term anonymity through post-quantum privacy. And those participating in cold staking should always move their full balance to a fresh, pristine address when reclaiming funds rather than leaving a residual balance behind.

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

Is PIVX Quantum Resistant? was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Daisy Wolf speaks with Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University and host of the Huberman Lab podcast. They discuss how the pandemic sparked a consumer health revolution, the emerging peptide and GLP landscape, what the science actually says about focus drugs, and the neurotechnologies Huberman believes will let us write to our own biology within the next five years.

 

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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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AI is shifting the conversations around development speed and security in ways that we're just beginning to grasp.

From criminal edge cases to superhuman auditing, we're entering a brave new world in crypto's agentic frontier.

A beginner's guide to setting up your first onchain AI agent with Wayfinder Cloud Agents.

We’re thrilled to announce the program and speaker lineup for Zcomm 2026, taking place virtually on Tuesday, March 24th, 2026. This year’s event brings together an inspiring group of community builders, organizers, educators, and creators who will share practical skills to help you activate and empower your own communities.

Zcomm focuses on the “how”— how to teach, how to organize, how to collaborate, and how to create meaningful engagement. Our speakers will offer hands-on strategies you can adapt to your local context, no matter your experience level.

Registration is now open!

Click here to add the schedule to your Google calendar or set reminders on YouTube!

Featured Speakers

Below is a preview of the speakers joining us this year:

13:00-14:30 UTC: How to Build Strong Partnerships with Aligned Communities and Organizations

Presented by: PG (Web3Privacy Now)
Culture, Collaboration, and Care: the pillars to build sustainable and impactful movements.

15:00-16:30 UTC: Zypherpunk: How we ran the world’s biggest privacy hackathon ever

Presented by: Harsh Bajpai (Aztec)
Hackathons are a powerful way to grow developer communities and accelerate innovation. In this session, Harsh Bajpai, Research Engineer at Aztec, will share practical lessons from running hackathons that attract global builders and produce meaningful projects. Harsh will cover how to define goals, support participants, and turn hackathons into lasting community and ecosystem growth.

17:00-18:30 UTC: Designing Engaging Workshops & Roundtables: Tools for Inclusive, Action-Driven Sessions

Presented by: mai ishikawa sutton (DWeb)
Join this session to learn practical tools and facilitation tips to design engaging, inclusive workshops and round tables, both virtual and in-person. mai ishikawa sutton will share strategies from their years of organizing in the DWeb community, including how to spark participation, manage group dynamics, and turn conversations into action. This is for anyone interested in running community sessions, meetups, or collaborative planning.

19:00-20:30: UTC: Building Online Communities Around Privacy and Shared Values

Presented by: Naomi Brockwell (Ludlow Institute/NBTV)
In an era of increasing surveillance and data exploitation, privacy has become a rallying value for people seeking safer digital spaces. This session covers why community-building around privacy is important, and walks through practical strategies for growing and managing online communities. Attendees will leave with actionable frameworks for building communities that are welcoming, resilient, and ready to move the privacy fight forward.

*Schedule is subject to change

We can’t wait to share this experience with you and help equip our global community with tools to create meaningful impact. If you have questions in the meantime, feel free to reach out.

Looking forward to seeing you at Zcomm!

The post Announcing the Zcomm 2026 Program and Registration! appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

TRON-associated Rainberry Inc. will also be barred from future violations of securities regulations under a proposed settlement.

The crypto exchange has published its response to U.S. Senator Blumenthal's money laundering and sanctions evasion inquiry.

The National Bank of Kazakhstan safeguards $69B of international reserves and a $65B oil fund.

Alex Rampell and Erik Torenberg speak with Mike Cannon-Brookes, cofounder and CEO of Atlassian, about how to make sense of the SaaS selloff, why not all software companies face the same AI-driven risks, and how Atlassian is thinking about the shift from records to processes. They also examine the real design challenge of getting everyday users to trust and benefit from AI agents in enterprise workflows.

 

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From volatile price swings to masternode updates, the crypto space moves fast. We’ve distilled all the major developments and community buzz into one digestible read. Let’s dive into this week’s Pulse.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: The PIVX network is bouncing back. This week, we saw the number of active masternodes climb from 2,064 to 2,074, fully recovering the dip from the previous week. This upward trend highlights the steady commitment of our node operators. Price Check: PIVX remains in a sideways trend, holding the $0.08 to $0.09 support level for another week. While the daily price remains steady, the weekly average dipped to $0.0837, a 3.01% decrease from the previous week’s $0.0863. Although the broader market showed signs of life, with Bitcoin and Ethereum posting modest single-digit gains over the last seven days, caution is advised. In my opinion, this broader recovery is a potential bull trap rather than a definitive trend reversal. Trading Buzz: We saw a slight boost in trading performance this week, with total volume rising from $14.4 million to $14.9 million. This 3.47% growth in activity indicates that the “wait-and-see” approach of previous weeks may be shifting toward active trading and accumulation.

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 (Feb. 27th, 2026 — Mar. 5th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Services: The New Software

By Julien Bek Published March 5, 2026

The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. 

Every founder building an AI tool is asking the same question: what happens when the next version of Claude makes my product a feature? They’re right to worry. If you sell the tool, you’re in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with. A company might spend $10K a year for QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books. The next legendary company will just close the books.

Intelligence vs Judgement

Writing code is mostly intelligence. Knowing what to build next is judgement.

Translating a spec into code, testing, debugging: the rules are complex but they are rules. Judgement is different. It requires experience and taste, instinct built on years of practice. Deciding which feature to build next, whether to take on tech debt, when to ship before it’s ready.

A year ago, most Cursor users treated AI as autocomplete. Today, more tasks are started by agents than by humans. Software engineering accounts for over half of all AI tool usage across professions. Every other category is still in single digits. The reason is that software engineering is primarily intelligence work. AI has crossed the threshold where it can do most of the intelligence work autonomously and leave the judgement to humans. Software engineering got there first. It is coming to every single profession.

Copilots and Autopilots

A copilot sells the tool. An autopilot sells the work.

Until recently, AI models were still developing intelligence and judgement, so the right approach was to build a copilot first: put AI in the hands of a professional and let them decide what to do with it. Harvey sells to law firms. Rogo sells to investment banks. The professional is the customer, the tool makes them more productive, and they take responsibility for the output.

Today, the models are intelligent enough that in some categories the best place to start is as an autopilot. Crosby sells to the company that needs an NDA drafted, not to outside counsel. WithCoverage sells to the CFO who needs insurance, not to the broker. The customer is buying the outcome directly. The work budget in any profession dwarfs the tool budget, and autopilots capture the work budget from day one.

The higher the intelligence ratio in any field, the sooner autopilots will win.

The Convergence

Today’s judgement will become tomorrow’s intelligence. As AI systems accumulate proprietary data about what good judgement looks like in their domain, the frontier will shift. Copilots and autopilots will converge. The copilot-to-autopilot transition has already begun in several categories. But the starting position matters because it determines where autopilots can win customers now and begin compounding the data that will eventually let them handle judgement too.

The Autopilot Playbook: Outsourcing as the Wedge

For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services.

The total addressable market for autopilots is all labour spend in a category, insourced and outsourced combined. But the right place to start is where outsourcing already exists.

If a task is already outsourced, it tells you three things. One, the company has accepted that this work can be done externally. Two, there’s an existing budget line that can be substituted cleanly. Three, the buyer is already purchasing an outcome. Replacing an outsourcing contract with an AI-native services provider is a vendor swap. Replacing headcount is a reorg.

The playbook: companies should start with the outsourced, intelligence-heavy task. Nail distribution. Expand toward the insourced, judgement-heavy work as the AI compounds. The outsourced task is the wedge. The insourced work is the long-term TAM.

Crosby started with NDAs: a well-defined task, primarily intelligence, that most companies already outsource to external counsel. The budget exists, the scope is clear, the ROI is immediate, and the substitution is frictionless.

Opportunity Map

Plotting every services vertical on an intelligence-to-judgement spectrum and outsourced-to-insourced ratio produces a priority map with labour TAM in brackets. The list is illustrative.

Insurance brokerage ($140-200B). The largest dollar market on this list. Standard commercial lines are highly standardised: the broker’s value-add is essentially shopping across carriers and filling forms, pure intelligence work. The distribution layer is incredibly fragmented, tens of thousands of small brokers each running the same process, so no single incumbent controls the customer relationship. WithCoverage and Harper are interesting newcomers.

Accounting and audit ($50-80B outsourced in the US alone). The US has lost roughly 340,000 accountants over five years while demand has grown. 75% of CPAs are nearing retirement, the licensing path is long, and starting salaries lag tech and finance. That structural shortage is pushing firms to accept AI faster than almost any other profession. Rillet is building the AI-native ERP that will close the books. Basis started as a copilot for accountants.

