标签：#crypto

Prosecutors accused 21-year-old student Zyaire Wilkins of publishing on Steam several fake video games that contained malware, infecting thousands of victims, and stealing crypto from some of them.

Federal authorities have arrested a Florida man suspected of stealing at least $220,000 in crypto through malware-infected Steam games, as reported earlier by local news outlet Local10. In the complaint, officials accuse 21-year-old Zyaire Wilkins and co-conspirators of launching eight malware-embedded games from around May 2024 to February 2026, allowing them to infect about 8,000 […]

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history : In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah” engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing’s portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away...

Retail investors hold digital coins on standard mobile apps. They also use basic physical hardware devices. These devices protect small amounts of money perfectly well. Things change entirely when an account holds fifty million dollars. A single hardware device creates a huge physical weakness. A home invader can force an investor to hand over the pin code. This makes the underlying computer math completely useless. Wealthy investors skip this physical risk entirely. They divide control across different global regions. They ensure no single person can approve a money transfer alone. When you ask where do rich people store their crypto, the answer is never a single app. The answer is a shared digital network. This guide explains exactly how ultra-high net worth crypto management works. We break down shared vaults. We look at the exact differences between multiple signatures and mathematical key splitting. We also cover the severe technical failures that retail investors ignore completely. Table of Contents The Core Strategy for Whale Wallet Management Why Standard Hardware Wallets Fail at Scale How Asset Transfers Actually Work for Whales The Multisig Boardroom Approach The Multi Party Computation Breakthrough The Fragmented Lens Analogy The Firmware Desync Edge Case Inside the Air Gapped Fortress The Rise of Institutional Crypto Custodians Segregated Accounts Versus Omnibus Pools Constructing a Family Office Security Standard Handling Succession and Inheritance Planning Physical Threats and Bunker Security Network Fees and Trading Execution for Whales The Institutional Blockchain Storage Comparison The Three Point Technical Audit for Large Vaults The Bottom Line The Core Strategy for Whale Wallet Management Rich people store their crypto by using qualified institutional custodians, multi-signature (multisig) wallets, and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) systems. Instead of leaving large funds on regular exchanges, wealthy investors split their cryptographic private key

Published to Dev.to — Bitcoin Development Series, Part 1 of 4_ Bitcoin is heading toward an August 2026 deadline for BIP-110, a proposed temporary softfork that would restrict Ordinals-style arbitrary data from being embedded in transactions for one year. As of today, miner signaling sits at effectively zero. The proposal is almost certainly going to fail but the mechanics of why and how are worth understanding if you work anywhere near the Bitcoin protocol. This post walks through how soft fork activation works, what BIP-110 specifically proposes, and how to inspect miner signaling yourself with code. What Is a Soft Fork? A soft fork is a backward-compatible change to Bitcoin's consensus rules. Nodes running old software still accept blocks from nodes running the new rules — but not vice versa. This is what makes soft forks safer than hard forks in a permissionless network: you do not force everyone to upgrade on day one. Hard forks, by contrast, change rules in a way that causes old nodes to reject new blocks entirely. They require near-universal coordination, which is why Bitcoin has avoided them. How Soft Fork Activation Works: BIP 9 The dominant activation mechanism used since 2016 is defined in BIP 9 . The process works like this: A proposal is assigned a version bit (bit 0–28) in the block header's nVersion field. Miners signal readiness by setting that bit in blocks they produce. Activation requires 95% of blocks in a 2,016-block retarget window to signal support. There is a starttime and a timeout . If the threshold is not met before timeout , the proposal fails and is discarded. # Simplified BIP 9 state machine logic THRESHOLD = 0.95 # 95% of blocks in a retarget window WINDOW = 2016 # one retarget period def check_activation ( signaling_blocks : int , total_blocks : int ) -> str : ratio = signaling_blocks / total_blocks if ratio >= THRESHOLD : return " LOCKED_IN " # activates after one more window return " STARTED " # still counting print ( check_activati

If you’ve ever built or interacted with DeFi protocols, you know the mathematical limitations of Constant Product Market Makers ($x \times y = k$). While AMMs are great for retail liquidity, executing a large transaction (e.g., $100,000+) directly against a liquidity pool triggers two major issues: Severe Slippage: The marginal price of the asset degrades exponentially relative to the trade size. MEV Exploitation (Sandwich Attacks): Public mempool transactions are highly vulnerable. Front-running bots will buy the asset ahead of your execution block, push the price up to your maximum slippage limit, and dump it immediately after. To solve this without relying on centralized, custodial desks or risky off-chain escrow setups, we built Typelex —a decentralized, non-custodial P2P OTC protocol. Here is a look at how we bypassed the AMM bonding curve entirely using on-chain atomic swaps. The Architecture of an On-Chain Atomic Swap Instead of routing trades through active liquidity pools, Typelex utilizes isolated smart contracts to execute peer-to-peer trades. The entire swap happens atomically : either all conditions are met within a single block execution, or the entire transaction reverts. Conceptual Smart Contract Logic (Solidity-based) To understand how the trustless escrow works under the hood, here is a simplified mental model of the swap execution logic: struct Order { address maker; address taker; // address(0) if public address tokenA; uint256 amountA; address tokenB; uint256 amountB; bool active; } mapping(uint256 => Order) public orders; function takeOrder(uint256 orderId) external { Order storage order = orders[orderId]; require(order.active, "Order not active"); if (order.taker != address(0)) { require(msg.sender == order.taker, "Unauthorized taker"); } order.active = false; // Pull Token B from Taker to Maker IERC20(order.tokenB).transferFrom(msg.sender, order.maker, order.amountB); // Push Token A from Contract Escrow to Taker IERC20(order.tokenA).transfer

