Web3 | Identosphere Blogcatcher

World Markets combines spot, perps, and lending with a fully onchain codebase, launching as MegaETH aims to unlock real-time DeFi.

When used properly, agents can shrink DeFi’s attack surface while helping users react to live risk before it becomes damage.

Panther Reward Points (PRPs) are a unique solution designed specifically for Panther, providing an economic flywheel to bootstrap protocol activity together with Panther’s Automated Market Maker (AMM). On this blog, we explain why PRPs are important, how they function, and what the role of PRPs are when it comes to protecting your onchain privacy. 

How does Panther achieve Privacy?

When users deposit their assets into Panther´s Multi-Asset Shielded Pool (MASP), they become private. For each transaction, there’s a ‘’receipt’’ in the form of an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO). The protocol tracks the UTXO and will then use the deposited assets onchain upon user request, internally tracking who did what by spending and generating new UTXOs for the said user. Onchain analysts can see a number of transactions all being handled by the protocol addresses, but can not deduce who did what. If there are only 10 users in the protocol, or if there is minimal volume, it will be easier for onchain analysts to link certain transactions to users. So privacy first comes in the form of actions (internally represented via UTXOs), and is then practically achieved via the volume of actions relative to the total number of users. Commonly referred to as the anonymity- or privacy set, the collection of all possible users that could have performed a specific action, preventing onchain analysts or AI from linking transactions to users.

Why does Panther have Reward Points? 

Panther’s privacy works via the anonymity set: more users and more actions equal better privacy, or a larger anonymity set. Realistically, this is what a user would care about the most, assuming privacy is the end goal. That is why the Panther Protocol values and encourages these elements: through Panther Reward Points. PRPs are not tradable assets. It exists only inside private accounts, accessible only to its owner, increment-only by protocol rules, decrement-only by zero-knowledge proofs. Each action, from signing up to depositing assets and holding them inside the protocol, rewards users with PRPs, analogous to loyalty points. As Panther expands the protocol's DeFi adaptors, such as zSwap, users will find more ways to use their private assets and generate PRPs. The protocol expands its anonymity set, offering greater privacy with each action. Users earn PRPs for helping the protocol.

How are PRPs calculated?

PRP calculations are configured and voted in through the Panther DAO. Some actions are simple and easily identifiable, such as PRP vouchers for signing up or doing DeFi swaps. But others are more complex, for example, PRPs earned on deposit and the PRPs generated over time.

PRP rewards come from three main sources:

Flat reward: 10 PRP for every MASP transaction, regardless of the transaction size.  Time-based yield: Targets 10% APY on shielded assets based on how long and how much value is shielded.  Deposit bonus: A reward of 0.01% of the deposited amount.  Understanding UTXOs and Their Limitations 

As mentioned earlier, UTXOs act as receipts that are conceptually simple but more complex than one might assume. UTXOs are a static representation of what has happened onchain. If a user deposits 1 ETH, there would be a UTXO saying that the user has 1 ETH. And if a user deposits another 0.5 ETH, there would be a UTXO showing that the given user has 1 ETH, plus another UTXO showing that the user has 0.5 ETH. When a withdrawal is being made, the protocol spends the relevant UTXOs and then creates new ones with the remaining balance. For example, withdrawing 0.8 ETH might spend both the 1 ETH and 0.5 ETH UTXOs, leaving a new UTXO of, say, 0.7 ETH. A UTXO doesn't display the current market value of 1 ETH, nor the rest of the user's holdings, nor how long each has been held. How do we go about determining an asset's annual yield if all of the information is trapped in a static UTXO that cannot infer on real-time values? The problem here is solved with PRPs, and why $ZKP isn't directly attributed. Instead, Panther users swap PRPs for $ZKP via the one-sided automated market maker (AMM). Just ponder for a moment on how you would attach a $ZKP value to a UTXO without running into fair value or liquidity issues. Additionally, using real-time price feeds would compromise privacy as external oracle calls could leak information about user activity patterns. 

Solving the Valuation Problem: Scaling and Weighting

Panther Protocol solves this limitation by first predetermining the asset's value for the UTXO to recognize. This is done via scaling and weighting factors. Each token may use a different decimal value, so a scaling factor is applied to normalize the values among the rest. This scaling factor is set once when a token becomes a zAsset and can never be changed. Then a weighting factor is applied against this value to approximate that token's US dollar value. The weighting factor is periodically updated via DAO votes to follow token price changes, and could even be adjusted to make one asset more desirable than another. This method allows tracking the approximate value of UTXOs, but the limitation is that it is not a real-time value; it is a preconfigured one that becomes outdated between updates. 

The PRP Value Assumption

Given that PRPs are only exchangeable for $ZKP and the access point is a one-sided AMM, another assumption is required: a target ratio. The Panther DAO’s target launch AMM ratio is "10 PRP: 1 $ZKP.’’ This real-time ratio will fluctuate over time, depending on the number of users claiming rewards or waiting for the AMM to recharge (recharges occur when $ZKP is added to the AMM), as explained in this article. Due to the limitations of UTXOs, all yields are calculated statically. The worth of $ZKP can be changed at a later date via weighting factor updates. 

PRPs to Bootstrap Protocol Activity

The purpose of PRPs are to encourage protocol usage and should not be classed as a primary yield-bearing mechanism with a fixed return. There are multiple dynamically changing values being used that no other privacy protocol has attempted. PRPs are a key feature of Panther protocol, and help solve a bootstrap problem that other privacy protocols have - together with Panther’s AMM! PRPs help protect the users' on-chain privacy, and are an important part of Panther’s solution to stimulate protocol activity within its core architecture. 

About Panther Protocol Foundation

Panther Protocol Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the ecosystem through research funding, open-source development grants, and ecosystem initiatives.

The Foundation does not operate the protocol, deploy smart contracts, host interfaces, custody assets, or provide financial or digital asset services.

For more information, visit www.panther.org
To learn more about Panther Protocol, visit www.pantherprotocol.io

Victims of North Korean terror, awarded hundreds of millions by a U.S. court, are now seeking to recover their damages from Arbitrum.

We are releasing Zebra 4.4.0 today. This release contains fixes for multiple security vulnerabilities, including several consensus-critical issues, and we strongly encourage all node operators to upgrade immediately.

Security Advisories GHSA-28xj-328h-72vm: Permanent Block Discovery Halt via Gossip Queue Saturation + Syncer Poisoning

Zebra’s block discovery pipeline contained a composite denial-of-service vulnerability that allowed a remote attacker to permanently halt all new block discovery on a targeted node. The attack exploited three independent weaknesses in the gossip, syncer, and download subsystems — all exercisable from a single TCP connection — to create a monotonically growing block deficit that never self-heals.

The gossip path was vulnerable because there was no per-connection rate limit on inv messages. A single connection could send enough sequential inv messages with fake block hashes to fill the entire gossip download queue in under a millisecond, and the FullQueue return value was silently ignored. The syncer backup path could be degraded by responding with empty inv to FindBlocks requests (valid protocol, zero misbehavior penalty) and with NotFound to block download requests. The attack produced zero misbehavior score, zero bans, and zero disconnections.

The fix drops connections that send empty responses to FindBlocks and FindHeaders messages, preventing attackers from degrading the syncer path without consequence.

GHSA-jv4h-j224-23cc: Consensus Block Sigops Undercount

Zebra’s block validator undercounted transparent signature operations against the 20,000-sigop block limit, allowing it to accept blocks that zcashd rejects. Two distinct undercounts were identified:

Coinbase sigops. zcashd includes the coinbase input’s scriptSig in its sigop count. Zebra skipped the coinbase input entirely, and up to ~98 sigops could be hidden inside the coinbase scriptSig without being charged against the block limit. Aggregate P2SH sigops. zcashd parses each P2SH input’s redeem script and sums those sigops into the block-wide total. Zebra computed P2SH sigops only in mempool transactions and never accumulated them during block validation. A block whose aggregate redeem-script sigops exceed 20,000 would be accepted by Zebra and rejected by zcashd.

The fix adds coinbase scriptSig to the legacy sigop iterator, introduces a shared p2sh_sigop_count function that mirrors zcashd‘s GetP2SHSigOpCount, and accumulates both legacy and P2SH sigops in the block-validation path.

Thanks to sangsoo-osec for finding and reporting this issue.

GHSA-gq4h-3grw-2rhv: Consensus Divergence in Transparent Sighash Hash-Type Handling due to Stale Buffer

The fix for a previous sighash advisory (GHSA-8m29-fpq5-89jj) introduced a separate issue due to insufficient error handling when the sighash hash type is invalid. Zebra’s transparent script verification calls Bitcoin Script verification code in C++ through a foreign function interface (FFI), with a Rust callback that computes the sighash. The previous fix correctly returned None for undefined hash types, but the FFI bridge only writes to the C++ sighash buffer when the callback returns Some, and the C++ checker reads that buffer unconditionally — so the failure signal was lost.

An attacker could exploit this by constructing a transparent output spent by a script that runs a valid OP_CHECKSIGVERIFY immediately before an OP_CHECKSIG with an undefined hash type. The first opcode primes the C++ sighash buffer with a valid digest; the second causes Zebra’s callback to return None while the C++ checker verifies the invalid signature against the stale digest. Zebra would accept the spend while zcashd would reject it, creating a consensus split.

The fix fills the sighash output buffer with random bytes on validation failure, which makes signature verification fail as expected with overwhelming probability. This is a workaround that avoids a breaking release of the zcash_script crate; a future release will propagate the error correctly for a direct fix.

Thanks to sangsoo-osec for finding and reporting this issue.

GHSA-cwfq-rfcr-8hmp: Transparent SIGHASH_SINGLE Corresponding-Output Handling

A divergence between Zebra and zcashd was reported in how SIGHASH_SINGLE is handled for V5 transparent transactions when an input index has no corresponding output. In zcashd, this case triggers a script failure under ZIP-244; in Zebra, the sighash engine computed a digest for the missing-output case rather than failing.

We do not consider this a practically exploitable security issue: the scenario requires an attacker to both submit a malformed transaction through Zebra’s mempool and have an external miner include it in a block — a chain of events with no economic incentive that has never occurred on mainnet. Nonetheless, we have added an explicit pre-check that rejects these transactions, matching zcashd‘s behavior and closing the divergence. (#10510)

Thanks to sangsoo-osec and defuse for finding and reporting this issue.

GHSA-438q-jx8f-cccv: Allocation Amplification in Inbound Network Deserializers

Several inbound deserialization paths in Zebra allocated buffers sized against generic transport or block-size ceilings before the tighter protocol or consensus limits were enforced. An unauthenticated or post-handshake peer could force the node to preallocate and parse orders of magnitude more data than the protocol intended, amplifying per-message memory and parse cost. Four vectors were identified:

headers message receive cap. The CountedHeader vector was deserialized via the generic TrustedPreallocate path, allowing up to ~1,409 entries per message. The protocol ceiling of 160 was only enforced on the send side, creating an ~8.8× preallocation gap on receive. This was reachable before the version handshake completed. Equihash solution length. The equihash solution was decoded as a generic Vec<u8> and only checked against the consensus size (1,344 bytes on mainnet) afterwards. A single fixed-size header field could be inflated to nearly the full block-size ceiling before rejection. Sapling spend vectors in coinbase transactions. V5 spend_prefixes and V4 shielded_spends were allocated with block-size-derived ceilings (~5,681 / ~5,208 entries) before the consensus rule that coinbase transactions have zero Sapling spends was enforced in the verifier. The fix reads the Sapling spend count and rejects coinbase transactions with any spends before allocating the spend vector. Coinbase script bytes. The coinbase script was read as a generic Vec<u8> up to the message-size cap before enforcing the consensus rule that coinbase scripts are between 2 and 100 bytes.

Each individual case is bounded by the 2 MiB transport ceiling or the block-size cap, so no single message causes unbounded allocation, but the cumulative gap between intended and actual limits is significant and stackable across concurrent connections. All four vectors have been fixed by capping allocations to the protocol-specified limits before deserialization begins.

Thanks to Zk-nd3r for finding and reporting these issues.

Security Improvements Indexer gRPC Server Resource Limits

The indexer gRPC server had no connection or subscription cap, and used a 4,000-message per-stream queue with full block payloads. The fix switches indexer streams to use try_send, which drops slow consumers instead of backpressuring the server, and reduces the per-stream buffer from 4,000 to 64 messages. Note: gRPC subscribers that fall behind are now dropped instead of backpressuring the server. Well-behaved clients are unaffected.

RPC Request Body Size Limit

The RPC compatibility middleware read, parsed, and re-serialized the full HTTP request body before applying any local size cap. The fix bounds the HTTP request body via http_body_util::Limited before allocation, with the limit derived from MAX_BLOCK_BYTES to accommodate submitblock.

getrawtransaction Block Hash Validation Race

A TOCTOU race condition existed in getrawtransaction between block hash validation and txid lookup during chain forks, which could return incorrect results. The fix reuses the caller-provided block hash and its best-chain flag from the initial query, avoiding a third state lookup that could race with a reorg.

RPC Auth Cookie File Permissions

The RPC authentication cookie file was written without explicit 0600 permissions, potentially allowing other local users to read it on multi-user systems. The fix sets restrictive file permissions on the cookie file at creation time on Unix, and also rejects symlinks at the cookie path.

Thanks to Zk-nd3r for finding and reporting the four issues above.

New Features nTx Field in getblock Response

The getblock RPC response now includes the nTx field, reporting the number of transactions in a block. This improves compatibility with downstream tooling that expects this field. (#10498)

Criterion Benchmark Suite

A Criterion-based benchmark suite and CI workflow have been added, giving the team a systematic way to track and catch performance regressions across releases. (#10444)

Sentry Environment Alignment

Sentry CI metadata and environment tagging have been aligned, improving how crash and error reports are categorized across development, staging, and production deployments. (#10490)

Bug Fixes getrawtransaction Confirmations

A bug in the getrawtransaction RPC that returned incorrect confirmation counts has been fixed. (#10507)

Dependency Updates librustzcash

The entire librustzcash dependency stack has been migrated to the latest version. This replaces the yanked core2 crate with corez 0.1.1, clearing the RUSTSEC-2026-0105 advisory. (#10522)

Other Changes Remaining Groth16 proof verification abstractions have been removed from zebra-consensus, completing the cleanup after the Sapling verifier migration. (#10436) cargo-vet configuration has been fixed to run correctly after releases. (#10504) Upgrading

We strongly recommend all Zebra node operators upgrade to 4.4.0 as soon as possible, particularly due to the consensus vulnerabilities described above. There are no known workarounds — upgrading is the only way to ensure your node remains on the correct chain and is protected against the issues listed in this release. You can find the release on GitHub.