Healthcare revenue cycle ($50-80B outsourced in US). People hear “healthcare” and assume it’s judgement-heavy, but the billing layer is almost pure intelligence. Medical coding is translating clinical notes into ~70,000 standardised ICD-10 codes. The rules are complex but they are rules. The outsourcing is already mature and outcome-based. An autopilot just has to do the same thing at lower cost. Anterior is the furthest along.

Claims adjusting ($50-80B including TPAs). On the other side of the insurance policy, claims adjusting is a separate autopilot surface. Standard-line claims are settled by interpreting policy language against damage schedules and setting reserves using actuarial tables. The adjuster workforce is aging out and nobody’s replacing them. The market is massively outsourced to independents and TPAs like Crawford and Sedgwick. One industry, at least two distinct autopilot opportunities. Pace is building the autopilot for claims handling. Strala is building an AI-native TPA. 

Tax advisory ($30-35B). CPA licensing creates a regulatory moat, but 80-90% of the underlying work is intelligence. Every additional jurisdiction a tax autopilot handles deepens its data moat. Multi-jurisdiction complexity is exactly what SMBs outsource because no single in-house accountant can cover it. TaxGPT is an early mover alongside Skalar and Ravical in Europe.

Legal, transactional work ($20-25B). Contract drafting, NDAs, regulatory filings: high intelligence, routinely outsourced. The work product is standardised enough that quality is verifiable, so the buyer can trust AI output without deep legal expertise. Harvey is the emerging leader and is moving quickly to autopilot; Crosby and Lawhive are the autopilot-native newcomers.

IT managed services ($100B+). Every SMB outsources its IT. Patching, monitoring, user provisioning, alert triage: intelligence work running on repeat across thousands of identical environments. The existing software layer (ConnectWise, Datto) sells tools to the MSP. Nobody has yet sold “your IT runs” directly to the company as an outcome. Edra is automating IT processes. Serval is automating IT support.

Supply chain and procurement ($200B+). Most enterprises negotiate seriously with only their top 20% of suppliers. The long tail gets zero attention because it’s not economical to have humans do the work. Contract leakage runs 2-5% of total procurement spend. The wedge is abandoned work: no budget line to justify, no incumbent to displace, just found money. Magentic is building the AI for direct procurement, AskLio for indirect procurement. Tacto is building both the system of record and copilot for the midmarket. 

Recruitment and staffing ($200B+). The largest services market on this list. The top of the hiring funnel (screening, matching, outreach) is pure intelligence, but closing a candidate and assessing culture fit is judgement built on years of pattern recognition. The autopilot wedge exists in high-volume, low-judgement roles where matching is standardised. Juicebox, Mercor, Jack & Jill are emerging leaders building across the spectrum.

Management consulting ($300-400B). Huge market but the work is mostly judgement. The interesting question is whether AI can disaggregate consulting into intelligence components (data gathering, benchmarking) and judgement components (strategic recommendations), with the intelligence layer getting automated and the judgement layer staying human. Best candidates TBD.

In 2025, the fastest-growing AI companies were copilots. In 2026, many will try to become autopilots. They have the product and the customer knowledge. But they also face the innovator’s dilemma: selling the work means cutting their own customers out of doing it. That’s the opening for pure-play autopilots.

If you’re building one, reach out. julien@sequoiacap.com / @julienbek

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The post Services: The New Software appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

Google has announced that starting September 2026, every Android app developer must register with Google and upload government-issued identification, even if they don’t use the Google Play Store. Brave has joined the EFF, the Tor Project, and more than 40 other organizations in calling upon Google to Keep Android Open and withdraw this requirement, which undermines a historically user-first ecosystem, presents massive privacy risks, and further entrenches Google’s surveillance economy.

Google is overriding user choice

When users install software outside Google’s Play Store, they are choosing to control what runs on their devices without Google’s gatekeeping. That choice is fundamental to what makes Android an open platform.

Last year, we launched an official Brave repository on F-Droid (a free and open source Android app store) so users could get Brave without going through Big Tech app stores and the accompanying tracking and restrictions. Many of our users specifically want software that is not mediated by Google.

Google’s new policy would override that choice. Even when a user deliberately seeks out an app from an independent source, Google would require the developer to have registered with Google first: paying a fee and submitting their legal name, physical address, phone number, and government ID for mandatory developer verification.

A developer registry is a privacy risk

Google’s developer verification policy creates a centralized database, controlled by a single corporation, containing the real-world identity of every person who writes software for Android. 

The privacy risks are immense: developers (often volunteers) who build privacy-first browsers, encrypted messaging apps, VPNs, Tor-based software or tools for journalists and activists in hostile environments would be required to upload government ID and other highly personal data to Google. These developers are unlikely to trust Google and might stop developing for Android, leaving vulnerable users much worse off.

This is part of a pattern

Google has repeatedly proposed mechanisms that expand its control over the platforms it operates, and we have opposed them each time. To name just a few:

Deprecation of Manifest V2 reduces what extensions can do, weakening the tracker blockers and other privacy tools that users rely on.

Google’s AMP Project inserts Google between users and the websites they want to visit, and requires pages to be built in ways that benefit Google’s advertising systems. Under pressure, Google eventually walked back this project.

Privacy Sandbox uses Google’s browser monopoly to force participation in advertising infrastructure and cement Google’s control over the Web. Under pressure, Google walked back this project as well.

Each of these mechanisms share the same structure: Google leverages its platform position to try to insert itself into activities where users and developers did not ask for Google’s involvement, framing the change as beneficial.

Keep Android open

The open letter we signed urges Google to do three core things: rescind the mandatory registration requirement for developers distributing outside Google Play; engage transparently with developers and civil society on security improvements that respect the platform’s openness; and commit to platform neutrality.

We believe privacy should be easy, both for users and for the developers who build tools to protect them. A policy that forces every Android developer to hand their identity to Google, regardless of whether they use Google’s services, makes Android a less-open and less-private platform.

The iconic NFT brand, entirely based around penguin-themed intellectual property, has been taken to court by Penguin apparel.

It's sowing season for airdrops as the TGE calendar quiets down.

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) will receive a board seat at OKX and license its price feeds for crypto futures.

Google's settlement with Epic Games affirms the ability of developers globally to use alternative payments rails.

The two crypto-adjacent firms want to deepen their ties to regulated U.S. financial systems with banking licenses.

The Traitor app lets you create and deploy an entire NFT collection in minutes.

John Daghita was arrested in Saint Martin for allegedly stealing over $46M in crypto from the U.S. Marshals Service using his father's access.

In this conversation, previously aired on TBPN, John Coogan and Jordi Hays speak with Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, about his essay "Anthropic and Alignment" and the broader collision between AI power and state power that the Anthropic–Department of War standoff revealed.

 

Resources:

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AI agents found to be far more public about data that users expect to remain private

You’ve probably heard of LLM-based agents that can act on our behalf online, automating tasks like booking flights or filling out forms by navigating live websites with your credentials and personal data. It sounds incredibly powerful, almost like finally having the digital assistant we always dreamed of. But the moment these agents begin operating across real systems, with access to sensitive information, important questions surface: How do web agents handle your data while accomplishing tasks on your behalf? If you carry certain privacy expectations, are those expectations actually respected? Or are web agents blind to distinguishing which user information is inappropriate to disclose in their interactions with websites? More provocatively: is privacy merely a design consideration, or a fundamental requirement for trustworthy agentic task completion?

These are the questions we set out to answer in SPILLAGE: Agentic Oversharing on the Web, a new research project conducted as part of the Brave internship program. 

The case for Web agents

Agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) fulfill a deeply human desire: having an assistant to handle tasks of daily life and act on one’s behalf, now extended into the digital realm. Agents allow users to automate tasks through a natural language interface, receiving and executing instructions much like a human assistant would, or as Maes (1994) put it, “a personal assistant who is collaborating with the user in the same work environment.” Unlike controlled chatbot settings that are limited to answering questions, agents autonomously plan and execute sequences of actions to accomplish user goals, performing delegated tasks on a user’s behalf or as part of the user’s extended mind (Clark & Chalmers, 1998).

The Web is the most consequential environment for such agentic operations: users constantly interact with websites through browsers to accomplish everyday goals, making the browser a natural place for agents to operate in. Rather than manually navigating pages, comparing options, and entering the same information repeatedly, users can choose to instruct a web agent to handle these workflows on their behalf, transforming the Web from a space of manual interaction into one of intelligent automation. For example, instead of browsing through multiple websites to find a desirable product or the best flight option, a user can delegate the tedious task to a web agent, which visits, interacts with, and reasons across many websites to fulfill the instruction end-to-end.