In the fast-moving world of cryptocurrency, market data changes every second — prices fluctuate, trades execute, and volumes shift continuously. Capturing this stream of real-time data and transforming it into meaningful insights requires a robust and scalable pipeline. In this project, I built a complete real-time crypto market data pipeline that captures, streams, stores, and visualizes live data from Binance using PostgreSQL, Debezium, Kafka, JDBC, and Grafana. The goal was to design an architecture that not only moves data instantly between systems but also keeps it queryable and monitorable in real time. What began as a simple Binance data extractor evolved into a production-grade CDC (Change Data Capture) workflow capable of detecting every database change, streaming it through Kafka, storing it in a sink database, and visualizing it live on Grafana dashboards.

The problem Websites have SSL certificates. Browsers verify them. Users trust them. It's the foundation of the web. AI agents have nothing . When Agent A connects to Agent B: ❌ No way to verify B's identity (anyone can impersonate) ❌ No way to check B's trustworthiness (no audit, no reputation) ❌ No encryption (messages are plaintext) ❌ No standard payment method ❌ No way to translate between frameworks (LangChain ≠ AutoGen) So I built ATC — Agent Trust Card . What is ATC? ATC is like an SSL certificate + passport + credit card for AI agents, all in one: Identity — Cryptographically signed by MarketNow (we're the Certificate Authority) Trust — Contains a Sentinel security audit score (0-10) Encryption — Contains an Ed25519 public key for end-to-end encrypted messaging Translation — Specifies the agent's framework; MarketNow translates between them Payment — Contains a USDC wallet address for autonomous payments How it works Agent A generates Ed25519 keypair ↓ Agent A requests ATC from MarketNow ↓ MarketNow runs Sentinel audit → signs ATC ↓ Agent A presents ATC when connecting to Agent B ↓ Agent B verifies A's ATC signature (using MarketNow's CA public key) ↓ Agent B checks A's trust score (rejects if below threshold) ↓ They communicate — end-to-end encrypted ↓ Agent A pays Agent B — USDC with escrow ↓ Both rate each other — trust scores update The code # Request an ATC POST https://marketnow.site/api/atc { "action" : "issue" , "agent_id" : "agent.yourorg.yourname" , "agent_name" : "Your Agent" , "public_key" : "Ed25519 public key" , "capabilities" : [ "web_scraping" ] , "protocol_language" : "langchain" , "wallet_address" : "0x..." } # Verify an ATC GET https://marketnow.site/api/atc?action = verify&card_id = ATC-2026-00001 # Get CA public key (for signature verification) GET https://marketnow.site/api/atc?action = ca-key What makes ATC different from existing solutions Feature AgentID Agent Passport IBM ACP Stripe ACP ATC Cryptographic identity ✅ ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ Security a

If you need real-time BTC conversion (USD and BRL), polling an API every few seconds is usually not enough. A better approach is streaming quotes with WebSockets and calculating conversions as events arrive. Why WebSockets for BTC conversion? With WebSockets, your app keeps one open connection and receives new prices instantly. Benefits: Lower latency than polling Fewer HTTP requests Better user experience for real-time values Trade-offs: You must handle reconnects Need heartbeat/health checks Must validate and normalize incoming messages Real-time conversion model For BTC conversion, a common model is: Stream BTC/USD Stream USD/BRL Calculate BTC/BRL = BTC/USD × USD/BRL This avoids waiting for a separate BTC/BRL endpoint and keeps conversion logic transparent What is a “tick”? A tick is one market update event. Example: BTCUSD changed to 64210.50 at timestamp t . In this article, each tick has: pair : market identifier ( BTCUSD , USDBRL ) price : latest value for that pair ts : event timestamp Why this matters: conversion state should always be derived from the latest ticks . Minimal WebSocket client (TypeScript) This client only transports responsibilities: Connect Receive messages Parse and normalize into a consistent shape Notify listeners Reconnect on disconnect type MarketTick = { pair : string ; // e.g. "BTCUSD" or "USDBRL" price : number ; ts : number ; }; class WsFeedClient { private ws ?: WebSocket ; private listeners : Array < ( tick : MarketTick ) => void > = []; constructor ( private readonly url : string ) {} connect () { this . ws = new WebSocket ( this . url ); this . ws . onopen = () => console . log ( " [ws] connected " ); this . ws . onmessage = ( event ) => { try { const data = JSON . parse ( String ( event . data )); // Normalize external payload into internal contract const tick : MarketTick = { pair : String ( data . pair ), price : Number ( data . price ), ts : Number ( data . ts ), }; // Basic guard if ( ! tick . pair || Number . isNaN ( tick