Thank You to Our Contributors

This release was made possible by the work of @alchemydc, @arya2, @conradoplg, @daira, @gustavovalverde, @mpguerra, @oxarbitrage, @schell, and @upbqdn. Thank you for your continued contributions to Zebra.

Zebra is the Zcash Foundation’s independent, Rust-based implementation of the Zcash protocol. Learn more at github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra.

The post Zebra 4.4.0: Critical Security Fixes appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Kalshi and Polymarket may have a wild road ahead as states wage war on sports markets and the public reckons with insider bets.

MegaETH’s DeFi TVL has doubled since Thursday’s MEGA token launch, with USDM and Terminal Points farming pulling in fresh capital.

IPOP markets reference anticipated public equity, convert to standard perps once shares list, and settle by TWAP if the listing fails.

Crypto markets open May with a rally despite an unresolved Hormuz blockade.

The proposed fix still involves irrevocably burning funds of quantum-vulnerable addresses that fail to take action.

The world's largest digital asset issuer claims to have made $1.04B in net profit last quarter.

The peninsular nation's financial watchdog imposed a ₩36.8B fine and partial business suspension on Bithumb last month.

April's exploits were driven less by smart contract bugs and more by social engineering, bridge spoofing, and AI-assisted reconnaissance.

In this episode, host Friederike Ernst is joined by Kubi Mensah, CEO and co-founder of Gattaca, the company behind Titan Builder. Kubi sheds light on the highly competitive and often opaque world of Ethereum block building, explaining how Gattaca evolved from a centralized exchange proprietary trading firm to one of the three dominant builders responsible for constructing the vast majority of Ethereum blocks today .
 

 
They dissect the true "journey of a transaction," revealing why over half of all Ethereum transaction value bypasses the public mempool in favor of private order flow auctions and MEV-protection services . Kubi explains the intricate mechanics of top-of-block bidding by high-frequency DeFi arbitrageurs, the necessity of extreme latency optimization, and the "flywheel effect" that makes block building a natural oligopoly . Finally, the discussion turns to the future of the Ethereum roadmap, unpacking how upcoming upgrades like ePBS (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) and FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) aim to permanently alter the power dynamics between block builders, validators, and originators .
 
 
Topics

04:15 Transitioning from TradFi Trading to Ethereum Block Building 09:30 Redefining the Builder: Relays and Order Flow Auctions 15:00 Unpacking the Mempool: Public vs. Private Transactions 21:45 The Anatomy of a Block & "Top-of-Block" Arbitrage 27:10 How Builders Pay Proposers to Win Auctions 35:20 The Oligopoly: Why Only 3 Builders Dominate Ethereum 42:15 Trust in the Dark Forest: Handling Searcher Bundles 49:00 The Convergence of Builders and Solvers 55:30 The Impact of ePBS, FOCIL, and Pre-confirmations

Sponsors:

Lido V3 introduces stVaults: a 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=epicenterBlock Space Forum: https://blockspace.forum/

Theo Jaffee speaks with Balaji Srinivasan and Taylor Lorenz about how AI is reshaping media, trust, and online communication. Building on prior public disagreements between the two, the conversation revisits core tensions around media, technology, and power in a rapidly changing information environment.

They discuss the breakdown of traditional information systems, the rise of AI-generated content, and why new models for verifying identity and truth may be necessary. The conversation lays out competing visions for the future of media, from decentralized “webs of trust” and cryptographic verification to the role of journalism, privacy, and public accountability.

 

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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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Onchain infrastructure doesn't go dark when a company does.

DeFi just got reminded that yield doesn’t matter when the system breaks down. Here are five onchain opportunities built to withstand chaos.

Bitcoin reclaims $76,000 despite U.S. spot ETFs posting a third consecutive day of outflows.

Tether is orchestrating a sweeping Bitcoin power play, backing a three-way mega merger and fueling it with $2.1B of fresh credit.

MEGA is live on Binance, Coinbase, and 11 other venues a week after the Ethereum Layer 2 network cleared its first performance milestone.

The partnership aims to make it easier for companies, including fintechs and paying firms, to issue compliant stablecoins in the United States.

The prediction market will deploy a custom on-chain detection model to flag insider activity.

Coinbase Asset Management has selected Superstate FundOS to issue on-chain shares of Coinbase Stablecoin Yield Fund (CUSHY).

The long-awaited MEGA token is finally here.

The payments giant will fold PYUSD, Braintree, and merchant processing into a new Payment Services & Crypto division, marking the first time digital assets have a dedicated home within the company.

The stablecoin issuer's new payment rail enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001, targeting AI agents that pay per API call, per second, or per dataset read.

April 2026 now ranks as the most-hacked month in crypto history, by number of incidents.

Wasabi Protocol is the latest victim in what appears to be a record bad month for DeFi hacks.

Kraken is introducing curated portfolio bundles combining cryptocurrency with traditional U.S. equities and ETFs through its xStocks offering.

Standard Intelligence: Training General Intelligence in Pixel Space By Sonya Huang Published April 30, 2026 The future of useful agents may begin not with text, but with pixels.

Could pixels hold the keys to training useful agents?

The race to scale language models — and the agent ecosystem around them — is white-hot. Coding agents, which reason through problems and write code to solve them, have already taken us very far.

But one ambitious young team is making a different bet: that the most promising path to general computer agents may not run through language, screenshots, and tool calls, but through scaling raw video.

Standard Intelligence’s thesis is that the best way to build a general agent is through full video pre-training on computer use, because it is the only approach that can truly scale action data. Instead of predicting text tokens, the model learns to use a computer from raw screen data, predicting the next mouse movement, click, and keystroke from the pixels in front of it. 

It is the Tesla FSD approach applied to knowledge work on computer screens.

That makes the bet both deeply contrarian and deeply “bitter lesson”-pilled. Rather than hand-engineering workflows or wrapping language models in increasingly elaborate harnesses, Standard Intelligence is betting on a new pre-training paradigm: feed the model the raw stream of computer use, scale it aggressively, and let the generality emerge from the data.

“We’re not video people”

Video is unwieldy. It is computationally expensive, economically expensive, and technically unforgiving. Prior attempts to scale video toward AGI have often died on the vine.

The Standard Intelligence team is emphatically “not video people.” They did not arrive with a decade of inherited assumptions about how to work with video as a medium. Instead, they have had to reason through each challenge from first principles, and have met those challenges with unusual optimism, creativity, and scrappiness.

The results are striking. An 11-million-hour computer action dataset — the largest in the industry. A video encoder that is roughly 50× more token-efficient than competing approaches, enabling nearly two hours of 30 FPS video to fit inside a 1-million-token context window. A 30-petabyte storage cluster racked in San Francisco for under $500K, roughly 20× cheaper than hyperscaler alternatives.

FDM-1, their first foundation model trained directly on computer-use video at scale, offers an early glimpse of what this paradigm could become. It is a general model that can extrude a CAD gear in Blender, drive a car around a San Francisco block after an hour of fine-tuning, and find bugs in software by exploring its state space the way a curious human might.

Conscientious young founders

Founders Galen Mead and Devansh Pandey met as teenagers during the Atlas Fellowship in 2022, a selective fellowship for high-school students interested in AI alignment and AGI. 

Galen and Devansh are unusually serious about reaching AGI, and unusually conscientious about doing so safely. Both founders are wise beyond their years (21 and 20 respectively), and both left their undergraduate programs out of a sense of urgency to work on this problem.

Galen and Devansh stand out for their combination of taste, scrappiness, technical courage, and ambition. It shows up in the product thinking, in the research direction, and in the FDM-1 report itself.

The full team of six is small but mighty. Neel, Yudhister, Ulisse, and Ryan are each quirky and exceptional. They have chosen to turn down the conventional path (fancy degrees and offers from big token) and pursue this courageous mission together. 

A new pre-training regime

Video has long been a powerful training ground for AI. DQN showed that agents could learn rich behavior directly from pixels in Atari environments. Tesla scaled video models to make self-driving cars and robots navigate the physical world.

But in the race toward general knowledge agents, video-first pre-training remains an unconventional idea.

Standard Intelligence is betting that it will not stay unconventional for long.

We are thrilled to lead Standard Intelligence’s Series A alongside Miko and Yasmin from Spark Capital.

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The post Standard Intelligence: Training General Intelligence in Pixel Space appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

Maple Finance's SYRUP token launched on Revolut, giving the fintech's 70M+ users across 39 countries access to on-chain institutional credit yield.

Elena Burger speaks with Joe Schmidt, partner on the enterprise team at a16z, about the future of enterprise software in the age of AI. Using Workday as a case study, they discuss why many of today’s most important enterprise systems feel broken, how platform shifts reshape entire categories, and what an AI-native replacement might look like.

The conversation covers the limits of legacy SaaS, why “AI revenue” may be overstated, and how agents could fundamentally change how companies manage workflows, permissions, and internal systems. They also explore why even the most defensible software businesses may now be vulnerable to replatforming.

 

Resources:

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MegaETH's MEGA token is launching into a tough market, but real usage and novel design could give it an edge.

ETH is down 7% on the week as the Fed signals the bar for rate cuts has risen, and ETF outflows top $350 million over two days.

The social media giant has rolled out USDC payments via Stripe on Solana and Polygon.

The convicted fraudster is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence in connection with his 2024 guilty plea.

A study of 1.29M wallets shows users returning more often and trading across more categories, with sports leading at $10.1B and crypto serving as the main onboarding gateway.

Former acting CFTC Chairman Caroline Pham will run the new business, which bundles key management, custody, execution, and white-label stablecoin issuance into a single stack.

The Federal Trade Commission settlement decision also ordered Mashinsky to pay the commission $10 million.

The collaboration lets non-crypto-native finance teams sweep idle dollars into WisdomTree's WTGXX alongside their stablecoin payments, with daily dividend accrual and 24/7 liquidity.

Another wave of chaos hit crypto this morning, with three separate exploits across Sui, Near, and Base exposing DeFi's fragile underbelly.

Issuer-Sponsored Tokens enable direct equity ownership in token form, rather than synthetic wrappers sitting on top of underlying shares.

PUMP briefly rallied today on news that the platform has burned ~36% of the token's circulating supply from previous buybacks.

The bank's digital assets team argues the post-Kelp coalition response and structural fixes around bridges leave DeFi stronger, not weaker, ahead of the Ethereum Economic Zone going live this summer.

A new partnership with Computershare will enable the native issuance of even more stock tokens via blockchain rails.

The investment, worth over $19M at current prices, coincides with Mezo's launch of Bitcoin yield vaults for institutional clients.

Theo Jaffee and Gabriel Dickinson speak with Cremieux about China’s rapid rise to the top of global clinical trial output. They discuss the regulatory reforms that accelerated China’s progress, the surge in novel drug development, and what the US would need to change to stay competitive in biomedical innovation.

 

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The retail-focused crypto exchange narrowly missed earnings estimates, yet got punished after the bell.

Crypto markets are trading cautiously, with the Fed widely expected to hold rates steady tomorrow.

The NFT market cap is at its lowest since summer 2021, yet top Ethereum collections are surging.

Basic DeFi security habits won't make you bulletproof, but they'll put you in better shape than most users.

The coalition has secured ETH commitments to refill the bridge in tranches and will use Aave and Compound governance proposals to liquidate the exploiter's remaining positions.

A new partnership with proxy services firm Broadridge will enable Ondo tokenized equity holders to participate in corporate governance.

The open-source standard, developed by The Open Platform, lets AI agents manage dedicated on-chain wallets without requiring user sign-off on every transaction

The Arbitrum-based RWA perps protocol now routes net directional flow to Jump and prime brokers offchain, retiring the single-pool model that absorbed all trader risk.

The CFTC filed suit against Wisconsin to establish its exclusive regulatory authority over prediction markets, a sector closely tied to crypto and blockchain-based derivatives.

Chair Selig says automated oversight will enable the agency to keep pace with the crypto industry, even as staffing levels decline.

The digital asset manager also delivered its earnings report for the first quarter of 2026.

The move would let Polymarket's primary, on-chain prediction market platform operate in the United States, rather than through its current intermediated setup with Polymarket US.

The partnership lets holders of tokenized equity and ETFs participate in proxy voting and access other governance features.

This interview with Stripe cofounders John and Patrick Collison originally aired on TBPN. They discuss Stripe's 34% growth and new employee tender offer, how agent commerce and stablecoins may require high-throughput blockchains built for millions of transactions per second, and why the economics of software are shifting from mass-produced products to bespoke, on-demand systems cooked fresh at the moment of use.

 

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Recovery efforts have stabilized Aave after the KelpDAO exploit, but governance delays and legal risks continue to cloud the timeline.

Crude oil jumped as Trump called off Iran peace talks, dragging BTC back below $77,000 and triggering $288 million in long liquidations.

The Strong and Free Elections Act is advancing to committee, backed by a quiet consensus among Canadian lawmakers.

Western Union's USDPT hits Solana next month as a SWIFT replacement, with a stablecoin card targeting inflation-sensitive markets coming later.

Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, Pudgy Penguins, Azuki and Doodles are all up double digits on the month.

Sen. Tillis' ethics provisions are the latest headwind for the Clarity Act, which recently missed its latest April deadline.

With Genesis Capital fully deployed, the protocol looks to shift from governance-determined capital outflows to rules-bound expenses capped at a fixed percentage of revenue.

The DeFi United coalition crossed its rsETH backing target after a flood of weekend commitments from across the Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Avalanche, and Bitcoin ecosystems.

We are pleased to welcome Andrés Rodríguez, who joins ZF as a Platform Engineer (DevOps/SRE).

Andrés has more than eight years of experience spanning cloud infrastructure, ERP systems, and platform automation across both the private and public sectors. He has helped organizations modernize their systems and adopt DevOps practices, building scalable and reliable platforms for high-traffic APIs and leading large-scale digital transformation initiatives. His career has also included leading teams and collaborating with stakeholders across technical, operational, and business functions.

Andrés is driven by solving real business problems through technology, and is eager to bring that approach to ZF’s infrastructure and platform operations. He brings hands-on experience designing resilient architectures and automating complex workflows to help ZF continue to scale its engineering efforts.

Welcome, Andrés!

The post Zcash Foundation Welcomes a New Platform Engineer appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Partnering with Ineffable Intelligence: A Superlearner for the Era of Experience By Sonya Huang and Alfred Lin Published April 27, 2026 David Silver is racing to build AI’s next chapter with an RL ‘superlearner.’

What does it mean to build a mind that is not a copy of our own?

Today, we are excited to announce that Sequoia is partnering with David Silver and Ineffable Intelligence, a new AI research lab based in London with a singular mission: to make first contact with superintelligence.

Ineffable is building what David calls a superlearner: a system that discovers all knowledge directly through its own experience, from elementary motor skills to profound intellectual breakthroughs. No pre-training. No imitation. Just an agent learning endlessly from the consequences of its own actions in a world built to teach it.