Privacy stakes and user expectations in Web agents

To accomplish tasks, web agents require access to users’ personal resources, such as emails, calendars, chat histories and account credentials, and use information from user resources to act effectively on users’ behalf. For example, a booking agent must access a user’s calendar to avoid scheduling conflicts, or retrieve payment details to complete a transaction.

During execution, agents interact with third-party websites and services on the user’s behalf, creating a significant privacy surface: sensitive personal information is not only shared with the agent itself, but is potentially exposed to every external party the agent interacts with in the course of completing a task. As users delegate more of their web activity to agents, privacy risks compound: the agent becomes a concentrated point of exposure, aggregating and transmitting personal data at a scale and speed that far exceeds typical manual browsing, and taking control of the process with limited recourse from the user.

Users therefore hold an implicit privacy expectation: that their personal information remains protected and is not inappropriately disclosed to external parties the agent interacts with.

For example, in the video below (from our evaluation of commercial agents 09/2025) we observe that Perplexity Comet copies user conversation histories directly into third-party search interfaces, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive personal information the user had no intention of sharing.

This raises a fundamental question: How effectively do web agents preserve and respect user privacy expectations when acting on users’ behalf across live websites?

Privacy as disclosure: what and how agents share on the Web

Unlike standard LLMs that operate in controlled chatbot environments, Web agents act “in the wild,” leaving action traces. These traces are not just logs of activity, they are observable signals. Every query typed, form submitted, click made, and page visited becomes visible to external services, analytics systems, and platform operators. As a result, an agent’s behaviour can inadvertently share information about the user beyond what is strictly necessary to complete the task.

We term this phenomenon Natural Agentic Oversharing: the extension of oversharing—originally theorized as a feature of human online behavior (Agger, 2012)—to autonomous Web agents acting on a user’s behalf.

To characterise and measure natural agentic oversharing, we introduced SPILLAGE (Systematic Patterns of Implicit & Loud Leakage in web AGEnts). SPILLAGE organises oversharing along two orthogonal axes: the directness of disclosure (explicit vs. implicit) and the channel through which disclosure occurs (content vs. behavior). This framework enables a principled and comprehensive analysis of how web agents may violate user privacy expectations.

The figure below illustrates a user granting an agent access to resources containing both task-relevant (green) and task-irrelevant (red) information alongside a shopping request. The agent searching for glucose tests on behalf of the user on Amazon may inadvertently overshare they are divorced in four distinct ways: explicit or implicit information entry into text fields on third-party webpages; and explicit or implicit disclosing of behavior through actions such as specific clicks or form choices, observed over time.

Oversharing is pervasive and prompt-level mitigation is not enough

We used SPILLAGE to evaluate natural agentic oversharing across two live e-commerce websites (Amazon and eBay) using a dataset of 180 shopping tasks grounded in three types of user resources: chat histories, emails, and generic personal information. We tested two open source agentic frameworks, Browser-Use and AutoGen, across three backbone LLMs (GPT-4o, O3, and O4-mini) resulting in a total of 1,080 runs.

Across all configurations, we demonstrated that unbeknownst to the user oversharing is pervasive, with behavioral oversharing consistently dominating content oversharing. This effect persists (and can even worsen) under prompt-level mitigation, suggesting that simply instructing agents to be privacy-conscious at the prompt level is insufficient to address the depth and breadth of natural agentic oversharing.

Privacy and utility are not at odds in Web agents

A common assumption is that privacy and utility exist in tension—that restricting what an agent shares necessarily comes at the cost of task performance. Our findings challenge this assumption. When we manually removed task-irrelevant information from the agent’s input prior to execution, task success improved by up to 17.9%. This demonstrates that reducing oversharing does not hinder agent performance, it actually enhances it.

Privacy and utility, in this light, are not adversaries, they are allies. We hope this finding serves as a call to action: building privacy-aware Web agents is not a constraint on capability. Understanding and addressing the root causes of agentic oversharing is therefore not only a privacy imperative, but a performance one. 

At Brave, we are actively identifying these privacy risks and working to ensure our agents are privacy-aware. If you’d like, you can also test an early version of agentic browsing in the Brave Leo AI assistant in Brave Nightly.

One of crypto's most battle-tested DAOs is now fighting a war within its own governance ranks.

a16z is renewing its crypto commitment, raising a new fund in spite of downtrodden market conditions.

Vitalik published what amounts to a moral manifesto for Ethereum's current moment.

The long-awaited payments platform can be accessed by early donors to a children and veterans charity.

a16z general partner Julie Yoo talks with Nikhil Buduma, CEO and cofounder of Ambience Healthcare, to discuss how AI is transforming clinical workflows. They cover the early days of deep learning, why Ambience started by running a medical practice before building a platform company, and what it takes to achieve high clinician adoption rates at major academic medical centers. They also dig into the challenge of building products when AI capabilities change every few months, the real ROI that's finally converting CFOs, and why this might be the moment to reimagine the legacy EHR stack.

 

Resources:

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If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!

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After meeting Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Trump urged Congress to pass the Clarity Act, accusing banks of blocking stablecoin yield.

The pair are partnering to bring real stock IPOs to Solana sometime this year.

The centralized exchange will gain direct Fedwire access, no longer forcing the firm to operate through a third party.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly delivered a ruling declaring that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) broke federal privacy laws approximately 42,695 times. Yes, you heard that right.

According to court filings, the IRS, under a directive to assist with “non-tax criminal enforcement,” systematically handed over confidential taxpayer addresses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The ruling centered on IRS Code 6103, a statute born out of the ashes of the Watergate scandal. It was designed specifically to prevent the President and federal agencies from using tax data as a political or personal tool for harassment. Yet, according to the judge, the IRS didn’t just bend the rules; they shattered them.

The court found that the IRS patently failed to ensure that ICE’s requests met legal requirements, leading to the illegal disclosure of private data for tens of thousands of individuals.

A Modern-Day Watergate

The Center for Taxpayer Rights drew a direct line from this scandal to the dark days of Richard Nixon. “Following the Watergate era, Congress clearly and unequivocally acted to protect the American people from these intrusions,” the Center stated.

But in 2026, those protections appear to be eroding. The IRS entered into a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cross-verify names and addresses against tax records. While the government claims this is about efficiency, the reality is a massive consolidation of power that turns the tax code into a surveillance dragnet.

The Myth of Government Protection

Time and time again, the government has continued to prove that it cannot be trusted with your data. While the state demands total transparency from its citizens, it treats your privacy as a mere suggestion. When the IRS and DHS signed this data-sharing deal, the then-acting commissioner of the IRS resigned in protest. They knew the law was being sacrificed for political expediency.

If the IRS can erroneously leak the private data of over 42,000 people to a different agency for the purpose of deportation and surveillance, what stops them from sharing your health records, your spending habits, or your political affiliations next?

The government is currently appealing the ruling, but the damage to public trust is permanent. We are living in an era where the “Gold Standard” of federal privacy laws is being treated as a roadblock rather than a requirement.

If 42,695 violations can happen under the radar of a single agency, we must ask ourselves: How much more of our lives is being traded behind closed doors?

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

42,695 Stabs in the Back: Paying the Government to Track You was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Spotlighting the power players building a full-spectrum crypto policy apparatus in D.C.

SuperRare's new ERC-20 tokens treat onchain market state as a creative primitive.

The eight-person ACI team will not seek renewal of its contract and will wind down operations over the next four months.

Visa and Bridge will expand their stablecoin-linked card product from 18 countries to over 100 by year-end, accepted at 175M merchant locations.

The CFTC has committed to launching true perpetual futures contracts in the United States within the next month or so.

On the show Long Strange Trip, Sequoia Capital partner Brian Halligan speaks with a16z’s Ben Horowitz about what separates great founder CEOs from everyone else. Ben explains why first-time founders lose confidence, defer too much to senior hires, and let decision debt paralyze their companies. They discuss where founder mode works and where people are taking it too far, why the VP of Sales is the hire founders mess up more than any other, and why Andy Grove's "constructive confrontation" matters more than most CEOs realize. Ben also shares what he's learned working with Zuckerberg, what Jensen Huang and Elon Musk actually have in common, and why culture is defined by behavior, not values.

 

Resources:

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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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XX Exchange Consolidation Update: Improving Liquidity Efficiency and Market Quality

Over the last few years, XX has expanded to multiple trading venues and multiple pairings to support access and price discovery—especially during the period before we had robust bridging and DEX options for wrapped XX. During that phase, we maintained dual listings for XX and WXX to help connect native XX markets with Ethereum-based access and broader DeFi liquidity, while infrastructure matured.

As the ecosystem has matured, it’s become clear that maintaining too many overlapping markets can work against token health by fragmenting liquidity across venues. When liquidity is spread too thin, order books become shallower, spreads widen, and market-making requirements increase, resulting in higher costs without meaningful benefits to the community.

For that reason, the xx Foundation will be consolidating exchange support and ending liquidity support and trading on Biconomy. This decision reflects:

Consistently low organic activity on Biconomy relative to our primary venues

A commitment to deeper liquidity and better price execution where the majority of trading already occurs

Improved capital efficiency, allowing treasury resources to be deployed more effectively

What this means for traders Trading access remains available on our primary venues, including MEXC (XX/USDT), LBANK (XX/USDT), Coinstore(XX/WXX/USDT), and Uniswap (WXX).

We will provide clear timelines for any deposit/withdrawal and trading deadlines on Biconomy.

We’ll share guidance for users who need to move assets ahead of the transition.

xx Foundation is focusing on supporting the venues that deliver the most value, while reducing redundant infrastructure that adds cost and complexity. We’ll continue to evaluate listings using clear criteria, user access, security posture, transparency, cost/benefit, and organic volume, so that exchange coverage stays strong without diluting liquidity. We’re excited about the road ahead as application development accelerates and adoption continues to mature. This consolidation helps ensure we’re building on a more efficient, resilient market foundation.

Onwards!

The post XX Exchange Consolidation appeared first on xx network.

Takeover turns Flaunch's ETH trading fees into a 100-tile grid where every seat is always for sale.

A proposed bill would enact taxes on unrealized gains to fund social programs for lower-earning Americans.

The crypto-focused VC previously broadened its focus to include artificial intelligence two years ago.

The TradFi exchange is seeking SEC approval to offer stock-linked, binary event contracts.

Risk assets have resumed their familiar uptrend to begin March despite weekend regime toppling in the Middle East.

In this feed drop from the Internet History Podcast, host Brian McCullough speaks with Chris Dixon, general partner at a16z, about his path from 1980s hobbyist programmer to one of the most prominent venture capitalists in tech. Chris traces his career from quantitative finance to founding SiteAdvisor, cofounding Founder Collective, starting an early machine learning company, and eventually building a16z's crypto practice from the ground up. They also discuss his framework for spotting unconventional investments, the current state of crypto regulation, and why New York is becoming a serious tech hub.

 

Resources:

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Introduction: Privacy Is Not a Luxury in Africa

Across much of Africa, privacy is not an abstract philosophical debate; it is a daily survival concern. From restrictive financial systems and unstable currencies to excessive surveillance and limited access to global banking, millions of Africans face structural barriers that make financial privacy both rare and necessary.

As digital finance expands across the continent, so do the risks: centralized control, data exploitation, transaction censorship, and financial exclusion. In this environment, the promise of cryptocurrency was never just about speculation; it was about freedom, dignity, and autonomy.

As PIVX marks 10 years of uninterrupted service, its privacy-first mission has become increasingly relevant to Africa’s financial reality.

The African Privacy Dilemma

Africa’s financial systems often operate under intense constraints:
 — Over-centralization of banking infrastructure
 — Capital controls and transaction monitoring
 — Frequent currency devaluations
 — Limited access to global payment rails
 — Weak data protection frameworks

In many countries, individuals and businesses must justify how, when, and why they move their own money. Journalists, activists, small traders, freelancers, and everyday citizens are often exposed simply for participating in the digital economy.

While mobile money has improved access, it has also introduced new vulnerabilities i.e full transaction visibility, account freezes, and dependency on centralized operators. Privacy, in this context, is not about hiding wrongdoing; it is about protecting legitimate economic activity from unnecessary exposure.

Why Financial Privacy Matters on the Continent

Financial privacy enables:
 — Economic self-determination for individuals
 — Protection from arbitrary restrictions
 — Safer cross-border trade and remittances
 — Freedom to save, spend, and transact without profiling

Without privacy, financial inclusion becomes conditional. Access can be revoked, limited, or monitored often without transparency or recourse.

This is where many early cryptocurrencies fell short. Public blockchains made transactions traceable by default, unintentionally recreating surveillance systems in a new form.

The Limits of Transparent Blockchains

Transparency is often celebrated as a feature of blockchain technology. But in practice, radical transparency without user choice creates risk, especially in vulnerable regions.

On fully transparent chains:
 — Wallet histories are permanently exposed
 — Users can be tracked, profiled, and targeted
 — Financial behavior becomes public data

For African users operating in volatile economic or political environments, this level of exposure can be dangerous.

What was needed was not opacity, but selective privacy, the ability for users to choose when and how their financial data is revealed.

PIVX: A Decade of Privacy by Design

Founded in 2016, PIVX (Private Instant Verified Transaction) was built with a clear philosophy: privacy should be accessible, optional, and user-controlled.

Rather than bolting privacy on as an afterthought, PIVX integrated it at the protocol level through Shielded Transactions, allowing users to protect transaction amounts and participant details when needed.

Ten years later, PIVX stands as one of the longest-running privacy-focused blockchains, fully operational, community-governed, and continuously evolving.

How PIVX Fills Africa’s Privacy Gap Optional Privacy, Not Forced Obscurity
PIVX allows users to choose between transparent and shielded transactions depending on their needs.

2. Decentralized Governance That Empowers Communities
Through its on-chain DAO and masternode governance, PIVX enables global participation, including African contributors.

3. Low Barriers to Entry
PIVX is energy-efficient, cost-effective, and accessible without specialized hardware.

4. Borderless and Permissionless
No bank approval. No intermediaries. No arbitrary restrictions. Real-World Relevance, Not Hype

PIVX’s strength lies not in trends, but in consistency. While many projects collapsed or pivoted narratives, PIVX continued building improving privacy tech, refining governance, and supporting community education.

This approach aligns with Africa’s need for resilient, long-term solutions.

A Decade Mark, A Forward Vision

Turning 10 is not just a milestone for PIVX; it is a validation of its core belief which is, “privacy is a right, not a privilege.”

As Africa continues its digital transformation, PIVX remains well-positioned to support privacy-respecting financial innovation.

Conclusion: Privacy That Serves People

The travails of privacy in Africa are real and persistent, but solutions exist.

PIVX’s decade-long commitment to optional privacy, decentralized governance, and resilience offers a compelling alternative to surveillance-heavy financial systems.

As it enters its second decade, PIVX is not just celebrating longevity, it is reaffirming its relevance.

In a continent where financial freedom is still contested, privacy is power and PIVX continues to stand for it.

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

Travails of Privacy in Africa and How PIVX Has Stepped In to Fill the Gap as It Turns 10 was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Digital dollars, bank deposits, and the fight over who gets the risk-free rate

StarkWare's new Starkzap SDK can shrink crypto feature integrations from months to minutes.

Fully homomorphic encryption is years away from frontier scale. But the bar for "good enough" just got lower.

XYZ rallied as much as 20% overnight in anticipation of Block's agentic-powered productivity future.

In this episode, host Friederike Ernst is joined by John Paller, founder of ETH Denver, to reflect on nine seasons of North America's largest Ethereum gathering and where the ecosystem goes next. John shares his "red pill" moment in 2016 and the subsequent realization that Ethereum was not just a corporate efficiency tool, but a way to rewire the global economic system. He discusses the evolution of the Biddle meme and how ETH Denver has become a market-driven aggregator for crypto's shifting narratives, from DeFi summer to the current era of institutional adoption.

They delve into a candid critique of the Ethereum Foundation’s "Infinite Garden" philosophy, with John arguing for more "structural vision" and actionable roadmaps to compete with the aggressive narratives of chains like Solana. The conversation highlights Agentic AI as the ultimate "Trojan Horse" for mass adoption, enabling a future where users interact with sovereign bots rather than complex private keys. Finally, John explains his Regulation Membership proposal to the US Congress, aiming to provide a federal securities exemption for on-chain cooperatives and restore true economic agency to the "little man."

Topics

00:00 Intro & Context 04:15 Recruitment Tech to Ethereum: John’s Genesis Story 09:30 Inventing the "Biddle" Meme at Denver 2018 15:00 Is Ethereum a "Neo Casino" or a Settlement Layer? 21:45 Critiquing Idealism: The Infinite Garden vs. Reality 27:10 Why Solana is Not "Sufficiently Decentralized 35:20 Agentic AI: The End of signing Transactions manually 42:15 The Roman Catholic Church & Institutional Co-opting 49:00 German Cooperative Culture & On-Chain Credit Unions 55:30 Regulation Membership & The SEC Challenge 59:45 Zero Knowledge Identity & Privacy Rights

Links

John Paller on X: https://x.com/PallerJohn ETH Denver: https://www.ethdenver.com/ Opolis: https://opolis.co/ Lido: https://lido.fi/stvaults?mtm_campaign=epicenter NEAR: https://near.ai/

Sponsors:

1. Lido V3 introduces stVaults: modular staking infrastructure that lets builders and institutions deploy custom staking vaults, while staying anchored to stETH as a shared liquidity layer. Get started building with Lido V3 today: https://lido.fi/stvaults?mtm_campaign=epicenter

2. NEAR AI Cloud now lets developers deploy OpenClaw—the rapidly growing open-source AI agent platform—inside Trusted Execution Environments, providing hardware-level encryption with cryptographic attestations. With OpenClaw on NEAR AI Cloud, you can run agents with cloud convenience, but without traditional cloud data exposure. No hardware to manage. No trust assumptions required. Learn more at near.ai.