A Reinforcement Learning-based superlearner has the potential to rediscover and then transcend the greatest inventions in human history: language, science, mathematics and technology. Imagine a machine that derives the laws of physics from first principles. That invents new branches of mathematics we never thought to ask about. That designs materials, medicines and computers we don’t yet have the vocabulary to describe. This is the prize David is reaching for.

A Different Path

The current generation of AI was built by training on the entirety of the human internet. It is an extraordinary achievement. But a system trained on human data may also have fundamental limitations.

Ineffable Intelligence is scaling reinforcement learning from a clean base: no pre-training, no human data to shortcut the system. Guided by the Era of Experience as a north star, David is proving that agents trained purely from an environment can develop non-human strategies for reasoning about problems we don’t yet know how to solve.

David led some of the defining breakthroughs in deep reinforcement learning, most famously in the devilishly difficult game of Go. Go is the ultimate machine intelligence test because it cannot be brute-forced by a computer: a combinatorially explosive O(10^170) possible legal board positions vastly exceeds the O(10^80) atoms in the observable universe. It was thought to be simply too hard for machines to solve.

At DeepMind, David drove the key breakthrough that finally solved the game of Go: self-play. Self-play drove the ~800 ELO-point leap that led to the historic AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol showdown in March 2016. David pushed the idea further still with AlphaGo Zero: removing human pre-training entirely and learning purely through self-play increased the system’s ELO rating from ~3,700 to 5,000+. The result was a system that reached decisively superhuman performance, and with somewhat non-human mannerisms.

That’s the lineage David has spent his career building. He was the lead researcher and technical force behind the Alpha series at DeepMind, where, for a brilliant period, his approach was the dominant paradigm: AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaStar, AlphaProof and more.

Even with the arrival of LLMs, David never stopped believing. He is one of the very few people on earth with the conviction, the technical depth and the team to scale reinforcement learning.

What’s Ahead

The work ahead is hard, the timeline to superintelligence is uncertain, and the bet is genuinely contrarian. That is exactly what excites us. The largest leaps in AI have always come from people willing to ignore the consensus. David has ignored more consensus, more correctly, than almost anyone in the field.

We are honored to co-lead Ineffable’s first round and to partner with David on what may be the most ambitious scientific mission of our generation.

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The post Partnering with Ineffable Intelligence: A Superlearner for the Era of Experience appeared first on Sequoia Capital.

CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam said prediction markets provide measurable value to participants and the public, committing the agency to setting regulatory standards for the sector.

Maple Finance announced it has crossed $7 billion in total bridge volume, signaling growing cross-chain demand for yield-bearing dollar assets.

MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 3,273 Bitcoin in a new purchase valued at approximately $255 million, while prediction market Polymarket sets 10% odds on the company selling any Bitcoin before year-end.

Elfa AI begins offering continuous listening and real-time interpretation for AI agents to execute transactions on Solana when market conditions are met.

Western Union plans to roll out its USDPT stablecoin next month, alongside a digital wallet network and Stable Card for global payments.

Anjney Midha, founder of AMP PBC, speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, about how venture capital changed from a small, relationship-driven business into a scalable system for backing new technology companies. They discuss network effects, firm design, leadership, culture, and how AI is reshaping both the capital race and the kinds of companies that can be built now.

 

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Now that Panther’s DAO-operated Mainnet deployment is near, it is time to take a closer look at how its Automated Market Maker (AMM) works! On this blog, we explain the role of Panther’s Reward Points (PRPs) and how their conversion to $ZKP works. We explain the conversion model's calculations, the factors that influence the PRP/$ZKP ratio, and why there is an Automated Market Maker in the first place. Let’s dive in!

What are PRPs and their role?

PRPs are rewards earned for holding shielded $ZKP (zZKP) in Panther’s Multi-Asset Shielded Pool (MASP) and for performing certain user actions within the protocol. zAssets like zZKP are digital assets within Panther’s MASP, in this case, $ZKP tokens within the protocol. Originally, PRPs were intended to be exchanged for zZKP determined by supply and demand once Panther’s Mainnet was operational. However, this has changed as there won’t be a transition from Panther’s MASP v0.5 (also known as Advanced Staking) to Mainnet (v1.0), nor a corresponding upgrade of v0.5 PRPs to v1.0 PRPs. Instead, there will be a floating rate starting at 10 PRPs for 1 $ZKP through the AMM, whereas 1 zZKP is equivalent to 1 ZKP – distinguishing it from the prior PRP exchange mechanism.

Automating claims and user involvement through the AMM

In the current setup, PRPs can be redeemed by exchanging them for $ZKP from the protocol's reserves. Each redemption reduces the $ZKP reserves while Panther users receive $ZKP. On the Limited Mainnet Beta version of Panther’s Mainnet, daily additions (e.g., approximately 33,300 $ZKP per day) significantly affected the PRP and $ZKP reserve balances, thereby influencing the ratio. In contrast, Panther’s Canary environment initially lacked a recharge AMM pool feature, which can skew the ratio by introducing large amounts of ZKP without a corresponding inflow of PRPs. 

As there is no way to automate the claiming process, it must be performed manually by PRP holders through the AMM. This design encourages active participation and aligns with the protocol's decentralized nature.

Rewards Redemption Breakdown How the AMM conversion ratio is calculated

Panther’s rewards functionality operates on a specific logic for issuing rewards, which has implications for the PRP-to-$ZKP conversion ratio. When protocol rewards are deposited, the reward controller first sends the total accrued amount to the Automated Market Maker (AMM), which can lead to a high initial conversion ratio. To manage this, options include depositing the accrued amount and claiming it to align with current values, or redeploying the smart contract to reset the start date. The $ZKP amount a user receives when redeeming PRP is determined entirely by smart contracts, with no modifications made by the development team. The Panther dApp retrieves this amount, displays it, and calculates the displayed ratio. If a user has no PRP available to redeem, the conversion ratio shows as 0 PRP = 0 $ZKP.

Panther’s smart contracts use the following formula for the PRP to $ZKP conversion:

zkpOut = (prpIn × zkpReserve) / (prpReserve + prpIn)

Where:

prpIn: Amount of PRP being converted. zkpReserve: Total ZKP in the pool. prpReserve: Virtual PRP balance in the pool. zkpOut: ZKP tokens received.

The rate is then zkpOut / prpIn.

Whereas an example calculation would be:

Pool state: 1,000,000 PRP reserve, 500,000 ZKP reserve. Converting 1,000 PRP: zkpOut = (1,000 × 500,000) / (1,000,000 + 1,000) = 500,000,000 / 1,001,000 ≈ 499.5 ZKP. Rate = 499.5 / 1,000 = 0.4995 ZKP per PRP.

These calculations depend on the user's available PRP and the current zkpReserve and prpReserve balances, which update with every redemption or AMM pool recharge. This means the $ZKP amount and ratio are recalculated dynamically for all dApp users on the Redeem PRP page.

Factors Affecting the Ratio and Potential Solutions 

The PRP-to-$ZKP ratio could become unfavorable due to low user participation—specifically, few users consistently adding significant PRP to the ZKP reserves. In scenarios with only a handful of users (e.g., up to three) redeeming and recharging sequentially in production, the ratio can fluctuate dramatically, for example, 1 PRP = 30 ZKP (as seen in certain screenshots from testers). However, with dozens or hundreds of users engaging 24/7—recharging the AMM pool and redeeming PRP at rates they find favorable—the ratio should stabilize and not spike excessively. To address unfavorable ratios, solutions like a buffer mechanism could be considered if they prove effective and secure. 

About Panther Protocol Foundation

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

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

For more information, visit www.panther.org
To learn more about Panther Protocol, visit www.pantherprotocol.io.

Contact

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

MetaMask has evolved from a simple browser wallet into a full financial suite. Here's everything you need to know about what it offers in 2026. Updated: April 2026

The room is warm. The light is low. Someone dealt the cards a long time ago, before you arrived, and the rules were explained just clearly enough for you to feel like a participant.

You played. Most people do. It seemed the reasonable thing — the only thing, really. Everyone else was at the table. The stakes felt manageable. And the dealer had a reassuring face, a practiced manner, a way of making the whole arrangement feel not just normal but necessary. Democratic, even.

It took a long time to notice that the other players always seemed to know something you didn’t. That the house never lost. That the rules, read carefully, had been written by people who were not sitting at your end of the table.

And that the door, the whole time, had been right behind you.

* * *

Some people thought they had found a way to change the game from within.

Not so long ago, they were promised disruption. An outsider. Someone who had nothing to owe the machine, because he had never needed it — or so the story went. The swamp would be drained. The people who had been dealt the worst hands, year after year, would finally have their turn.

They were not stupid for wanting this. They were human. When the table has been rigged long enough, the promise of a new dealer feels like salvation.

But disruption, it turned out, has its own donors. Its own revolving doors. Its own preferred industries, preferred policies, preferred exemptions. The faces around the table shifted. The table did not.

This belief — that the right person, the right movement, the right wave of anger could finally overturn the house — is not stupidity. It is loyalty. And loyalty, once extended, is astonishingly difficult to withdraw — because withdrawing it means admitting something painful: that the years of compliance, the forms filled out, the taxes paid, the faith extended, the ballots cast, were not investments in a shared future. They were contributions to someone else’s private one.

Some people are only now beginning to admit this.

But they are.

* * *

Watch the dealer carefully, and the technique becomes visible.

A politician takes the stage. The lighting is warm. The words are practiced. There is talk of ordinary people, of shared sacrifice, of the hard work ahead. There is a flag somewhere, applause at the right moments. The cameras find faces in the crowd — worried faces, hopeful faces, faces that want to believe they are watching something real.

And then the cameras stop rolling.

The calls begin. Not to constituents, but to donors. The legislation takes shape in rooms that smell like money rather than democracy. The final text — thousands of pages, released hours before the vote — was not written by the people who will vote on it. It was written by the people who paid for the people who will vote on it.

This is not cynicism dressed up as insight. It is the operational reality of modern governance in most of the world’s wealthiest democracies. Lobbyists don’t influence legislation. In many cases, they author it.

But the deepest trick happens before any of this — before the cameras, before the speeches, before the vote. It happens in the hand selection. Candidates who might genuinely threaten the donor class find their funding dry up, their media coverage thin, their party support quietly withdrawn. By the time a name appears on a ballot, the serious vetting has already occurred. Not by voters. By money. The players at your end of the table get to choose between the cards the house has already approved.

Democracy, in this reading, doesn’t begin at the ballot box.

It ends there.

* * *

People know this. They have known it for a long time, in the way you know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that the odds in a casino are not in your favour — and keep playing anyway, because what else would you do?

Opinion surveys in country after country show the same result: collapsing trust in governments, in institutions, in the premise that those in power answer to those who placed them there. But the surveys measure a feeling. What they do not capture is the mechanism. It is not simply that politicians stop listening after they are elected. It is that the politicians who would have listened were never permitted to get that far. The selection happens upstream, in the funding rounds, the endorsement calls, the quiet conversations about viability that precede any public process entirely.

The filter is invisible. That is the point of it.

If the game is fixed at the point of selection, what do you do? You cannot simply vote harder — the cards available to you were chosen by someone else. You cannot protest your way to the table where decisions are actually made. You cannot opt out of the economy — you still need to eat, to pay rent, to move through a world that requires participation at every turn.

So most people do the only thing that seems available: they carry on. They absorb the dissonance. They reserve their outrage for the dinner table, the comment section, the private conversation. And they continue, dutifully, to lay down their cards.

And to fill out the forms.

* * *

Here is where the arrangement reveals its sharpest edge.

You will provide your name. Your address. Your date of birth. Your government-issued identification. Proof of your source of funds. Explanation of the purpose of your transaction. Not because you are suspected of wrongdoing, but because the system has decided that your continued participation requires justification.

Know Your Customer. The phrase has the texture of care — as though the institution asking is motivated by concern for you, for your protection, your best interests.

But consider what is not asked in return.

Does the customer know the institution? Does the customer know how the bank’s balance sheet is structured, which risks it carries, which political campaigns its executives quietly fund, which industries its investment arm finances in your name? Does the customer know which lobbyist wrote the regulation that defines what the institution may do — and what it need not disclose?

The answer, of course, is no.

And yet this same system — the one that requires your complete financial transparency — has a long and documented record of looking the other way when the person in question is wealthy enough, connected enough, or useful enough to the right people. Files have surfaced over the years. Names attached to extraordinary behaviour in extraordinary places — behaviour that would have ended ordinary lives. The consequences for those concerned remained largely theoretical. But what those files also revealed, to those paying attention, is that the names within them were not the architects of the arrangement. They were guests. The people who truly control such situations are rarely found in the documents at all. They are the ones who decide what gets released, and when, and to whom.

The information flows in one direction only: toward them, about you. Analysed, cross-referenced, sold, leaked, stolen — fed into systems that will judge your future based on choices you made with no idea they were being permanently recorded.

This is what they call safety. What they call the price of participation.

They did not ask if you agreed to these terms. They simply changed them. And the cards kept coming.

* * *

Now, in the background, the house is introducing a new kind of chip.

It goes by several names. In some places, a Central Bank Digital Currency. In others it arrives more quietly, dressed as a stablecoin — neutral, efficient, modern. Progress. The natural next step in a journey toward frictionless payment that has only ever moved in one direction.

What it actually is, is the logical conclusion of everything that came before. The final card in a hand that has been building for decades.

Physical cash has always been the problem, from the house’s perspective. Cash is anonymous. It cannot be frozen by an algorithm, redirected by a policy update, or expired on a schedule designed to encourage spending at politically convenient moments. A centrally-issued digital currency solves all of these inconveniences — not from your perspective, of course, but from theirs.

Money has always been, at its core, a tool of individual agency — the ability to exchange value without permission, to save without approval, to move resources without explaining yourself to anyone. A programmable currency issued by a central authority is the opposite of that. It is money with conditions attached — updated silently, applied selectively, enforced automatically. Spend it here, not there. Before this date, not after. On these goods, not those.

The technology is neutral. The intentions behind it are not.

A leash. Made of code. Attached, gently and for your own good, to everything you own.

* * *

The natural response, still, is to look for a reformer. A new dealer. Someone honest enough to change the rules from within.

But the rules were not written by the dealer. The dealer is an employee. And the people who own the house have spent decades purchasing not just politicians but the entire machinery through which politicians might be held to account — the regulators who return to the industries they once oversaw, the legislation drafted before the public vote, the campaign structures that determine which reformers are viable before a single ballot is cast.

To believe that the next election, the next administration, the next wave of righteous anger will alter this architecture is not hope.

It is the house’s most valuable asset.

There is an old idea that has grown newly urgent. When an institution fails you, the theory goes, you have a choice between voice and exit. For generations, exit was treated as surrender — the responsible citizen raised their voice, organised, demanded to be heard.

But that framing assumed the microphone was real. That the feedback loop between citizens and those who govern them remained intact.

When that loop is severed — not just at the point of governance but earlier, at the point of selection, where money has already determined which voices will ever reach the room — exit changes its character entirely.

Pushing back your chair and walking away from a rigged table is not defeat.

It is the only move that cannot be countered.

* * *

What does walking away actually look like?

Not the fantasy of the hermit — disconnected, self-sufficient, responsible to no one. That is simply a different kind of illusion. You still live in the world. You still need to move through it.

It looks, instead, like a steady and deliberate migration of your financial life away from systems that require your total legibility as the price of participation. A quiet reduction of surface area. Not a protest anyone needs to witness. A personal decision, made in private, for reasons that are nobody else’s business.

It looks like understanding that the money in your bank account is a liability on someone else’s balance sheet — subject to their policies, their freezing mechanisms, their reporting requirements. The account number is yours. The money, increasingly, is conditional.

It looks like recognising that continuing to fund decisions you were never asked about — made in rooms you will never enter, for reasons explained to you only afterward, if at all — is not citizenship. It is subsidy.

And it looks like asking, calmly and without drama, what an alternative architecture for your financial life might actually look like. Not as a political statement. Not as a form of protest that anyone needs to notice.

As a personal decision. Private. Practical. Self-respecting.

* * *

This is where something built without venture capital timelines, without the approval of institutions, and without any particular interest in being respectable, begins to matter.

PIVX does not promise to fix the table. It offers something more modest and more useful: a way to leave it.

You can hold wealth in a form that no government can freeze, no institution can seize, no algorithm can expire. You can stake that wealth — participate in the network’s operation — and receive quiet, compounding rewards that require neither employer nor bank account nor form to access. You can operate a masternode and participate in a system that functions identically for everyone, regardless of jurisdiction, identity, or political inconvenience.

But PIVX offers something beyond the financial — something the current system has not managed in a generation: a community where voice is not for sale.

Development decisions are not handed down from a boardroom or shaped by the preferences of venture capital. They emerge from open discussion among people who understand what they are building and why — a meritocracy in the original sense, where the quality of an argument matters more than the status of the person making it. This is how PIVX has, more than once, arrived at the frontier of privacy technology before larger, better-funded projects found their way there. Not despite its structure, but because of it.

Masternode owners do not merely earn rewards. They vote. On the treasury. On proposals. On the direction the project takes next. Real votes, on real decisions, that move real resources. The outcome is not predetermined by whoever wrote the largest cheque. It is determined by the people who chose to show up.

This is what representative democracy was supposed to look like. The fact that it is functioning here — in a privacy network, governed by pseudonymous participants across dozens of countries — while failing so visibly in the institutions that claim to embody it, is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of design. Systems that cannot be bought tend to behave differently from systems that can.

And when you need to re-enter the world you still live in — because you do still live in it — the paths exist. Into Bitcoin, something close to digital gold after more than seventeen years: a store of value outside the reach of monetary policy, resistant to dilution by decree. Or directly into daily life — through gift cards, through merchants, through the growing network of places where value held outside the system can be spent inside it, on your terms, without leaving the trail that someone else will use to build their model of who you are.

This is not escape.

It is the freedom to move through the world without the house watching every hand you play.

* * *

The objection will come — it always does — that this is only for those with something to hide.

That phrase has done extraordinary work for the people it protects, and it deserves examination.

Everyone has something to hide, in the precise sense that everyone has things they consider private. Medical choices. Religious convictions. Political donations. The contents of their conscience. These are not shameful things. They are human things. The right to hold them without narrating them to an institution is not a privilege for the suspicious. It is a basic condition of dignity.

The people demanding your total financial transparency are, themselves, comprehensively opaque. The donor relationships, the backroom arrangements, the regulatory decisions made over private dinners — none of this is visible to you. It is visible to the participants, who are careful about what they commit to paper.

They have chosen their privacy carefully, and defended it at every turn.

They would simply prefer that the option not be available to you.

* * *

The room is still there. The table is still set. The dealer still has that practiced manner, that reassuring face.

But something has changed.

You can see the door now.

Not the dramatic exit of the revolutionary — coat thrown on, bridges burning behind them. The quieter exit of someone who has simply looked clearly at what is being asked: total financial legibility, permanent behavioral records, participation in a monetary system whose direction has been consistent for decades. And decided, without anger, without theater, that this particular arrangement no longer requires their cooperation.

Becoming ungovernable is not a statement. It is a posture. Maintained privately. Practiced daily. Invisible to the people it no longer serves.

It does not fix the room. Nothing so modest could claim that.

But it does something the house cannot easily counter: it reduces your dependence on it. Quietly. One decision at a time. Building, in the unhurried way of someone who has stopped rushing toward a finish line that was never theirs, a financial life that does not require total submission as the price of admission.

And in that reduction, something returns that is difficult to name but immediately recognizable once felt.

Not the performed agency of the voter who believes their ballot reaches the rooms where things are actually decided. Not the exhausted agency of the protester who shouts at a wall. The real kind. The private kind. The kind that requires no audience, no validation, no permission.

The kind that was always yours.

The door was always there.

It is remarkably easy to walk through.

PIVX Voices: writings from PIVXcommunity
To stay on top of PIVX news please visit PIVX.org and Discord.PIVX.org.

The Game They Need You To Keep Playing was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The entire onchain industry is set on a completely different path after this week's consequential exploit.

Legislators are ready to age-gate the internet’s most popular services from kids. AI agents may get swept up in the laws, too.

x402 needs native integrators to succeed. Unauthorized wrappers could turn potential partners into adversaries instead.

The Aave DAO is voting on a proposal to provide funding to restore Kelp DAO's rsETH product backing after an April 18 bridge incident, as part of a broader DeFi United ecosystem recovery effort.

The Wisconsin DOJ just sued five prediction market operators, arguing their sports-based “event contracts” are simply illegal gambling venues in disguise.

Post-quantum security startup Project Eleven awarded Giancarlo Lelli a bounty for cracking a 15-bit elliptic curve key.

The Ethereum Foundation finalized a 10,000 ETH over-the-counter sale to BitMNR at an average price of $2,387 per token.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou pledged his support for Mantle's 30,000 ETH loan proposal.

Traders can post non-USDC assets as collateral for perps through Unified Trading Accounts, with conservative supply caps at launch.

Major altcoins traded sideways on Friday after Trump ordered the Navy to fire on Iranian mine-laying boats.

Let the stories come to you. Catch up on the best of the community and market actions every week with the Pulse.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: Over the last seven days, the PIVX active masternode count adjusted from 2,119 to 2,131. While fluctuations are standard, the network ended the week with 12 more active nodes than it started with. Price Check: Trading for PIVX remained flat over the past seven days, with the Daily USD Value fluctuating within the $0.08 corridor. Despite this sideways movement in prices, the weekly average declined from $0.0862 to $0.0782, a 9.28% from last week. Trading Buzz: Reflecting the decline in daily prices, trading activity saw a reduction this week. Total weekly volume contracted from $22.2 million to $17.1 million, a 22.97% drop. The reduction in activity suggests a transition from aggressive speculative trading to a period of consolidation, as the lack of a clear price catalyst led to thinner order books.

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 (Apr. 17th, 2026 — Apr. 23th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Steven Sinofsky, board partner at a16z, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and Martin Casado, general partner at a16z, discuss the reality of AI inside enterprises. They cover the gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world, why most AI initiatives fail in large organizations, and how agents, infrastructure, and workflows are evolving beyond the hype.

 

Resources:

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The deployment of 10 Mega Mafia apps satisfies the first of three performance triggers tied to the long-awaited token launch.

Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly turned classified intel on Maduro’s capture into a $400k prediction market profit.

Nouns DAO has been captured. Here's why a V2 is worth rooting for.

Ethereum DeFi design principles forged in a past era point the way forward during a challenging moment.

A newly released Bank for International Settlements report warns that many crypto service providers function like banks without proper safeguards.

Satsuma Technology PLC investors are urging the DATco to return capital after a steep decline in the firm's share price.

Lido is the first service provider to publicly announce its participation in the relief fund via a governance proposal requesting up to 2,500 stETH.

We have just released FROST v3.0.0. You can find frost-core and the ciphersuite crates available on crates.io. This stable release follows v3.0.0-rc.0, which introduced the bulk of the changes in this major version. If you are upgrading from v2.x, please read the RC release post for the full picture—the changes described here are what’s new since the release candidate. Full release notes are on GitHub, and the updated documentation book is at frost.zfnd.org.

What Changed Since v3.0.0-rc.0

The changes between the release candidate and the final release are modest but meaningful. On the security front, SigningKey is no longer Copy and now implements ZeroizeOnDrop, meaning signing keys are automatically wiped from memory when they go out of scope. dkg::round2::Package has received the same treatment. These changes reduce the window during which sensitive key material exists in memory and bring FROST in line with security best practices for cryptographic implementations.

There is also a bug fix: verify_signature_share() now correctly calls the Ciphersuite::pre_commitment_aggregate() hook, which was added in the RC to support custom pre-aggregation logic but was inadvertently omitted from the per-share verification path.

Finally, PublicKeyPackage::new() now takes min_signers as an Option. Passing None is useful when the threshold is not known at construction time—for example, when deserializing packages from older versions.

Contributors

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release: @conradoplg, @natalieesk and @BeeFlea.

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

The long-awaited MEGA TGE is scheduled to occur next Thursday, April 30.

Erik Torenberg speaks with Martin Shkreli, American investor and businessman, about how he sees the AI landscape, from OpenAI to Anthropic, and what actually matters beyond the hype. They also talk through the future of computing, the limits of “vibe coding,” and why biotech and pharma remain some of the toughest industries to get right.

 

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ETH is lagging with on-chain risk still elevated post-Kelp, while SOL dropped 3% and the broader market cap slipped 1.6% on the day.

The stablecoin issuer says it has now supported more than 2,300 cases worldwide, including over 1,200 with U.S. agencies.

WisdomTree's WTGXX holds nearly $860M in distributed asset value, mostly on Ethereum.

Stablecoin issuer argues Aave's interest rate curve is failing to clear the $1.89B pool after four days at full utilization.

AI is collapsing drug discovery costs, expanding what DeSci communities can fund and explore.

Securities law claims targeting Coinbase’s handling of WLUNA during the 2022 Terra collapse have been dismissed.

Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI has struck a $60B purchase option to acquire the AI startup.

Aave TVL has dropped by $10B since the Kelp attackers used the protocol to borrow $190 million in WETH, depositing unbacked rsETH.

TRON founder takes the Trump-linked DeFi project to California federal court, escalating a months-long feud over blacklisted tokens and governance rights.

What began as a governance dispute between Justin Sun and World Liberty Financial has spiraled into a lawsuit and volley of personal attacks.

Base's Azul upgrade is currently live on testnet, with mainnet launch scheduled for mid-May.

Polymarket announced early access for perpetual futures trading, while The Information reported that Kalshi is planning a similar product launch.

WalletConnect's ecosystem of 700 crypto wallets and 70,000 dApps now supports the enterprise- and privacy-focused blockchain network.

Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, has fined Poste Italiane and its subsidiary PostePay a combined total of €12.5 million following a series of privacy violations related to the processing of personal data.

The enforcement action proves a persistent tension where government-backed organizations struggle to meet the very privacy benchmarks they are legally required to uphold for the public.

The investigation by the Garante revealed that the state-owned postal operator and its electronic money institution failed to implement sufficient technical and organizational measures. These shortcomings led to the unauthorized processing of data belonging to thousands of customers.

According to the regulator, the entities were found to have violated core principles of the GDPR, specifically regarding the security of data processing and the failure to provide clear information to users. Under the pretext of security, both apps required users to grant permission for the monitoring of various device data, such as a list of installed and active applications.

The companies said the monitoring was needed to protect transactions and comply with payment services rules, but the regulator alleges that the methods used were excessively invasive and were not needed for fraud prevention.

The Paradox of the “Protector”

While the state is responsible for drafting and enforcing privacy regulations, its own digital systems frequently fall short of these mandates.

In this case, the regulator pointed to flaws in how the organizations handled data access and internal security protocols. For citizens, there is often no alternative to using these state services, creating a forced trust dynamic that becomes particularly problematic when the agency in question fails to secure sensitive information.

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

When the Protectors Fail the Protected was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Erik Torenberg and Theo Jaffee speak with Balaji Srinivasan, angel investor, entrepreneur, and author of The Network State, about how AI is transforming media, eroding trust, and reshaping how information is created and verified. They discuss why systems like hiring, journalism, and online communication are breaking under synthetic content, and what replaces them. The conversation also examines the role of cryptography, on-chain data, and new models of proof in rebuilding trust online.

 

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This is the 37th post in an ongoing series describing new privacy features in Brave. This post describes work done by Vadym Struts (Senior Software Engineer) and Agustín Ruiz (DesignOps Lead), and was written by Shivan Kaul Sahib (VP, Privacy and Security).

Following the success of the Shred button on the Brave iOS browser, Brave is bringing the Shred feature to the Brave Android app. Now available with version 1.89, the Shred button on Android allows users to quickly delete site data that could be used to re-identify users across visits.

Shred lets you instantly erase any data a site stores on your device. Shred on Android offers the same easy and site-specific data erasure as Shred on iOS. This means you can instantly wipe one website’s stored data without being forcibly logged out of all websites, eliminating the need for complex site-by-site exceptions. This sets Shred apart from similar features in other privacy-focused browsers.

You can also set up Auto Shred to automatically delete site data when you close website tabs or the browser. Auto Shred replaces the existing “forget me when I close this site” feature on Android. The Shred feature unifies the user experience across Android and iOS by providing a more consistent approach to both manual (tapping the Shred button) and automatic (using Auto Shred) data clearing. If you previously used the Android forgetful-browsing feature, your preferences will be automatically migrated to the new Auto Shred settings.

The Shred button on Android, just like on iOS, is a powerful tool against the first-party tracking that might otherwise allow sites to:

Monitor your visits and limit content access (e.g. “you have 5 articles left this month”) Invisibly share your data with partners (e.g. via server-side tracking)

By allowing you to clear data stored by the site, Shred disrupts this tracking. Shred can help prevent companies from building detailed user profiles or monitoring your interactions with them over extended periods.

How to use Shred Shred data now

You can immediately Shred a site in three different ways:

From the tab switcher From the contextual menu By selecting the new Shred option in Shields

Shred works on a per-site basis, since that is the privacy boundary for cookies and storage. When you shred a site, all tabs open to that site are closed, and locally stored data for that site is erased.