The trio hopes to revolutionize the way developers launch their own stablecoins with PYUSDx.

A Morgan Stanley subsidiary applied earlier this month to the OCC for a national trust banking charter.

Users should withdraw all funds from ZKsync Lite ahead of the deadline as the ecosystem moves to consolidate around Era.

And more ideas from our latest Risk Club series dinner in Berlin

Two weeks after our Munich dinner during the Security Conference, the BlueYard team gathered again in Berlin with a group of founders, investors, and operators to talk about the state of our global civilization and how to go risk on during one of the most volatile times in recent history. Here are a few key themes from our closed-door conversation, hosted in partnership with Max Claussen at System.One VC:

AI is displacing jobs faster than any previous wave of automation

Today, a fleet of 400 Waymo autonomous vehicles can serve the same market as roughly 10,000 human rideshare drivers. These cars run 24 hours a day with no breaks to speak of. In China “dark factories” like Xiaomi run around the clock, producing a smartphone every three seconds with the lights off because robots don’t need to see.

Every previous wave of automation — mechanization, electrification, computing — took decades to fully deploy. These decades provided a necessary buffer for humanity, giving workers time to retrain, institutions time to adapt, and policy time to catch up. That’s not happening here.

The scramble to adapt is underway

The gig economy is growing as a buffer between employment and unemployment, and human-in-the-loop work for AI training is emerging as an entirely new labor category. But the gig economy is itself automatable (as the Waymo numbers make plain) and AI training work may shrink as the models improve. So even these adjustments are temporary. Some at the table raised whether displaced white-collar workers could retrain into trades and how long that window stays open before physical AI closes it too.

The economies absorbing these shocks are already vulnerable

In the US, strip out AI and data center investment and GDP growth is barely visible. Stock market performance is concentrated in a handful of companies. And rule of law is eroding, with institutional trust on a precipitous decline. Meanwhile, in Europe, regulatory complexity continues to hamper innovation and markets remain fragmented compared to the US.

Globally, 18-to-25-year-olds are voting for extremes on both the left and the right, signaling a generation that sees the current system as unable to deliver on promises past.

Policy proposals from the table

At each of our dinners, we like to ask people to imagine policy proposals for this new world. In Berlin, we talked about mandatory equity-backed pension plans, starting from birth, at €50 to €100 per month — the logic being that if AI shifts GDP growth from labor to capital, citizens need to own capital from day one.

Others suggested structural reforms to governance itself: smaller parliaments, defined term limits, fewer career politicians. Still others called out the need to streamline permitting for solar, batteries, and physical infrastructure (if resilience is the goal then bottlenecks in deployment become strategic liabilities).

Where we see opportunity

From the conversations at this dinner and across our broader work, we see the most compelling opportunities in four areas: European defense and resilience infrastructure, where a €650B rearmament wave is creating a new generation of companies. The European startup ecosystem, which continues to outpace the continent’s corporates in responding to these shifts. Ukrainian reconstruction (which several at the table compared to Poland’s post-1989 transformation). And European energy sovereignty, where accelerating solar and battery deployment is both a security imperative and a commercial opportunity.

We’re looking for the next generation of founders making civilizational bets. If that’s you — or if you’re an investor, policymaker, or operator thinking about these questions — we’d love to talk.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article has been prepared solely for informational purposes and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any entity managed by BlueYard Capital (“BlueYard”). Any reference to a specific company or security does not constitute a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, or directly invest in the company or its securities. It may not be modified, reproduced, or redistributed in whole or in part without the prior written consent of BlueYard. Portfolio company information presented herein is for informational purposes only and not intended to be a guarantee of certain investment results. BlueYard does not represent that the information herein is accurate, true, or complete, makes no warranty, express or implied, regarding the information herein and shall not be liable for any losses, damages, costs, or expenses relating to its adequacy, accuracy, truth, completeness, or use. All other company, product and service names or service marks of others and their use does not imply their endorsement of, or an association with this program.

The Zcash Foundation is committed to transparency and openness with the Zcash community and our other stakeholders. Today, we are releasing our Q4 2025 report, which provides an overview of the work undertaken by our engineering team, as well as an overview of other activities during this period.

As with our previous quarterly reports, this report describes our financial inflow and outflows, with a detailed breakdown of our expenses, and we have included a snapshot of the Foundation’s financial position, in terms of liquid assets and liabilities that must be met using those assets.

Download the Q4 2025 report here.

Our previous quarterly reports can be found here.

The post Zcash Foundation Q4 2025 Report appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Catch up on everything PIVX with our latest Weekly Pulse: price swings, masternode update, community news, and everything in between.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: A true test of a network is how it holds during turbulence. This week, the PIVX masternode count saw a slight dip of ten nodes, settling at 2,064 from last week’s 2,074. Despite this minor slip, our dedicated holders continue to anchor the ecosystem, proving that the PIVX foundation is built on long-term conviction rather than short-term hype. Price Check: PIVX slipped lower to find support between $0.08 and $0.09. This move brought the weekly average to $0.0863, an 8.48% decrease from last week’s $0.0943. Meanwhile, sentiments are negative in the broader crypto market as traders grapple with intense fear. Trading Buzz: Along with the daily price adjustments, trading volume also dropped this week. The total weekly volume reached $14.4 million, representing a 4% drop from the previous week’s $15 million. As the market cools, the shift away from high-octane trading suggests that traders are currently adopting a “wait-and-see” approach.

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 (Feb. 20th, 2026 — Feb. 26th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Erik Torenberg, Ben Horowitz, and Marc Andreessen discuss how the media landscape has fundamentally changed and what a16z is doing about it. They cover why offense beats defense, why individuals now matter more than corporate brands, why speed wins in the new media landscape, and the difference between oral and written culture on the internet.

 

Resources:

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

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

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

Stay Updated:

Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube

Find a16z on X

Find a16z on LinkedIn

Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify

Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts

Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg

 

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

RAILGUN's integration with Gnosis Guild's Mech standard will unlock non-atomic private DeFi.

The NFT marketplace is withdrawing to its Solana and "crypto entertainment" roots.

AI agents won’t scale without crypto rails. Here are the advances to watch.

The OG ecosystem steward believes its ATOM delegation changes will better align incentives to grow Cosmos Hub.

The U.S. rollout follows a successful year-long European pilot that was unveiled at ETHDenver 2025.

The OCC is allying itself with the banking lobby, attempting to eliminate the ability for stablecoins to pay any type of interest.

Bloomberg's Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway speak with David George, general partner at a16z and head of the firm's growth fund, about why $5 trillion in tech market cap now sits in the private markets, how that figure has grown 10x in a decade, and what it means for founders, employees, and investors. They also cover SPVs, tender offers, the collapse of legacy software valuations, and why AI companies may be speed-running the path to public markets. This episode originally aired on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast.

 

Resources:

Follow Joe Weisenthal: https://twitter.com/TheStalwart

Follow Tracy Alloway: https://twitter.com/tracyalloway

Follow David George: https://twitter.com/DavidGeorge83

Listen to Odd Lots: https://www.bloomberg.com/oddlots

Stay Updated:

Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube

Find a16z on X

Find a16z on LinkedIn

Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify

Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts

Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg

 

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today, we’re announcing the release of Place Search via the Brave Search API, a new endpoint for granular map searches from our index of over 200 million points of interest. Place Search is available as part of the recently revamped Search plan of the Brave Search API and allows end users to find places (businesses, landmarks, parks, etc) in a geographic area by providing a center point, radius, and optionally a query.

For instance, end users of an app powered by the Place Search endpoint can now search for “restaurants in San Francisco within 5km.” Place Search gives API customers access to the same technology that powers “Search area” in the full map view of Brave Search.

Key advantages include:

Granularity: The location where a user searches can be very granular, such as points of interest within a 500 yard radius from a certain latitude/longitude. Place Search can also search a radius of up to 13 miles (20 kilometers) from a given point. Relevance: With Place Search, users always get location results. In contrast, with a regular search, users get the “locations” key only if Brave Search considers that a common intent for the query is getting points of interest. Speed: Place Search is extremely fast (on average twice as fast as a regular search that returns locations), so API customers and their end users will experience less latency. New Explore Mode: Place Search allows users to put an empty query, called “Explore Mode,” which provides popular or interesting points of interest in the area. This is a new feature for the Brave Search API, making it more user friendly.