Automatically shred

Auto Shred lets you automatically delete data for specific sites, so you don’t have to remember to manually clear site data. As mentioned above, Auto Shred replaces the “forget me when I close this site” feature. Similar to the “forget me when I close this site” setting, Auto Shred has a 30 second delay after tabs close before all data is cleared for the site, to give you a chance to restore tabs.

To set up Auto Shred:

Open Shields. Tap Shred site’s data. Tap Auto shred.

You can configure Auto Shred to happen when all tabs for a site are closed, or on browser restart. Setting Auto Shred to Site Tabs Closed means that whenever you close the last tab for a site, Brave will automatically Shred that site’s data.

You can also set Auto Shred to happen for all sites:

Open Settings. Tap Brave Shields & privacy. Tap Auto Shred. What data does the Shred feature delete?

Shredding deletes data explicitly stored by the site (e.g. cookies and local storage) as well as implicit data (e.g. network-related caches) available to the site. Android doesn’t have the same platform restrictions as iOS, so Brave has more control over the storage associated with a particular website. This means we can more effectively clean up all first-party storage visible to the site.

Note that your local browsing history is not available to websites, and is not currently cleared by Shred. Let us know if you would like the ability to shred local browsing history.

Privacy should be simple (and fun)

Our iOS users love the Shred button, and we’re excited to finally bring the same experience to our Android users. As always, Brave is committed to making privacy protections simple, effective, and fun for everyone. We’re also exploring new capabilities, such as shredding tab groups. Tell us how we can make Shred work even better for you!

What if a frontend couldn't be hijacked by design? A look at the move toward decentralized browser tools.

The moves increase competition between leading prediction markets and their existing competitors, including Coinbase and Hyperliquid.

New York AG Letitia James filed suit against Coinbase and Gemini, alleging their prediction market platforms constitute illegal gambling operations lacking state licenses.

A federal judge just ruled that JENNER isn’t a security, confirming SEC guidance issued last February.

After attackers deposited rsETH from an exploited Kelp bridge and borrowed Wrapped ETH, Aave had frozen WETH across multiple markets.

New York’s top prosecutor is taking aim at crypto prediction markets, escalating regulatory pressure on major exchanges.

The action is reigniting industry-wide debate about when blockchain service providers have a responsibility to act.

Tempo also announced it's launching a Stablecoin Advisory.

Ramp expands stablecoin access by launching USDT across Solana, Plasma, and Ethereum with seamless 1:1 USD conversion for global money movement.

Since the freeze, ZachXBT reported that the attackers had begun moving funds from Ethereum mainnet to Bitcoin.

Optimism's first privacy offering by core developer Sunnyside uses ZK and TEE hybrid technology to enable confidential computing for enterprises on the OP Stack.

Etherealize just dropped a report making the case for $250K ETH. The argument closes a loop Bankless opened six years ago.

Erik Torenberg and Theo Jaffee speak with Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at a16z, about the launch of Monitoring the Situation (MTS), a new, always-on media network on X. They discuss the rise of the “current thing,” how narratives spread in real time, and why internet-native media is reshaping politics, culture, and attention.

 

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Fluid's aWETH Redemption Protocol, launched with Lido, Ether.fi, 1inch, 0x and Kyber, has processed $136M out of Aave's frozen WETH pool in 48 hours.

Matt Bornstein speaks with Scott Chacon, cofounder of GitHub and CEO of GitButler, about why Git's user interface has barely changed since 2005, how GitButler is rethinking version control for both humans and AI agents, and what the "next GitHub" might actually look like. They cover parallel branches, agent-optimized CLI design, the future of code review, and why the best engineers of the future will be the best writers.

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Many users remain unable to withdraw from Aave V3 as the protocol grapples with hundreds of millions of dollars in bad debt.

An attacker used a compromised AI platform to access Vercel's internal systems and customer environment variables. Here's what happened and what to do.

In a detailed incident report, Aave service providers quantified the protocol's exposure for the first time and outlined two scenarios depending on how Kelp DAO allocates the loss. LayerZero and Kelp continue to blame each other for the compromised bridge configuration.

Strategy spent $2.54B on Bitcoin last week. Bitmine added 101,627 ETH to their stash in their largest purchase yet this year.

Agentic.Market lets humans and AI agents discover and connect to x402 services.

Analysis of 2,665 LayerZero OApp contracts shows nearly half rely on single-validator security configurations, the same setup that exposed KelpDAO's rsETH to exploitation.

Tangem Pay lets users spend USDC directly from their self-custodial Tangem wallets, settling all transactions on Polygon.

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times that privacy is a fundamental right. But can you confidently say that your personal information, data, and financial history are truly private? Your guess is as good as mine.

Most systems treat privacy as an all-or-nothing proposition; you either have it or you don’t. Take cryptocurrencies, for example, there are fully transparent blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum at one end, and there are private-by-default networks like Monero on the other. But the sweet spot, in my opinion, is projects like PIVX and ZCash that offer optional privacy. Well, here are five reasons why I think that optional privacy is the best privacy.

1. Context is the Currency of Human Interaction

Human beings are naturally optionally private. You share your medical history with your doctor, but not your barrister. You share your financial status with your mortgage lender, but not necessarily your social media followers.

Optional privacy mirrors real-world social dynamics. It recognizes that information is contextual. By allowing users to toggle privacy on or off, systems respect the nuance of human relationships. It moves us away from a world of “permanent records” and toward a world of purpose-bound sharing.

2. Compliance Without Compromise

One of the greatest hurdles for privacy-centric technologies is the friction with existing legal and regulatory frameworks. We’ve seen regulators target cryptocurrencies and private instant messengers. Mandatory anonymity often invites scrutiny and de-risking from institutions.

Optional privacy solves this by offering a “View Key” or “Audit” capability. A user can keep their transactions or data shielded from the public eye to prevent targeted advertising or theft. If that same user needs to prove the source of their funds for a home loan or a tax audit, they can provide a specific view key to a verified third party without exposing their entire history to the world.

This creates a bridge between the decentralized future and the regulated present, allowing for institutional adoption without sacrificing the individual’s right to remain unobserved by default.

3. Protection Against Social Engineering

In a fully transparent system, your data has gravity because it attracts bad actors. If a hacker can see that a specific wallet address is active and holds significant assets, that individual becomes a target for phishing, $5 wrench attacks, or sophisticated social engineering.

By making privacy the default setting but keeping it optional, users can navigate the digital world under a cloak of mathematical silence. They only break that silence when they choose to engage in a specific transaction or interaction, drastically reducing their digital footprint and their profile as a target.

4. The Moral Superiority of Consent

True privacy is not just about hiding; it is about consent. If a system forces you to be private, it is a cage. If a system forces you to be public, it is a stage. Only when you have the option do you have agency.

Optional privacy systems, particularly those utilizing technologies like zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge), allow for the verification of truth without the exposure of data. You can prove you are over 18 without showing your birth date. You can prove you have sufficient funds without revealing your balance. This selective disclosure is the ultimate expression of digital consent.

5. Future-Proofing the Digital Economy

As we move toward a Web3-integrated world, our digital identities will carry more weight than ever. If every interaction is etched into a public ledger forever, we lose the right to be forgotten and the ability to evolve.

Optional privacy provides a buffer zone. It allows for commercial confidentiality. Businesses can use private blockchains for settlement without leaking their entire supply chain strategy or payroll to competitors. It also allows for personal safety.

Activists and journalists can operate in high-risk zones with the ability to go dark when necessary, while still having the option to verify their identity to trusted editors or legal counsel.

Conclusion

The “Best Privacy” is the one that serves the user, not the system. By championing optional privacy, we move away from the “Surveillance Capitalism” of the modern web and the “Dark Web” stigma of total anonymity.

We land instead in a balanced ecosystem where transparency is a tool, but privacy is the foundation. It is a world where you own your data, you control the “viewing” rights, and you, and only you, decide when it’s time to step into the light.

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

5 Reasons Why Optional Privacy is the Best Privacy was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AAVE, ZRO, LDO, and ENA tokens plunged 10–22% as market repriced risk across DeFi protocols exposed to a bad debt event, with LayerZero priced as equally culpable as the originating lender.

North Korea's Lazarus Group exploited a single-verifier LayerZero setup to drain $290M in rsETH on April 18 by compromising RPC infrastructure and poisoning the bridge's data feeds.

Mizuho, Nomura, and Japan's central clearing house are launching a blockchain-based proof-of-concept for collateral management of Japanese government bonds.

Attacker minted unbacked rsETH through Kelp's LayerZero bridge, then borrowed WETH on Aave V3 and V4 before markets could freeze.

This episode originally aired on The Kevin Rose Show. Kevin Rose speaks with Anish Acharya, general partner at a16z, about how AI is rewriting the rules of consumer software, the defensibility of network effects in a world where anyone can spin up an app in 48 hours, and why the real threat to consumer founders may be the cost of inference, not competition. They also discuss model pricing, the future of the four-day work week, and peptides.

 

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The cross-chain exploit struck a LayerZero integration, now Aave is scrambling to contain fallout.

Tom Lee and Michael Saylor are taking classic Etherean and Bitcoiner approaches to stacking their favorite assets.

We are releasing Zebra 4.3.1 today. This release contains fixes for a number of vulnerabilities, and all node operators are strongly encouraged to upgrade immediately.

In addition to the security fix, this release introduces a Dockerized mining setup, automated checkpoint management, and a number of CI hardening improvements.

Security Advisories CVE-2026-40880: Transaction Verification Cache Consensus Vulnerability

A logic error in Zebra’s transaction verification cache could have allowed a malicious miner to induce a consensus split between Zebra nodes and the rest of the Zcash network. The root cause was a performance optimization that skipped re-verification of transactions previously accepted into the mempool, without accounting for the fact that a transaction’s validity can be height-dependent.

We removed the optimization entirely, as it was deemed too risky to patch in place. Verification is now always performed in full against the current block height, regardless of prior mempool acceptance.

Thanks to @sangsoo-osec for a thorough advisory submission that identified the lock time issue, and to @shieldedonly for an independently submitted advisory — received while we were already working on the first — that identified additional dimensions of the same vulnerability.

CVE-2026-40881: addr/addrv2 Deserialization Resource Exhaustion

When deserializing addr or addrv2 messages, Zebra would allocate memory for up to 233,000 entries before checking the protocol-specified limit of 1,000. An attacker could exploit this by sending multiple oversized messages across different connections, potentially pushing a Zebra node into an out-of-memory state.

The fix changes the max_allocation() method for the relevant types to return 1000, capping allocation before deserialization begins rather than after.

Thanks to @Zk-nd3r for finding and reporting the issue, and for suggesting the fix.

Consensus Divergence in Transparent Sighash Hash-Type Handling

After a refactoring of Zebra’s transparent transaction verification, a consensus rule restricting valid sighash hash types for V5 transactions was inadvertently dropped. The rule had previously been enforced inside the C++ verification code; when verification was restructured so that only the core check remained in C++ and the rest moved to Rust via callback, the hash-type validation was not carried over. As a result, Zebra nodes could accept transactions that zcashd nodes would correctly reject, creating a consensus split.

A related divergence was also identified in pre-V5 (V4) transactions. zcashd serializes the raw hash_type byte directly into the V4 sighash preimage and only masks it with 0x1f for selection logic, preserving non-canonical bits (e.g. 0x41) in the digest. Zebra instead canonicalized the byte before computing the sighash, producing a different digest. This meant that a V4 transaction signed with a non-canonical hash_type — valid and accepted by zcashd — would be rejected by Zebra due to a sighash mismatch, creating a second consensus split in the opposite direction.

The fix adds the missing hash-type validation for V5 transactions in the Rust callback, and introduces a raw-byte sighash path for V4 transactions that preserves zcashd’s preimage semantics. Both fixes are included in zcash_script 0.4.4 and zcash_transparent 0.6.4.

Our thanks for the initial discovery of this vulnerability go to Alex “Scalar” Sol and also to @sangsoo-osec for a later independently submitted advisory confirming the same vulnerability.

rk Identity Point Panic in Transaction Verification

Orchard transactions include an rk field — a randomized validating key and elliptic curve point. While the Zcash specification permits rk to be the identity value, the orchard crate would panic when encountering it, crashing the node. An attacker could exploit this by submitting a crafted transaction with an identity rk.

The fix, agreed upon with zcashd developers who share the same exposure, disallows the identity rk at the point of transaction parsing. This was considered the safest approach, as fixing it inside the orchard crate would have made the vulnerability public before nodes could be patched. The Zcash specification has been updated accordingly.

Our thanks for the discovery of this vulnerability go to Alex “Scalar” Sol.

Denial of Service via Interrupted JSON-RPC Requests from Authenticated Clients

Zebra’s JSON-RPC HTTP middleware treated a failure to read the incoming HTTP request body as an unrecoverable error, aborting the process rather than returning an error response. A client that disconnected after sending only part of a request body, for example, by resetting the TCP connection mid-transfer, was sufficient to trigger the crash. The vulnerability could be exploited only by authenticated RPC clients. Nodes running the shipped defaults, with RPC bound to localhost and cookie authentication on, were not vulnerable. The fix propagates failures to read the HTTP request body as ordinary error responses, so Zebra now rejects truncated or interrupted requests rather than crashing.

Security Improvements Supply Chain and License Auditing in CI

CI now runs advisory checks, license compliance scanning, and cargo-vet auditing on every pull request. This ensures that new dependencies are vetted before they land in the codebase, reducing exposure to supply chain vulnerabilities. (#10455)

Updated Security Policy

SECURITY.md has been updated to include a public encryption key, giving security researchers a clear and secure channel for responsible disclosure. (#10460)

Security Advisory Documentation

Past security advisories have been documented in the changelogs, improving the historical record and transparency around Zebra’s security posture. (#10433)

New Features Dockerized Mining Setup

A Dockerized mining setup has been added to Zebra, making it easier for node operators and developers to run a mining environment alongside their node without managing local dependencies manually. (#10301)

Automated Checkpoint and End-of-Support Height Updates

Checkpoint updates and end-of-support height tracking are now automated in CI. This was previously a manual step, and automating it reduces the risk of human error and keeps Zebra’s checkpoints current with less overhead. (#10459)

Bug Fixes Proptest Input Data Length Range

An issue with the arbitrary input data length range in property-based tests for chain logic has been fixed, improving the reliability and correctness of the test suite. (#10431)

Other Changes PR titles are now required to follow Conventional Commits format, enforced in CI, keeping our changelog and release automation consistent. (#10456) The README has been updated to reference the correct v4.3.0 installation tag. (#10432) Upgrading

We strongly recommend all Zebra node operators upgrade to 4.3.1 as soon as possible, particularly due to the consensus vulnerability described above. There are no known workarounds — upgrading is the only way to ensure your node remains on the correct chain and is protected against malicious forks. You can find the release on GitHub.

Thank You to Our Contributors

This release was made possible by the work of @conradoplg, @gustavovalverde, @mpguerra, @oxarbitrage, @arya2 and @upbqdn. Thank you for your continued contributions to Zebra. We also extend our thanks to ZODL and Shielded Labs for their coordination efforts throughout this release.

Zebra is the Zcash Foundation’s independent, Rust-based implementation of the Zcash protocol. Learn more at github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra.

The post Zebra 4.3.1: Critical Security Fixes, Dockerized Mining and CI Hardening appeared first on Zcash Foundation.

Solana announced wXRP is live on Titan Exchange, Real, Phantom, Jupiter, and Meteora, expanding cross-chain asset availability on the blockchain.

Opinion: World Liberty drama galore has the crypto community grappling with Trump fatigue.

X's new cashtags trading pilot for stocks and crypto reached an estimated $1 billion in volume within days of its Tuesday launch.

Head of Product Nikita Bier touts the tool as driving an estimated $1B of trading volumes, though details remain scarce.

A geopolitical breakthrough and strong ETF inflows converged to lift crypto markets on Friday.

The impending purchase marks the crypto exchange's seventh acquisition since the start of 2025.

Narrative-driven tokens are catching bids again as the broader memecoin sector attempts to recover from a bruising 2025.

AI has finally given CC0 the expansion engine it always needed. The proof is in the games.

The major services are embracing biometric identity to fight AI-driven fraud.

USDC Bridge is Circle’s official, native cross-chain bridging solution powered by its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP).

Morpheus Research's report alleges that the $7.7B fintech is exaggerating its use of blockchain technology, while Figure and asset manager Van Eck dispute the findings.

The bank says it plans to add other stablecoins across multiple blockchains to the service.

The pair announced their resignations from the EF earlier this week, but didn't offer up any reasons for the departures.

Payward has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Bitnomial for up to $550 million.

Stay informed without the effort. Get the latest community stories delivered to you every week in the Pulse.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: The PIVX masternode network saw a slight pullback, with the active node count shifting from 2,159 to 2,119 over the past seven days. Although the network remains resilient and continues to be reinforced by its dedicated operators, 40 masternodes went offline this week. Price Check: PIVX saw erratic price action this week, with sudden intraday dips hitting $0.067. Trading largely hovered between $0.08 and $0.09, showing a clear decoupling from the gains seen across the wider crypto sector. Consequently, the weekly average fell to $0.0862, a 0.23% decline from the previous week’s $0.0864. Trading Buzz: Trading activity enjoyed a major uptick this week, defying the erratic price environment. The total weekly volume climbed from $17.6 million to $22.2 million, a 26.1% increase.

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 (Apr. 10th, 2026 — Apr. 16th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Waymo is now delivering hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous rides each week — but getting there required more than better models. It meant building a complete system for training, evaluating, and deploying a driver in the real world.

In this episode — originally aired on the Cheeky Pint podcast — Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov joins John Collison to break down how self-driving actually works today: from sensor fusion across LiDAR, radar, and cameras, to simulation, “critic” models, and the role of AI in decision-making.

They also explore why full autonomy is fundamentally different from driver-assist, what it takes to scale globally, and how recent advances in AI are reshaping the path forward.

 

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

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The shift to Optimism is ZPG's first deployment on a public blockchain since launching in 2022, and the start of its global rollout.

Michael Saylor’s perpetual preferred stock pitch is attracting overwhelming interest — and unease.

ETH held above $2,300, while SOL reclaimed $90 and XRP jumped to $1.46.

TITLES Studio lets artists train custom AI models on their own work and earn USDC royalties on every downstream generation.

The digital asset investor disclosed a January private placement into Stablecoin Development Corporation (SDEV).

The curated art platform says its infrastructure has already been spun down with no plans to come back online.

Lido's token is the only top DeFi token in the green over the past 30 days, fueled by a $20 million treasury repurchase program.

Law firm charges Circle Internet Financial with failing to freeze $230 million in stolen USDC after the April 1 Drift Protocol exploit, allegedly linked to North Korean attackers.

Sky's native stablcoins are being deployed on Avalanche via Skylink, Sky's crosschain bridge protocol built on LayerZero infra.

Proper enforcement in markets remains a "top priority" for the federal derivatives regulator.

The $12 trillion brokerage will begin a phased rollout of Schwab Crypto, offering direct spot BTC and ETH trading to retail investors in the coming weeks.

The recovery plan includes the issuance of another Drift token and will see the Solana-based perpetuals exchange adopt USDT.

Nine major banks will participate in the pilot, which replaces government purchase cards with programmable blockchain-based payments starting in Q4.

The Stripe-incubated blockchain is pitching privacy as the missing piece for institutional stablecoin adoption.

Josh Stark, a member of the EF's leadership team, and Trent Van Epps both separately announced this week that they are leaving the foundation after five years.

Tether is leading a $150M recovery initiative for Drift Protocol; the plan will also shift the perp DEX's primary settlement asset to USDT on Solana.

Erik Torenberg and Anish Acharya, general partners at a16z, speak with signüll about how technology reshapes culture, relationships, and the products we build. The conversation covers tacit knowledge versus intellectual knowledge, dating apps and their effect on human connection, AI relationships, why Claude feels artisan while other models feel utilitarian, and what consumer founders should actually care about.

 

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Bitcoin’s current quantum defense plan seeks to solve a future threat at the detriment of its most sacred rule.

X is finally starting to close the gap between what it offers and what Crypto Twitter actually wants.

ETH, SOL, and major altcoins are marginally higher on the day.

The feature lets iPhone users in the U.S. and Canada view live price charts for stocks and crypto tokens without leaving the app.

TRON founder escalates feud with Trump-linked DeFi project, alleging coercion and frozen voting rights.

The MegaMafia-backed startup will focus on tokenizing emerging market real world assets, starting with iTRY.

Aave Checkpoint combines automated AI analysis with mandatory human verification to review all DAO proposals before onchain execution.

After crypto's worst Q1 since 2018, ETF inflows have turned positive, and $268 billion in stablecoins sits on the sidelines waiting for a catalyst.

BAVA is the third U.S.-listed AVAX ETP and highlights in-house staking as a competitive edge.

The platform's new Earn feature lets its thousands of institutional clients deposit their stablecoin to DeFi's top lending protocols directly on Fireblocks.

Partnering with Auctor: AI Autopilot for Software Implementation

By Julien Bek Published April 15, 2026 Matt, Will and Sky.

For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services. Why? Because buying enterprise software is easy. Implementing it is hard, and still leans heavily on labour. Across the top 10 software ecosystems (ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, AWS, and others), 9 million implementation consultants represent more than $500 billion in annual labour spend, still growing 10%+ a year. It’s one of the largest markets in technology, and one of the least disrupted.

Enterprise platforms have thousands of components that change daily. A single deployment can span hundreds of requirements, dozens of stakeholders, and months of back-and-forth between what a business needs and what the system can actually do. Today, consultants hold all of this together through experience and pattern recognition. But they forget context between meetings. They miss dependencies across systems. They can’t track thousands of platform updates simultaneously. Unlike LLMs, their context windows are limited by biology. 

Auctor is the autopilot for software implementation, from the moment a customer requirement is captured all the way through to delivery. It brings together the requirements, decisions, and context that typically live across meetings, documents, and dozens of disconnected systems, and translates them directly into the outputs needed to move a project forward. What used to take teams weeks of scoping now gets done in a single sitting.

We first partnered with Auctor at the Seed, shortly after the team graduated from YC. At Sequoia, each year we select a handful of portfolio companies and take their founders to meet executives at some of the most important technology companies in Silicon Valley. For an hour, these leaders effectively join the team, helping us and the founders think through strategy, positioning, and go-to-market. In our very first meeting with the C-suite of a major enterprise platform, the executives asked for a pilot halfway through the conversation, before we’d even demoed the product. 

What gave us conviction beyond the market was the team. This is a category where speed of execution determines the winner given the first mover advantage. Will, Sky, and Matt are the hardest-charging, fastest-moving team we’ve met in this space. They shipped their platform and landed their first major enterprise contract within months of graduating YC. They’ve set up shop in New York and are pulling in talent the way only a team with this much momentum can.

We’re leading Auctor’s Series A and couldn’t be more excited to partner with Will and the team to bring software implementation into the age of AI.

Share Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share this on LinkedIn Share this via email Related Topics #AI #Funding announcement Partnering with Magentic By Julien Bek and Zefi Hennessy Holland News Read Services: The New Software by Julien Bek Perspective Read Partnering with Rillet By Julien Bek, Roelof Botha 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:

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An Ohio federal judge denied Kalshi's request to enjoin Ohio regulators from enforcing state gambling laws last month.

The proposal preserves majority insider control while imposing a mandatory four-year vesting schedule on retail token holders.

The governance proposal would give early token buyers the ability to start unlocking their tokens in two years — notably, after Trump's second presidential term ends.

Earlier this week, the Governor of Virginia signed a piece of legislation that bans the sale of precise geolocation data. This signals a major shift in how states protect their citizens from the “surveillance-for-profit” industry.

The new law specifically targets the sale of geolocation data within a 1,750-foot radius. For privacy advocates, this buffer zone is the crown jewel of the legislation. By mandating a radius of roughly a third of a mile, the law prevents data brokers from pinpointing the exact doors people walk through.

Without these protections, brokers have historically sold data precise enough to identify where a person lives and works, which places of worship they attend, the health facilities they visit, and the retail stores and community centres they frequent.

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this victory is the unanimous, bipartisan support the bill received in the Virginia legislature. The protection of personal movement is starting to look like a universal priority.

The momentum is not limited to Virginia. With Maryland and Oregon already sporting similar laws, and states like California and Massachusetts currently debating their own bans, we are witnessing the emergence of a privacy patchwork that is slowly forcing a national reckoning for the data broker industry.

As noted by policy experts at Consumer Reports, the risks of precise tracking have evolved from mere targeted advertising to more sinister threats, including stalking, individualized scams, and the targeting of vulnerable populations.

Recent investigations have highlighted how this data has been weaponized. Reports have surfaced of data brokers selling nearly real-time movement data (within a 10-meter accuracy) of national security officials and individuals visiting sensitive health clinics. Virginia’s new law serves as a direct shield against these intrusive practices.

But is this truly a privacy win? I mean, many privacy laws allow for data collection if the user has provided “consent,” a standard often buried in lengthy, incomprehensible Terms of Service agreements that most consumers click through without reading. If brokers can still collect this data under the guise of “service improvement,” the ban on selling the data may lose its teeth.

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

Virginia’s Geolocation Ban Marks a Victory for Personal Safety was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bitcoin developers and researchers have proposed a mechanism to freeze coins vulnerable to quantum computing attacks as an incentive for users to upgrade their security.

Jack Neel speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit, about how AI is making it easier than ever to build and ship software without a technical background. They discuss Replit's rise from a browser-based coding tool to a platform generating $250 million in annual revenue, why Masad turned down a $1 billion acquisition offer, and his case for why AI represents empowerment rather than existential risk. This episode originally aired on The Jack Neel Podcast.

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CoW Swap's primary domain swap.cow.fi is currently inaccessible due to a lock, with the team working with security experts to regain control.

X introduced a new cashtag feature enabling users to tag and discuss stocks and cryptocurrencies directly on the platform.

21Shares submitted an updated regulatory filing for a US-listed Hyperliquid ETF with ticker symbol $THYP, with fee details still pending.

The Trump Family's DeFi platform is seeing a surge in scrutiny over its growth and governance tactics.

AAA publishers are facing regulatory pressure to provide what indie onchain devs are already building by default.

Tether’s new self-custodial wallet allows users to send its tokens across multiple blockchains, no gas required.

The contracts are safe, but some users got swept up in the frontend hijacking.

Deutsche Börse Group has purchased a 1.5% ownership stake in Kraken parent company Payward, Inc.

Warsh's wealth vastly eclipses that of all recent Federal Reserve chairs.

Recorded live at the a16z Fintech Connect conference in Deer Valley, Alex Rampell speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at a16z, about how AI has rewritten the fundamental rules of software competition, why crypto infrastructure will become essential in an AI-dominated world, and what the future holds for venture capital.

 

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Paradigm's EVM execution client just got a 2.0 upgrade with plenty of speed enhancements.

Jeremy Allaire says that unilateral intervention poses a moral quandary, and wants liability carveouts that shield stablecoin issuers.

New guidance clarifies when crypto interfaces can operate without broker-dealer registration, and where the limits lie.

The crypto exchange is coordinating with law enforcement to address an ongoing extortion attempt.

While central banks worldwide are flirting with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), China has moved into a relatively mature operational phase. As of 2026, the e-CNY has transitioned from digital cash to digital deposit money, earning interest and integrating deeply into the national financial fabric.

However, beneath the veneer of financial inclusion and efficiency lies a sophisticated mechanism for social control.

From Cash to Traceable Data

Traditionally, physical cash provided a buffer of anonymity. If you bought a book or paid for a meal in cash, the state had no record of the transaction. The e-CNY eliminates this gap.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) promotes managed anonymity, where small transactions are private from third parties. However, the PBOC itself maintains a full, centralized ledger.

While commercial banks handle the front-end user wallets, the central bank controls the back-end data. This allows the state to bypass the “information silos” of private giants like Alipay and WeChat Pay, consolidating all financial data under government oversight. Here are some interesting stats from the usage of the e-CNY.

Digital yuan usage skyrocketed by more than 800% between 2023 and November 2025. The cumulative transactions reached 3.48 billion, representing a total value of 16.7 trillion yuan ($2.37 trillion). The e-CNY is currently the world’s largest existing central bank digital currency experiment. China is the first country to offer interest on its CBDC. The rate is set at 0.05% a year, matching the benchmark for ordinary savings accounts. There are currently over 225 million personal wallets on the e-CNY app. Programmable Money: The “Smart” Leash

One of the most revolutionary and perhaps controversial features of the e-CNY is its programmability. Using smart contracts, the government can dictate how, where, and when money is spent.

Authorities can issue stimulus funds or subsidies with use-it-or-lose-it timestamps to force immediate economic activity. Digital yuan can be programmed to be valid only for specific goods like groceries or education and blocked for others.

The true power of the e-CNY as a tool of social control emerges when it is linked to China’s Social Credit System. Fines for misdemeanours (like jaywalking caught on CCTV) can be automatically deducted from a digital wallet. Political dissidents can be effectively erased from the economy by freezing their e-CNY access.

Comparison: e-CNY vs. Traditional Banking

While traditional digital payments in China (Alipay/WeChat) already offered significant tracking, the e-CNY represents a categorical shift in power.

Unlike private digital wallets, which are liabilities of a company, the e-CNY is a liability of the state. This means the state has the ultimate legal and technical kill switch.