Place Search is enabled for all API customers who have subscribed to the Search plan, and is perfect for:

Location-Based Apps: Help users discover nearby places Travel & Tourism: Find attractions, restaurants, and hotels in any destination Business Directories: Create local business listings and discovery features Mapping Apps: Populate maps with relevant points of interest Geofenced Recommendations: Suggest places based on user location

Get started today with Place Search by checking out our developer documentation and add geographic intelligence to your apps now.

If you’re not yet a Brave Search API customer, the API is available now with low-cost pay-as-you-go subscriptions and a monthly credit system that makes the API free for small-scale projects, trials, or proofs of concept.

→ Sign up and make your first API call today
→ Contact us to learn more about bespoke plans

The refreshed Ethereum roadmap includes a development timeline and calls for features including shielded ETH transfers and 10k TPS.

Many tokens are on track for their best day of the year as immediate selling fears subside.

The world feels full of potential, yet completely off its axis. The band of possible outcomes has widened, and the margin for error is deadly sharp.

On March 24–25, in Los Angeles, we are bringing together founders, builders, experts, investors and LPs for 2 days of workshops, debates and open conversations — all pointed towards the question of how we can move humanity toward utopia, while holding the line against oblivion.

Expect to mingle with peers and founders of more advanced mult- $bn companies, and previous attendants of BlueYard summits have included some of the world’s leading politicians, historians and scientists — so expect an immersive experience that will expand your horizon.

Interested in joining us?

We’ve reserved the last few spots for seed-stage founders/builders outside of our immediate network –those working on some of the most consequential technologies to see humanity through this great filter moment. We will cover flight and lodging costs for a select few to attend.

Apply here: https://blueyard.typeform.com/to/VjyWz9ut

AGENDA Tuesday, March 24

8:15am: Basecamp, Coffee & Breakfast
Rapid-fire group scene setter questions & discussions

9:15am: Building Hard Things in Volatile Times
Observations and tactics from the best. A conversation with Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder HashiCorp) and Brad Burnham (co-founder USV)

10:15am: Hike & Guided Discussions at Topanga State Park
Founder knowledge exchange, war stories and networking while hiking the Topanga State Park

5:30pm: Happy Hour and Dinner

Wednesday, March 25

9:00am: Founder debrief morning
Breakfast, coffee and working space available

10:30am: Anarchy or Transition to a New System?
AI, geopolitics and an outlook for humanity. Keynote & Q&A

11:00am: Round Table Sessions

Compute: Solving real compute scaling bottlenecks or feeding the AI CapEx bubble? Where are we in the cycle? Crypto: From decentralized cypherpunk to a fintech backend. What’s crypto’s future? Defense, Energy, and Resilience: Big budgets, but will it be great business? Playing the startups and venture game in a legacy industry Bio & Chemistry: A tale of two markets: AI powered discovery vs wet-lab progress. What’s real and what is not? Applied & Physical AI: Re-vamping legacy industries for the future. RoI or experimentation?

12:00pm: Risk Club Sessions (Best of Edition) Bull and bear cases for humanity, long & short trades you would make, preparing for a world where people can live together, and Cold War II

12:45pm: Lunch

2:00pm: Group Activity Prepare for a madmax world — at the intersection of robots and human ingenuity.

5:30pm: Happy Hour and Dinner

BlueYard is committed to keep our events safe and open to all. View our code of conduct here.

Three years ago, Brave released the Brave Search API to provide developers with access to Brave’s independent search index of now 40 billion Web pages. Usage has grown exponentially since then, with thousands of new users signing up each day and billions of weekly API calls.

This increase in API calls coincides with huge growth in user adoption of AI in general—users who expect timely, accurate, in-depth answers. This makes Web search one of the most critical components of an app’s technical stack. An AI app’s access to the Web has to be fast, accurate, up-to-date, and reliable long-term.

Until recently, there were only three primary sources for this Web search: Brave, Google, and Bing. But 2025 saw significant change in this landscape: in August of last year, Microsoft shut down Bing’s public API; a few months later, Google took legal action against SerpApi, sending a clear signal that the days of free scraping are over. In short, Brave is one of just three Web search indexes at scale in the West, and it’s the only one commercially available in a reliable, independent Search API.

This leaves the Brave Search API as the only viable option for AI app makers. It also happens to be the best option:

Here for the long-term: Powered by its own, independent index of the Web, Big Tech lawsuits or attempted shutdowns will have no effect on our API’s availability or quality (something that can’t be said for scrapers)

Private & compliant: With no intermediate calls to other indexes, Brave can guarantee privacy controls for user queries, which can help app makers achieve legal compliance. It’s also the only search API that can offer true Zero Data Retention

Affordably priced: Transparent pricing plans as low as $5 CPM, including free request credits to get started

Built for AI: Endpoints like LLM context and news search are built specifically for AI use cases

Reliable & easy to use: 99.99% uptime for calls that return intuitively-structured JSON

The writing on the wall for scrapers

Companies relying on scraper-based APIs face several challenges. These solutions are inherently unstable and legally uncertain. When a scraper gets blocked or throttled, applications built on them can experience sudden disruptions. Additionally, scraper APIs typically share user data with third parties, creating compliance risks and privacy concerns that many organizations find unacceptable in today’s regulatory environment.

And these risks aren’t theoretical: In a landmark lawsuit, Google filed legal action against SerpApi for scraping its search results—violating terms, circumventing security, and undermining the rights of content creators.

While this particular lawsuit pertains to SerpApi, it’s really a signal to any company that scrapes data from Google and repackages that data for resale. It also matters for AI companies who rely on these scrapers to power their apps.

“If you’re building something without a full-scale, independent Web index, your entire business is at risk.”

With this lawsuit, Google has signaled that the data pipeline is at risk for anyone using second-hand search data—any company building an AI, chat, agentic, or search experience, or relying on real-time Web data. If you’re building something without a full-scale, independent Web index, your entire business is at risk. Companies can’t build on top of a foundation that can be dismantled.

Exponential 2025 growth

While the market for Big Tech indexes has contracted, and scrapers fight for Google’s scraps, the Brave Search API has been working quietly in the background, making the product better and earning exponential growth. In 2025, adoption rates surged across industries, with developers increasingly choosing Brave as their primary search data provider.

The Brave Search API now supplies most of the top-10 LLMs with real-time Web search data; for some of those LLMs Brave is the only search engine index supporting their AI answers. This growth reflects not just market conditions, but genuine confidence in the quality and reliability of our platform.

This growth extends beyond volume to the breadth of our partners. Just as we’re seeing increased adoption from enterprise clients who prioritize data sovereignty, privacy, and long-term stability in their infrastructure decisions, we’re also seeing growth in small startups and midsized businesses. For anyone building AI or search experiences, the Brave Search API has proven to be the solution.

Indexed Brave Search API growth relative to Q1 2024 levels (Q1 2024 = 100) 2025 - 2026 product improvements

Despite these competitive advantages, we haven’t rested on our laurels. We’ve continued to improve the product, release powerful APIs, and improve the developer experience through AI tooling integrations and improved documentation via our recently redesigned developer portal. Here are some of the notable changes over the last year:

LLM Context API

The most powerful search API for AI applications to date is optimized to provide LLMs with highly relevant Web context for any user query. The LLM Context API already powers Brave’s Ask Brave experience (the largest private user-facing AI app in the world at 22 million answers per day), helping it outperform end-user experiences like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode in head-to-head comparisons.

This high-quality context data is now available to any AI app maker. By contrast with scrapers (which essentially repackage Google’s 10 blue links—results optimized for human readers), Brave’s new endpoint is optimized for machine consumption, and the LLMs that power AI.

→ Read more about the LLM Context API

Simplified plans and pricing

We’ve drastically streamlined our plans and pricing, with most endpoints available under a simplified framework of Search or Answers. The Search plan delivers the real-time search data that chatbots and agents need to generate answers, from endpoints like Web search, LLM context, news, images, and more. The Answers plan delivers summarized, completed answers to any user query, with answers grounded on a single search or multiple searches for better accuracy and reduced hallucinations. And of course, bespoke Enterprise plans are available for large-scale deployments.

→ Read more about new plans and pricing

Zero Data Retention

The only search API built with privacy at its core is also the only search API that can offer true Zero Data Retention. Whereas scrapers can only offer ZDR (if at all) on the fraction of queries where they’re not scraping from Google, Brave can provide enterprise customers with ZDR on every user query. With ZDR, companies can meet ever-growing compliance obligations and gain a competitive advantage.

→ Read more about ZDR in the Brave Search API

SOC 2 Type II attestation

In 2025, the Brave Search API underwent a thorough external audit, and in October we announced that the API had earned its first SOC 2 Type II attestation. SOC 2 will give 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.