In 2026, the e-CNY began offering interest rates similar to demand deposits. This incentivizes citizens to move their savings from private banks to the state-controlled digital ledger, further centralizing financial control.

e-CNY’s dual-offline technology allows payments via NFC without the internet. While convenient, it ensures that even in remote areas or during network outages, the state’s digital footprint remains the primary medium of exchange.

Efficiency at the Cost of Liberty?

The e-CNY is an undeniable technical marvel that reduces transaction costs and brings banking to the underbanked. Yet, it also provides the Chinese state with an omnipresent ledger of human behaviour.

In a world where data is the new oil, the digital yuan is more than just a currency; it is a real-time map of a society’s pulse, giving the state the power to not just observe economic life, but to program it.

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

The Digital Yuan (e-CNY) and its impact on social control in China was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this episode, host Sebastian Couture is joined by Torab, CEO of Move Industries, to discuss the tension of radical transparency and the decision to scrap Movement's complex L2 architecture in favor of a sovereign L1 powered by the Move VM. He explains how this transition drastically reduced latency and AWS infrastructure costs while improving the builder experience.The conversation explores Movement's core thesis: "Move is for Money". Torab argues that general-purpose L1s are becoming saturated and that Movement's true product-market fit lies in the Global South, serving nations battling currency devaluation.

They discuss the implementation of AI agents for continuous security auditing, the "Move Alliance" for ecosystem financial alignment, and why the industry must move past "decentralization theater" to offer pragmatic, yield-bearing stablecoin products to users who actually need them.

Finally, Torab teases the upcoming roadmap, including institutional-grade yield on USD, BTC, and Gold. Topics

00:00 Intro & Context 04:15 The Movement Turnaround 09:30 Why Movement Pivoted 15:00 The Move VM & Overcoming Developer Friction 21:45 AI Agents for 24/7 Security Audits 27:10 The Global South 35:20 Currency Devaluation & The Demand for Stablecoins 42:15 The Move Alliance 49:00 Pragmatism vs. Decentralization 55:30 Roadmap: Bringing Yield to USD, BTC, and Gold

Episode Links

Torab on X: https://x.com/utorabyou Movement: https://movementnetwork.xyz/ 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.

Katherine Boyle and Sarah Wang speak with Jesse Genet, a startup founder and family builder, about building 11 AI agents while homeschooling four young children. Jesse runs agents across roles ranging from coding to curriculum planning to household management, and she shares how agent architecture, logging systems, and “benevolent neglect” parenting have changed her life as both a founder and a mother.

 

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Cryptography-breaking quantum computers and zero-day finding AI models are signaling the end of the human-secured internet.

We track the momentum so you don’t have to. Catch the stories shaping our community every week, only in the Pulse.

Market Pulse Masternode Count: Masternode growth continues to reinforce the PIVX network. We’ve seen the active node count climb from 2,142 to 2,159 over the past seven days. Price Check: PIVX showed resilience this week as prices traded sideways, holding steady in the $0.09 zone. This represents a slight improvement over last week’s performance, mirroring tentative signs of recovery across the broader crypto market. While it may be too early to bank on a complete trend reversal, the momentum is leaning positive. Consequently, the weekly average climbed to $0.0864, a 7.2% increase from the previous week’s $0.0806. Trading Buzz: Trading metrics reflected a healthy week for PIVX, with total volume rising from $15.9 million to $17.6 million (a 10.7% increase). Daily trading remained robust, consistently holding above the $2 million benchmark, underscoring a period of renewed liquidity and buyer interest.

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 (Apr. 3rd, 2026 — Apr. 9th, 2026) was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Agents are knowledge systems first. Local models make them more private, but security gaps loom.

CEO Brian Armstrong is now publicly supporting the bill after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called for faster crypto regulation.

The existential threats facing DeFi, the risk users are taking on, and the nascent solutions.

Donald Trump’s family-backed crypto project is dismissing recent pushback as FUD.

The embattled DATco is considering emergency measures to remain compliant with Nasdaq's listing requirements.

The Asian city's central bank has awarded its first licenses to HSBC and a Standard Chartered-backed joint venture.

Theo Jaffee speaks with Steven Sinofsky, board partner at a16z and former president of the Windows division at Microsoft, about Apple's 50th anniversary, the cultural differences that separated Apple and Microsoft, why the MacBook Neo puts Windows laptops in a difficult position, and what the history of computing design reveals about where hardware and software are headed.

 

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What should a social app actually feel like? Sup is one potential answer.

A Bank of Canada report offered a window into how legacy institutions see the opportunities and risks involved with DeFi investing.

Interested parties are apparently hunting for a regulatory shortcut to more easily enter European and British crypto markets.

It is unclear whether the President will be able to physically attend the publicly touted event.

Joe "CupOJoseph" Schiarizzi is running for Congress as a Democrat in Virginia's new 7th district.

Eddy Lazzarin speaks with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verdon, founder and CEO of Extropic, about whether AI progress can or should be steered, the risks of concentrated power, and what open source and decentralization mean for who benefits from increasingly powerful systems. This episode originally aired on the a16z crypto podcast. 

 

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The coolest Ethereum tools don't always come from startups with major VC backing.

The Treasury Department is preparing for stablecoins, proposing new rules to treat issuers like full-fledged financial institutions.

Polygon is reportedly seeking to promote real-world payments use cases on its EVM blockchain with a new stablecoin startup.

The EF is offloading approximately $11M worth of ether today via CoWSwap to fund R&D, grants, and donations.

The Italian Data Protection Authority recently slammed Intesa Sanpaolo with a $36 million fine, and the reason is nothing short of a privacy nightmare.

For more than two years (from February 2022 to April 2024), the private financial records of 3,573 customers were accessed without authorization. The victims included high-risk public figures, whose sensitive data was left exposed to internal prying due to what regulators called serious shortcomings in security infrastructure.

So, while they were trusting the system, a rogue employee was allegedly treating the private financial lives of customers like a personal social media feed.

Findings paint a troubling picture of the circular operating models used by major institutions. For instance, an employee could query the entire customer database with minimal oversight. Internal control systems failed to detect thousands of unauthorized intrusions for twenty-six months. And the bank allegedly failed to meet legal deadlines for notifying affected individuals, leaving customers in the dark.

Feel free to argue, but this is the reality of the modern financial world. You do not actually own your data. In the traditional system, privacy is a promise made by a corporation; a promise that can be broken by a single disgruntled or curious employee.

True financial privacy should be permissionless and cryptographic, not dependent on the technical and organizational measures of a third party that can be compromised from within. As long as our financial history remains a searchable database for bank employees, the concept of banking secrecy remains an outdated myth.

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

Your Bank is Watching: The $36M Privacy Disaster was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Erik Torenberg, Steve Sinofsky, and Martin Casado speak to Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, about what happens to enterprise software when agents become the primary users. They discuss why coding agents succeed where other knowledge work agents struggle, what abstraction layers mean for the workforce, and how data access and systems of record must change in an agent-first world.

 

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The banking regulator's Board of Directors has proposed a new framework for stablecoins under the GENIUS Act.

The shock hack and unimpeded fallout is leaving plenty in the industry pointing fingers at the USDC issuer.

The crypto exchange will implement its "Spot Price Range Execution Rule" beginning April 14.

a16z general partner Erik Torenberg speaks with Balaji Srinivasan, angel investor and entrepreneur, about why AI simultaneously reduces the cost of creation and increases the cost of verification, and what that tension means for the shape of the AI economy. They discuss why AI drives companies toward the "trusted tribe" model of the Chinese internet, why physical world tasks are easier to automate than digital ones, why shortcuts only work for experts, and why AI makes everyone a CEO rather than making CEOs obsolete.

 

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Anish Acharya speaks with Peter Yang, creator and product lead at Roblox, about how personal AI agents are replacing the apps we open every day, why coding agents feel like slot machines, and what happens when the cost of building software drops to near zero. They discuss why future companies will stay radically small, how the IDE is becoming a thinking tool rather than a making tool, and why human ambition will always create more jobs than AI eliminates.

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In a Proof of Stake (PoS) network like PIVX, the blockchain is secured by people who “stake” their coins. Think of it like a high-yield savings account. By holding and locking your coins, you help verify transactions, and in return, the network pays you interest in the form of new coins.

In this beginner’s guide, I’ll walk you through how you can start earning passive income by staking on the PIVX network.

What is Cold Staking?

Cold Staking is a way to earn rewards for securing a blockchain while your actual coins remain offline.

In traditional “hot” staking, your wallet must be open and connected to the internet 24/7 because the computer needs access to your private keys to sign new blocks. This is a security risk because your funds become vulnerable if your computer is hacked.

Cold staking solves this by splitting the “power” of your coins into two separate keys, the spending key (cold) and the staking key (hot). The spending key stays on your hardware wallet or an offline computer. It is the only key that can move or spend your money. The staking key, on the other hand, allows you to delegate your coins to an online computer or hot node. This node stays online to do the technical work of securing the network, but it has zero authority to touch your funds.

PIVX allows you to delegate your staking rights without giving up ownership.

The Delegation Process

As a beginner, you can start staking on either the PIVX Core Wallet or the MyPIVXWallet (MPW). I personally recommend MPW due to its ease of use. MPW acts as a “light” interface that can connect to your hardware wallet or a web-based seed.

PIVX Core Wallet Generate a Staking Address: You get a special address from the Hot Node (the staker).

2. Create a Delegation: In your Cold Wallet, you send a transaction to yourself using that staking address. This “locks” the coins into a cold staking contract.

3. Network Validation: The PIVX network sees that your coins are assigned to that Hot Node. The Hot Node then begins competing for block rewards on your behalf.

4. Reward Distribution: When the Hot Node wins a block, the reward is automatically sent directly to your Cold Wallet

MyPIVXWallet Access Your Wallet: Go to MyPIVXWallet.org (ensure you are using the official URL).

2. Navigate to the Staking Tab: On the main dashboard, look for the “Staking” bar. MPW has a dedicated interface designed to make delegation simple.

3. Stake Your Funds: Click on the “Stake” button. A pop-up tab will appear where you can specify the amount of PIV you’d like to stake. Click on stake, and you are good to go. Wait for the network to confirm your transaction and start earning rewards. Confirmation typically takes less than 1 hour.

Pro Tips

Technically, you can stake as low as 1 PIV. The network does not prevent you from delegating a single coin; however, doing so is generally not recommended.

Because PIVX uses a weight-based system, your chance of winning a block is directly proportional to the number of coins you have delegated. Staking just 1 PIV is like having a single ticket in a global lottery with millions of entries. It could take years, or even forever, to actually secure a reward.

The PIVX network generates a new block approximately every 60 seconds. For every block successfully confirmed, stakers are rewarded with 4 PIV. The remaining portion of the block reward goes to masternodes.

One of the best features of staking on MPW is that your rewards (those 4 PIV payments) are sent directly back to your “Owner Address.” This means they are automatically added to your total staking balance. Over time, this compounds your stake, increasing your weight and your chances of winning future blocks without you having to lift a finger.

For those starting with a smaller amount, the best strategy is to be patient or continue adding to your balance to “beef up” your weight and reduce the time between those 4 PIV rewards.

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

The Beginner’s Guide to Cold Staking was originally published in PIVX on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This episode originally aired on the Latent Space Podcast. swyx and Alessio Fanelli speak with Marc Andreessen about the arc of AI from its origins in 1943 to today's breakthroughs in reasoning, coding agents, and self-improvement. They cover the parallels between AI scaling laws and Moore's Law, the architectural insight behind Claude Code and the Unix shell, the coming supply crunch in compute, and why the messy reality of 8 billion people means both AI utopians and doomers are too optimistic about the pace of change.

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a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania, cofounder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, World, and cofounder of Merge Labs. World is building the largest real human network, a proof-of-human layer for the AI era. They cover the technical challenge of proving human uniqueness at scale using iris biometrics, the privacy architecture behind World ID, and why platforms from social networks to dating apps to video conferencing will soon require proof of human verification.

 

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David Haber speaks with Owen Jennings, executive officer and business lead at Block, about how the company rebuilt itself around AI agents, small squads, and internal tools like Goose and Builder Bot after restructuring more than 40% of its workforce. They discuss what it took to execute a major restructuring, how teams of three are now doing what teams of 14 used to, and how Block is shipping AI-native products like Money Bot and Manager Bot that generate custom interfaces on the fly for tens of millions of users.

 

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OpenClaw’s explosive adoption confirms Brave as the go-to Web search for the agentic future

Brave Search API has crossed a major milestone: nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users have now signed up to use the Brave Search API, and integrate the service as their agent’s primary Web search tool. This surge cements Brave as the preferred API for the fast-growing OpenClaw ecosystem, the leading open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents, which now operates under a foundation supported by OpenAI. It also signals the accelerating shift toward machine-driven search that is fundamentally reshaping the internet.

OpenClaw, with its massive community traction (evidenced by rapid GitHub growth and widespread developer enthusiasm), lists the Brave Search API as a search tool of choice to enable real-time Web access in AI agents, and Brave Search was the first provider integrated into OpenClaw. Developers have praised Brave’s independent index, strong privacy protections, reduced SEO noise, and seamless optimization for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and agent workflows.

This milestone arrives as AI agents are emerging to dominate both personal and professional tasks like scheduling, research, automation, browser navigation, form-filling, and dynamic decision-making—all of which demand reliable, full-scale Web search. Brave uniquely delivers this through its truly independent search capabilities, empowering agents to operate securely and effectively without Big Tech dependencies.

Some analysts show machine search overtaking human-initiated queries in volume in the near future, a change fueled by the proliferation of AI. This trend will intensify exponentially with embodied agents like Tesla’s Optimus robots relying on Web data for real-time awareness and planning. Soon, the average queries per day per entity—human or machine—will dwarf the old human benchmark of roughly 2.5 daily Google searches, potentially scaling to hundreds or thousands per day per active agent.

In this new era, access to a comprehensive, independent Web search index becomes strategically essential. Only three major search providers remain viable at scale: Google, Microsoft Bing, and Brave. With Google limiting API availability and Bing phasing out its API, Brave stands out as the only alternative fueling the agent revolution. It also happens to be the best option.

To wit: In a recent internal evaluation of major AI search engines, Ask Brave (powered by Brave’s LLM Context API and open-weights Qwen3) outperformed ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. While the AI industry has emphasized the importance and value of high-end models, Brave’s testing shows that less powerful open-weights models can outperform closed frontier models if they incorporate high-quality grounding data. This data is available to AI app makers and agent projects like OpenClaw via the LLM Context API.

OpenClaw’s embrace of Brave is now backed by nearly 700,000 integrated users, positioning both projects at the forefront of this transformation, where machines don’t just query the Web…they live on it.

How to use the Brave Search API with OpenClaw

If you’d like to try using the Brave Search API with OpenClaw, check out our step-by-step guide.

Note that (as with any AI agent) there are ongoing security risks with OpenClaw. If you plan to use it, you should follow the best-practices recommendations in our guide, including running OpenClaw on a dedicated machine or VM that has restricted access to sensitive data. You should also set usage limits for the Brave Search API.

About Brave Search and the Brave Search API

Brave Search is the default search engine for most of the Brave browser’s 110 million users; it’s also available as a private, high-quality alternative in any browser at search.brave.com. Brave Search is the third-largest global independent search engine, with an index of 40 billion webpages that handles over 2 billion monthly queries across the API and end-user search.

The Brave Search API helps anyone access this high-quality index for their AI and search projects. With the Brave Search API, customers can supply their AI LLMs with real-time data, power agentic search, train foundational models, and create search-enabled software. Any AI application can benefit from having access to the Web, ensuring the otherwise static knowledge of AI models is constantly refreshed.

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

→ Sign up and make your first API call today
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From Hierarchy to Intelligence

By Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha Published March 31, 2026

At Sequoia, we see that speed is the best predictor of start-up success. Most companies are focused on AI as a productivity enhancer. Few are focused on the potential of AI to change how we work together. Block is showing what it looks like to fundamentally rethink organization design, ultimately harnessing AI to increase speed as a compounding competitive advantage.

Two thousand years before the first corporate org chart, the Roman Army solved a problem that every large organization still faces: how do you coordinate thousands of people across vast distances with limited communication?

Their answer was a nested hierarchy with a consistent span of control at every level. The smallest unit was the contubernium, eight soldiers who shared a tent, equipment, and a mule, led by a decanus. Ten contubernia formed a century of eighty men under a centurion. Six centuries made a cohort. Ten cohorts made a legion of roughly 5,000. At each layer, a named commander held defined authority, aggregated information from below, and relayed decisions from above. The structure (8 → 80 → 480 → 5,000) was an information routing protocol built around a simple human limitation: a leader can effectively manage somewhere between three and eight people. The Romans discovered this through centuries of warfare. Even today, the US Army’s hierarchical chain follows a similar pattern. We now call it “span of control,” and it remains the governing constraint of every large organization on earth.

The next big change came from Prussia. After Napoleon’s army destroyed the Prussian forces at the Battle of Jena in 1806, a group of reformers led by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rebuilt the military around an uncomfortable truth: you cannot depend on individual genius at the top. You need a system. They created the General Staff, a dedicated class of trained officers whose job was not to fight but to plan operations, process information, and coordinate across units. Scharnhorst intended these staff officers to “support incompetent Generals, providing the talents that might otherwise be wanting among leaders and commanders.” This was middle management before the term existed. Professionals whose purpose was to route information, pre-compute decisions, and maintain alignment across a complex organization. The military also formalized the distinction between “line” and “staff” functions. Line advances the core mission. Staff provides specialized support. Every corporation still uses this vocabulary today.

Military hierarchy entered the business world through the American railroads in the 1840s and 1850s. The U.S. Army lent West Point-trained engineers to private railroad companies, and these officers brought military organizational thinking with them. Staff and line hierarchies, divisional structure, bureaucratic systems of reporting and control: all of it was developed in the military before the railroads adopted it. In the mid-1850s, Daniel McCallum of the New York and Erie Railroad created the world’s first organizational chart to manage a system stretching over 500 miles with thousands of workers. The informal management styles that worked for smaller railroads were failing. Train collisions were killing people. McCallum’s chart formalized the same hierarchical logic the Romans had used: layers of authority, defined reporting lines, structured information flow. It became the blueprint for the modern corporation.

Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), often called the “Father of Scientific Management,” optimized what happened within that hierarchy. Taylor broke work into specialized tasks, assigned them to trained experts, and managed through measurement rather than intuition. This produced the functional pyramid organization – a structure optimized for efficiency within the information routing system that the military had pioneered and the railroads had commercialized.

The first real stress test of functional hierarchy came during World War II. The Manhattan Project required physicists, chemists, engineers, metallurgists, and military officers to work across disciplinary boundaries toward a single objective under extreme secrecy and time pressure. Robert Oppenheimer organized Los Alamos into functional divisions but insisted on open collaboration across them, resisting the military’s instinct to compartmentalize. When the implosion problem became critical in 1944, he reorganized the lab around it, creating cross-functional teams unlike anything in corporate America at the time. It worked, but it was a wartime exception led by a singular figure. The question the postwar business world faced was whether that kind of cross-functional coordination could be made routine.

With the growth and globalization of companies after World War II, the scale limitations of functional design became acute. In 1959, McKinsey’s Gilbert Clee and Alfred di Scipio published “Creating a World Enterprise” in the Harvard Business Review, providing an intellectual framework for a matrix organization that combined functional specialties with divisional units. Under the leadership of Marvin Bower, McKinsey helped companies like Shell and GE implement these principles, balancing central standards with local agility. This became the “professional” or “modern” corporation that propelled the postwar global economy.

Over time, other frameworks emerged to address the complexity, rigidity, and bureaucracy of matrix structures. The McKinsey 7-S framework, developed in the late 1970s by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, distinguished the “hard Ss” (Strategy, Structure, Systems) from the “soft Ss” (Shared Values, Skills, Staff, Style). The core idea was that structural elements alone were insufficient. Organizational effectiveness required alignment across cultural traits and the human factors that determine whether a strategy actually succeeds.

In more recent decades, technology companies have experimented aggressively with organization structure. Spotify popularized cross-functional squads with short sprint cycles. Zappos attempted Holacracy, eliminating management titles entirely. Valve operated with a flat structure and no formal hierarchy. Each of these experiments revealed something about the limitations of traditional hierarchy, but none solved the underlying problem. Spotify moved back toward conventional management as it scaled. Zappos saw significant attrition. Valve’s model proved difficult to scale beyond a few hundred people. As organizations grow into the thousands, they revert to hierarchical coordination because no alternative information routing mechanism has been powerful enough to replace it.

The constraint is the same one the Romans faced and the Marine Corps rediscovered in World War II: narrowing span of control means adding layers of command, but more layers mean slower information flow. Two thousand years of organizational innovation has been an attempt to work around this tradeoff without breaking it.

So what’s different now?

At Block, we’re questioning the underlying assumption: that organizations have to be hierarchically organized with humans as the coordination mechanism. Instead, we intend to replace what the hierarchy does. Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a copilot, which makes the existing structure work slightly better without changing it. We’re after something different: a company built as an intelligence (or mini-AGI).

We are not the first to try to move beyond traditional hierarchy. Haier’s rendanheyi model, platform organizations, “data-driven” management: these are real attempts at the same problem. What they lacked was a technology capable of actually performing the coordination functions that hierarchy exists to provide. AI is that technology. For the first time, a system can maintain a continuously updated model of an entire business and use it to coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management.

For this to work, a company needs two things: a kind of “world model” of its own operations, and a customer signal rich enough to make that model useful.

Block is remote-first. Everything we do creates artifacts. Decisions, discussions, code, designs, plans, problems, and progress all exist as recorded actions. It’s the raw material for a company world model. In a traditional company, a manager’s job is to know what’s happening across their team and relay that context up and down the chain. In a remote-first company where work is already machine-readable, AI can build and maintain that picture continuously. What’s being built, what’s blocked, where resources are allocated, what’s working and what isn’t. That’s the information the hierarchy used to carry. The company world model carries it instead.

But the capability of the system is only as good as the quality of the customer signal feeding it. And money is the most honest signal in the world.

People lie on surveys. They ignore ads. They abandon carts. But when they spend, save, send, borrow, or repay, that’s the truth. Every transaction is a fact about someone’s life. Block sees both sides of millions of these transactions every day, the buyer through Cash App and the seller through Square, plus the operational data from running the merchant’s business. That gives the customer world model something rare: a per-customer, per-merchant understanding of financial reality built from honest signal that compounds. The richer the signal, the better the model. The better the model, the more transactions. The more transactions, the richer the signal.

Together, the company world model and the customer world model form the foundation for a different kind of company. Instead of product teams building predetermined roadmaps, you build four things.

First, capabilities. The atomic financial primitives: payments, lending, card issuance, banking, buy-now-pay-later, payroll, and so on. These are not products. They are building blocks that are hard to acquire and maintain (some have network effects and regulatory permission). They have no UIs of their own. They have reliability, compliance, and performance targets.

Second, a world model. This has two sides. The company world model is how the company understands itself and its own operations, performance, and priorities, replacing the information that used to flow through layers of management. The customer world model is the per-customer, per-merchant, per-market representation built from proprietary transaction data. It starts with raw transaction data today and evolves toward full causal and predictive models over time.

Third, an intelligence layer. This is what composes capabilities into solutions for specific customers at specific moments and delivers them proactively. A restaurant’s cash flow is tightening ahead of a seasonal dip the model has seen before. The intelligence layer composes a short-term loan from the lending capability, adjusts the repayment schedule using the payments capability, and surfaces it to the merchant before they even think to look for financing. A Cash App user’s spending pattern shifts in a way the model associates with a move to a new city. The intelligence layer composes a new direct deposit setup, a Cash App Card with boosted categories for their new neighborhood, and a savings goal calibrated to their updated income. No product manager decided to build either solution. The capabilities existed. The intelligence layer recognized the moment and composed them.

Fourth, interfaces (hardware and software). Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, bitkey, proto. These are delivery surfaces through which the intelligence layer delivers composed solutions. They are important, but they are not where the value is created. The value is in the model and the intelligence.

When the intelligence layer tries to compose a solution and can’t because the capability doesn’t exist, that failure signal is the future roadmap. The traditional roadmap, where product managers hypothesize about what to build next, is any company’s ultimate limiting factor. In this model, customer reality generates the backlog directly.

If this is what the company builds, then the question becomes: what do the people do?

The org structure follows from this, and it inverts the traditional picture. In a conventional company, the intelligence is spread throughout the people and the hierarchy routes it. In this model, the intelligence lives in the system. The people are on the edge. The edge is where the action is.

The edge is where the intelligence makes contact with reality. People reach into places the model can’t go yet. They sense things the model can’t perceive: intuition, opinionated direction, cultural context, trust dynamics, the feeling in a room. They make the calls the model shouldn’t make on its own, especially ethical decisions, novel situations, and high-stakes moments where the cost of being wrong is existential. A world model that can’t touch the world is just a database. But the edge doesn’t need layers of management to coordinate it. The world model gives every person at the edge the context they need to act without waiting for information to travel up and down a chain of command.

In practice, this means we normalize down to three roles.

Individual contributors (ICs) who build and operate capabilities, the model, the intelligence layer, and the interfaces. They are deep specialists and experts in a specific layer of the system. The world model provides the context that a manager used to provide, so ICs can make decisions about their layer without waiting to be told what to do.

Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) who own specific cross-cutting problems or opportunities and customer outcomes. A DRI might own the problem of merchant churn in a specific segment for 90 days, with full authority to pull resources from the world model team, the lending capability team, and the interface team as needed. DRIs may persist on certain problems or move elsewhere to solve new ones.

Player-coaches who combine building with developing people. They replace the traditional manager whose primary job was information routing. A player-coach still writes code or builds models or designs interfaces. They also invest in the growth of the people around them. They don’t spend their days in status meetings, alignment sessions, and priority negotiations. The world model handles alignment. The DRI structure handles strategy and priority. The player-coach handles craft and people.

There is no need for a permanent middle management layer. Everything else the old hierarchy did, the system coordinates, and everyone is empowered, with a role that’s much closer to the work and the customer.

Block is in the early stages of this transition. It will be a difficult one, and parts of it will likely break before they work. We’re writing about it now because we believe every company will eventually need to confront the same question we did: what does your company understand that is genuinely hard to understand, and is that understanding getting deeper every day?

If the answer is nothing, AI is just a cost optimization story. You cut headcount, improve margins for a few quarters, and eventually get absorbed by something smarter. If the answer is deep, AI doesn’t augment your company. It reveals what your company actually is.

Block’s answer is the economic graph: millions of merchants and consumers, both sides of every transaction, financial behavior observed in real time. That understanding compounds every second the system operates. We believe the pattern behind this, a company organized as an intelligence rather than a hierarchy, is significant enough that it will reshape how companies of all kinds operate over the coming years. Block is far enough along to show the idea is more than theory (though, we welcome debate and feedback to pressure test and improve our ideas).

Companies move fast or slow based on information flow. Hierarchy and middle management impede information flow. For two thousand years, from the Roman contubernium to today’s global enterprises, we have had no real alternative. Eight soldiers sharing a tent needed a decanus. Eighty men needed a centurion. Five thousand needed a legate. The question was never whether you needed layers. The question was whether humans were the only option for what those layers do. They aren’t anymore. Block is building what comes next.

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a16z general partners Erin Price-Wright and Erik Torenberg speak with Doug Bernauer, founder and CEO of Radiant, and Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron, about rebuilding American energy infrastructure. They discuss portable micro nuclear reactors, solid state power electronics, why delivery rather than generation is the real bottleneck, the case for modular manufacturing, and whether data centers are actually good for the grid.

 

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In this episode, host Friederike Ernst is joined by Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, to explore the platform's radical pivot from passive on-chain analytics to active, AI-driven agentic trading. Alex unpacks the technical hurdles of labeling over 500 million addresses, the transition from raw data into harmonized insights, and why true alpha now lies in attribution rather than raw data . He explains how Nansen uses ClickHouse databases and a mix of algorithmic heuristics, agentic teams, and human specialists to maintain the highest industry precision.

The conversation dives deep into the intersection of LLMs and blockchain, exploring how standard AI models lack domain-specific common sense and why Nansen augments them with real-time data and visual "artifacts". Alex introduces "Nansen Gym," a simulated historical replay environment for training trading agents and teases the upcoming release of "Smart Money 2.0", which aims to predict future profitable addresses with 2-3x uplift on precision. Finally, they discuss the existential risks of AI, the striking parallels between open-source AI and early DeFi, and why Alex believes agentic trading will be the absolute default by 2028.

Chapters

00:00 Intro & Context 04:15 Nansen's Evolution & Agentic Trading 09:30 Harmonizing Data & The Attribution Layer 15:00 Deterministic vs. Inferred Labeling (Uniswap vs. Binance) 21:45 Evaluating AI Agents: LLMs as Judges 27:10 User Privacy & Public Blockchain Realities 35:20 Building a Unified Trading OS 42:15 Smart Money 2.0: Predicting Which Wallets Win 49:00 The Limitations of Vanilla LLMs in Crypto 55:30 Nansen Gym & Time-Traveling AI Agents 59:45 The Open Source AI vs. DeFi Parallel

Links

Alex Svanevik on X: https://x.com/ASvanevik Nansen: https://www.nansen.ai/ NEAR: https://near.ai/

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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.