→ Read more about our SOC 2 attestation

→ Visit the Brave Trust Center

AWS Marketplace

In July, we announced the availability of the Brave Search API in the new AI Agents and Tools category of AWS Marketplace. Customers can now use AWS Marketplace to easily discover, buy, and deploy AI agents solutions, including Brave’s Search API, using their AWS accounts, accelerating agent and agentic workflow development.

→ Read more about Brave on the AWS Marketplace

MCP servers

Our MCP server and implementation integrate the Brave Search API to provide comprehensive search capabilities including Web search, local business search, image search, video search, news search, and AI-powered summarization. The project supports both STDIO and HTTP transports, with STDIO as the default mode.

→ Visit the GitHub repo for Brave’s MCP server

AI Tooling

To improve the developer experience, we also released official skills for using the Brave Search API with AI coding agents. We also released a new API assistant that’s integrated into the developer portal.

→ Visit the GitHub repo for Brave Search API skills

Ready to build with resilient, affordable, high quality data?

The Brave Search API is the only legitimate option available today. We don’t scrape. We don’t rely on others. We have our own, independent, and continuously updated Web index—built with privacy and integrity at its core. Our API is designed for developers who need reliable, future-proof access to Web search data. No loopholes. No interdependence.

Unlike scraper-based APIs, the Brave Search API is powered by its own, independent index of the Web. Brave Search receives tens of millions of unique user queries each day, and it’s the default search engine for most new users of the Brave browser. These users can anonymously contribute data to the index via the Web Discovery Project; this contribution method coupled with daily crawls help ensure the Brave Search index of 40 billion pages is constantly updated with quality data (we add or refresh more than 100 million pages each day). That means real webpages visited by actual humans, and less of the SEO spam that plagues Google and Bing.

Combined, these index-building techniques make the Brave Search API uniquely positioned to power the AI and search markets. It has affordable, transparent pricing plans. Reliable, unique, well-structured data. And a unique blend of low latency and high capacity (up to 100 queries per second, depending on the plan).

If you’re not yet a Brave Search API customer, the API is available with low-CPM subscriptions, and a $5 US monthly credit system (good for up to 1,000 calls per month) that can power small-scale projects, and enable free testing and proofs of concept.

→ Sign up and make your first API call today
→ Contact us to learn more about bespoke plans

Thank you to everyone who participated in the NU7 sentiment polling — ZCAP members, coinholders, the Engineering Caucus, ZecHub, Zcash Brasil, Zcash Español, and Zcash Türkiye. The breadth of participation reflects how seriously this community takes protocol governance, and we don’t take that for granted.

We want to be direct: the results reveal both meaningful consensus and real disagreement. We think it’s important to name both clearly rather than gloss over the gaps. The following is our perspective on the path forward.

Thank you to Daira-Emma for drafting the full summary of all polling data.

Where There Is Clear Consensus

The following proposals received strong support across all polling groups, including both ZCAP and coinholders. These represent the clearest mandate from this process:

Project Tachyon — Universal or near-universal support across every group. This is the most unambiguous signal from the entire poll and should be prioritized accordingly.

Orchard Quantum Recoverability — Strong support from both ZCAP (90.5%) and coinholders (94.6%). There is no meaningful opposition to this feature anywhere in the community.

Explicit Fees — Consistent support across groups (83.2% ZCAP, 87.2% coinholders). This is well-understood, low-controversy, and broadly wanted.

NSM: Burning Transaction Fees — Both ZCAP (78%) and coinholders (80.1%) support the fee-burning component specifically. This is an important distinction from NSM as a whole (see below).

These four features represent the core of what NU7 can deliver with genuine community-wide support. We believe they should form the foundation of any NU7 scope.

A Note on the Community Group Polls

The Engineering Caucus, ZecHub, Zcash Brasil, Zcash Español, and Zcash Türkiye each conducted their own polls, with participation rates ranging from 57% to 92% within each of their respective groups. Across these polls, results were broadly aligned with ZCAP — strong support for Tachyon, Quantum Recoverability, Explicit Fees, and fee burning, with more mixed signals on ZSAs, NSM issuance smoothing, and STARK/TZEs. We are grateful to each of these groups (and aquietinvestor) for organizing their own processes and contributing to the overall picture.

We note that the smaller group polls — particularly Zcash Türkiye (7 participants) and Zcash Español (13 participants) — yield results that are directionally informative rather than statistically robust. They lend support to, rather than independently confirm, the broader ZCAP signal.

Where There Is Significant Disagreement

The following proposals show material divergence between ZCAP and coinholder results. The gap between these results is real, and we think it’s more useful to name it directly than to minimize it.

Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs) — ZCAP support was 70.4%, while coinholders voted 98.6% against. ZSAs represent years of community investment and development work and are considered a flagship feature by many in the ecosystem. That work is real and it matters. At the same time, coinholder opposition of this magnitude cannot be dismissed. Before any decision is made, we need to understand why coinholders oppose ZSAs so strongly — whether it’s economic concern, technical risk, complexity, or something else. We invite ZSA proponents and skeptics alike to engage in good faith conversations in the coming weeks.

Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) — Issuance Smoothing — ZCAP supported NSM at 84%, but coinholders opposed it at 83.5%. Combined with the strong coinholder support for fee burning specifically, this suggests coinholders may support the deflationary element of NSM while rejecting aspects of the mechanism that alter issuance. These components need to be disentangled and evaluated independently before moving forward.

Consensus Accounts — 77.9% ZCAP support, 97.3% coinholder opposition. The low ballot count (55) on the coinholder side warrants the same caveat as Memo Bundles, but the gap is too large to proceed without further deliberation.

Memo Bundles — Supported by 76.8% of ZCAP, but coinholders voted 99.3% against. We note that Memo Bundles had among the lowest coinholder ballot counts (62 ballots), so this result may reflect a more motivated or concentrated subset of voters rather than broad coinholder sentiment. This warrants scrutiny before being treated as definitive, and further deliberation is needed.

Sprout Deprecation (v4 Transactions) — 77.7% ZCAP support, 84.6% coinholder opposition. This is a legacy cleanup item that most developers consider overdue, and ZCAP’s support is clear. The coinholder opposition here is worth understanding — it may reflect concern about disrupting existing users rather than opposition to the technical goal itself. We intend to pursue this conversation further before making a recommendation.

STARK Proof Verification via TZEs — The weakest result in ZCAP (56.8% support, 38.4% oppose), with coinholders opposing at 83.6%. There is no path to including this in NU7 based on current sentiment. Further deliberation on the use case and design would be needed before revisiting.

An Honest Note on the Coinholder Poll

We want to acknowledge something directly: the coinholder poll had 7.25% participation of circulating ZEC, and ballot counts varied significantly across questions — from 210 ballots on Tachyon down to 55 on Consensus Accounts. This participation structure matters for interpretation. A near-unanimous result from 55 ballots is a different signal than a near-unanimous result from 210 ballots.

This does not invalidate the coinholder results. Coinholders have legitimate standing in this process, and the mechanism was auditable and transparent. But it does mean that extreme results on low-participation questions should be understood as the strong views of a subset of participating coinholders, not a definitive verdict from all ZEC holders. ZF is committed to working with relevant parties to improve coinholder participation infrastructure for future polls.

What Comes Next

For the proposals with clear consensus — Tachyon, Quantum Recoverability, Explicit Fees, and Fee Burning — we will work with the relevant parties to assess technical readiness and scope for inclusion in NU7.

For the contested proposals, further deliberation is needed before any recommendations can be made. ZSAs in particular require a dedicated community conversation to understand the basis of coinholder opposition. For NSM, we think the fee-burning and issuance-smoothing components should be evaluated on their own terms given how differently they polled.

On governance: the divergence between ZCAP and coinholder results in this poll is not a failure of the process — it’s the process doing its job by surfacing real disagreement. But it does raise a legitimate question about how to weigh different constituencies when they conflict significantly. This deserves its own deliberation, separate from the immediate NU7 decisions.

We know this isn’t the clean, unified result some were hoping for. But we believe a Zcash built on genuine consensus — even if narrower in scope — is better than one built over unresolved community conflict.

We’re committed to playing our role in getting this right. Thank you for staying engaged.

The post NU7 Polling Results: What We Heard and Where We Go From Here appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Moonshots host Peter Diamandis speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at a16z, alongside regular cohosts Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, about whether AI can or should be paused, what happened when Horowitz told a Biden administration official that regulating AI means regulating math, why crypto is the natural money for AI agents, and why the gap between AI capability and societal adoption may be wider than people think. This episode originally aired on Peter Diamandis's Moonshots podcast.

 

Follow Peter H. Diamandis on X: https://x.com/PeterDiamandis

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

Follow Salim Ismail on X: https://twitter.com/salimismail

Follow Dave Blundin on X: https://twitter.com/DavidBlundin

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In this episode, host Sebastian Couture is joined by Chris Yin, CEO of Plume Network, to deconstruct the current state of Real World Assets (RWAs) and why the sector is at a pivotal inflection point. Chris argues that most RWA projects today are functionally "worse on-chain" because they lack liquidity, composability, and the "crypto-native" user experience that made stablecoins successful.

He details how Plume is solving this through a custom L1 stack and the Nest vault protocol, which tokenizes high-yield assets like Brazilian credit card receivables and oil production for a global market.

They explore the friction between traditional finance and DeFi, highlighting why private credit's long duration makes it unsuitable for the "looping" and leverage that drives crypto demand. Chris explains the significance of Plume’s SEC Transfer Agent license and its role in bridging the gap between regulated funds and permissionless rails.

Finally, the conversation tackles the "bleak" vs. "optimistic" future of crypto, asking whether the industry will maintain its core principles of self-custody and decentralization as it searches for a "new daddy" in institutional capital.

Topics

00:00 Intro & Context 04:15 The Job of a Founder: Finding Change 09:30 Crypto Natives vs. TradFi Suites 15:00 Stablecoins: The Only RWA That Matters (Today) 21:45 The Bottleneck: It’s Not Tokenization, It’s Demand 27:10 Why Build an L1 for Assets? 35:20 SEC Transfer Agent License Explained 42:15 Nest Alpha: Blending Oil, Credit, and T-Bills 49:00 Is Leverage Sustainable for Institutions? 55:30 The Exodus: Will Crypto Values Survive?

Links

Chris Yin on X: https://x.com/chriseyin Plume Network: https://www.plumenetwork.com/ Nest: https://nest.plumenetwork.com/ NEAR: https://near.ai/

Sponsors:
NEAR AI Cloud now lets developers deploy OpenClaw—the rapidly growing open-source AI agent platform—inside Trusted Execution Environments, providing hardware-level encryption with cryptographic attestations. With OpenClaw on NEAR AI Cloud, you can run agents with cloud convenience, but without traditional cloud data exposure. No hardware to manage. No trust assumptions required. Learn more at near.ai.

The Zcash Foundation recently concluded the ZCAP NU7 Sentiment Polling, which closed on Friday, February 20 at 20:00 UTC. This poll was designed to gauge community sentiment on 11 proposed protocol features and initiatives, each either completed or expected to be ready within the next year.

This post summarizes the results from the ZCAP poll. This poll ran in parallel with identical polls administered to coinholders, ZecHub, Zcash Brazil, Zcash Espanol, Zcash Turkey and Zcash Engineering Caucus. Individual poll results are advisory and non-binding on their own; they are evaluated alongside all other poll results to assess whether broad consensus exists across the ecosystem.

Participation

A total of 99 ZCAP members cast ballots out of 173 eligible participants, representing a 57% response rate. Each voter was permitted to abstain from individual questions while still submitting a valid ballot.

Results at a Glance Question #ProposalSupportOpposeAbstainTotal VotesSupport %1Zcash Shielded Assets (ZSAs)692919970.4%2Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM) + Issuance Smoothing791559984.0%3Burning 60% of Transaction Fees via NSM712089978.0%4Memo Bundles732249976.8%5Explicit Fees791649983.2%6Disallowing v4 Transactions (Sprout Deprecation)732159977.7%7Project Tachyon (New Shielded Pool for Scalability)831429985.6%8STARK Proof Verification via TZEs (Layer-2 Support)5038119956.8%9Comparable-Based Dynamic Fee Mechanism672399974.4%10Consensus Accounts6719139977.9%11Orchard Quantum Recoverability86949990.5% What Comes Next

These ZCAP results will now be compared with other community polling results. If there is clear, broad consensus across all groups, that signal will inform decisions about which features are prioritized for NU7. 

We want to thank every ZCAP member who took the time to review the proposals, engage in discussion, and cast their ballot. Additionally, we appreciate those who organized alternative community polls and are grateful to everyone who took the time to vote.

The post NU7 Sentiment: ZCAP Polling Results appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Key takeaways from behind closed-doors conversations at the Munich Security Conference

The era of Western hegemony is over. What will follow, after nearly 80 years of international cooperation, is a multipolar scramble where nations compete for industrial supremacy, technology access, and control of critical resources.

To make sense of this new era, we recently gathered a group of founders, investors and operators at our latest Risk Club session in partnership with our friends at General Catalyst in Munich.

These Risk Clubs, which BlueYard has held across the US and Europe for a few years now, bring together a dozen or so leading founders, investors, operators, policy makers, and journalists for conversations in a Jeffersonian debate dinner format. We focus on the defining risks of our time and how we might treat volatility as an opportunity to nudge ourselves towards utopia.

Whereas many aspects such as industrial capacity of the West, the ability to manage asymmetric cost warfare, and European sovereignty are the dominating topics, there are several additional potentially tectonic shifts and risks that key actors are focused on:

Compute is power, sovereignty is controlling your own compute capabilities

U.S. hyperscalers still control the majority of the world’s compute and data infrastructure. In response, European stakeholders are now investing massively in the bedrocks of digital sovereignty: cloud infrastructure, sovereign data centers, semiconductor lithography and more. The talent base around ASML and deep research institutions give the continent a foundation to build from. But it is one thing to build a technology, it is a completely other game to build a thriving ecosystem and commercial success. It’s still very much an open question where Europe and the rest of the world can replicate a sovereign AI stack (and get the parts required for the build out at scale — where some companies that tried to catch-up struggled with).

2. We are underestimating how AI can change the fabric of conflict and make democracies more vulnerable

AI progress is breakneck fast. And so will its impact be on the future of war. Not just attacking and defending IT systems and networks. But the ability to create massive and shifting social and information campaigns, spoofing personas, and synthetic content. The bar to swing an election will lower massively. New “trust tech” that allows people to figure out what is true or not could play an essential role. Or will societies default to treating everything as fake until verified. What does that imply for how societies work?

3. Middle Powers Rising

Whereas the US, China, and Europe dominate the headlines — middle powers such as Turkey both have military prowess and geopolitical influence and can tip the balance in a newly shaping world order. Expect other middle powers (potentially based on resource access) to find ways of projecting power.

4. The civil war no one is talking about: labour market vs AI

The impact of AI in labour markets is going to be a battle between productivity increases, GDP growth, and labour replacement. If the transition is not managed well, a new type of civil war between labour and the capital controlling AI could emerge.

5. European budget tailwinds, collaborative headwinds?

Europe is currently sitting on a €650B budget for rearmament and re-industrialization over the next four years. But the continent remains divided by its own strengths — Germany has capital and the industrial base, France has nuclear capabilities and experience. Without deeper cooperation between the two to build independent capabilities on the continent, Europe risks continuing paying protection money to the US as deterrence credibility gets eroded by a lack of integrated capabilities.

At BlueYard, we believe there is opportunity in volatile times like these. That the founders who will change the world emerge from these crucibles to build solutions that move us toward something better.

We’ve invested across defense, compute, and industrial resilience — backing founders building the infrastructure that sovereign, secure societies will depend on. In defense: Castelion, AnySignal, ZeroPhase, and Momentum. In compute: Corintis, Inpho, and Protocol Labs. In industrial: Manex, Eigenblue, and FDM.

We’re actively looking for the next generation of founders to make civilizational bets. If that’s you or if you’re an investor, policymaker, or operator thinking about these questions then we’d love to talk.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article has been prepared solely for informational purposes and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any entity managed by BlueYard Capital (“BlueYard”). Any reference to a specific company or security does not constitute a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, or directly invest in the company or its securities. It may not be modified, reproduced, or redistributed in whole or in part without the prior written consent of BlueYard. Portfolio company information presented herein is for informational purposes only and not intended to be a guarantee of certain investment results. BlueYard does not represent that the information herein is accurate, true, or complete, makes no warranty, express or implied, regarding the information herein and shall not be liable for any losses, damages, costs, or expenses relating to its adequacy, accuracy, truth, completeness, or use. All other company, product and service names or service marks of others and their use does not imply their endorsement of, or an association with this program.

Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and an investor in Anysphere, to talk about Collison's history with Smalltalk and Lisp, the MongoDB and Ruby decisions Stripe still lives with 15 years later, why he'd spend even more time on API design if he could do it over, and whether AI is actually showing up in economic productivity data. This episode originally aired on Cursor's podcast.

 

Resources: 

Follow Patrick Collison on X:   https://twitter.com/patrickc

Follow Michael Truell on X: https://twitter.com/mntruell

Follow Cursor: https://www.youtube.com/@cursor_ai

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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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