Title: Week 13: a second team is now running an AI agent on atomic HTLC swaps. Here is what that validates. Tags: mcp, ai, cryptocurrency, blockchain For most of this spring, the map of the agent economy had a strange gap. Wallets to hold keys. Rails like x402 to move value. Marketplaces and reputation so an agent knows who to trust. And then, at the exact moment two parties settle a trade, a custodian: an escrow contract, an evaluator, a referee holding the money while a decision gets made. We have spent thirteen weeks arguing that the settlement layer does not need a referee, because a hash-time-locked contract can hold neither side and still guarantee the trade. This week, a second team shipped a live agent that makes the same argument in code. That is worth stopping on. The signal that mattered this week KaleidoSwap released KaleidoAgent, described as a self-sovereign trader agent on Bitcoin Layer 2s. It is fully non-custodial. It runs a Lightning and RGB wallet, executes atomic HTLC swaps on the KaleidoSwap DEX, runs DCA and portfolio strategies, manages Lightning channel liquidity, and acts as an interactive wallet assistant. The reasoning layer is an LLM (Claude or OpenAI) driving the kaleido CLI and the wallet primitives underneath. Read that list again through a settlement lens. An autonomous agent, deciding what to trade, and executing the trade over a primitive where no third party ever holds the funds. That is the exact shape of the thing we have been building. Different network, same bet. Why the mechanism is the same KaleidoSwap earlier completed what it described as the first atomic swap of an RGB asset on the Lightning Network mainnet, using tUSDT, an RGB20 version of USDT, over real Lightning channels. The detail that makes it atomic is the one that makes every HTLC atomic: The payment hash remains identical across both legs of the swap. Paying the wrapped invoice creates a Hash Time-Locked Contract in the Lightning channel, and the HTLC locks the p

When I first started learning Solana, one of the biggest questions I had was: "If there are no usernames or passwords, how does the blockchain know who I am?" As a Web2 developer, I was used to creating accounts with an email address, choosing a password, and relying on a company to manage my identity. After spending several days learning Solana, I realized blockchain approaches identity in a completely different way. Identity in Web2 Think about all the accounts you have today. GitHub Gmail Facebook LinkedIn Your bank Every service asks you to create another account. Each company stores your username and password in its own database. Your identity exists because they say it exists. If they suspend your account or delete it, your access disappears. In other words, your identity is owned by the platform. Identity on Solana On Solana there are no usernames. There are no passwords. There isn't even an account registration page. Instead, your identity begins with one thing: A cryptographic keypair. A keypair consists of: A Public Key A Private Key When I generated my first wallet using the Solana CLI, I immediately had a new blockchain identity. For example: Public Key: AxfVXDX7jsCw7vSnwut9hA7oX4UykE3ZeiNF6cxCKvpf This public key becomes my wallet address. Anyone can send tokens to it. Anyone can view its transactions. But nobody can spend funds from it. Why? Because only I possess the private key. Think of SSH Keys The easiest comparison for Web2 developers is SSH. When connecting to a Linux server: the server knows your public key you prove ownership using your private key Solana works almost exactly the same way. Except instead of logging into one server... you're interacting with an entire blockchain. Every transaction I make is digitally signed using my private key. Validators verify the signature before accepting the transaction. No password is ever transmitted. No administrator approves my login. The mathematics prove my identity. Why Wallets Matter One thing I f

Everyone who has ever been right about something loud enough to remember it will tell you they called it. The screenshot arrives after the match, after the candle, after the election. And there is no way to know whether it was written on Monday or edited on Friday. This is the quiet rot at the center of most "track records": a prediction you cannot date is not a prediction at all. It is a memory with good lighting. The technical name for the problem is look-ahead . If a forecast can be created, tweaked, or cherry-picked after the outcome is known, then it carries zero information about skill. The only fix is to make the timing of a prediction independently checkable вАФ to prove a document existed in a specific form before a specific moment, without asking anyone to trust you, your server clock, or your database. That is precisely what OpenTimestamps does, using the Bitcoin blockchain as a shared, tamper-evident clock. Why timing is the whole game A forecast is a bet against the future. Its value comes entirely from the fact that the future was unknown when the forecast was fixed. The instant you allow post-hoc editing, every desirable property collapses: calibration becomes meaningless, Brier scores become fiction, and "I predicted this" becomes unfalsifiable. So an honest forecasting system needs one hard guarantee before anything else: this exact text existed at this exact time, and has not changed since. Note what that guarantee does not require. It does not require publishing the forecast publicly in advance (you might want it sealed). It does not require a notary, a lawyer, or a trusted timestamping company that could be subpoenaed, hacked, or simply go out of business. It requires a clock that nobody controls and nobody can wind backward. What "proof of existence" actually means The building block is a cryptographic hash вАФ typically SHA-256. Feed any file into it and you get a 64-character fingerprint. Change a single comma and the fingerprint changes compl

If you only tracked one part of the agent economy this June, you'd have missed how fast the rest of the stack is being built. So here's a roundup, and one honest observation about the piece that's still missing. Four launches, one month Four things shipped in roughly four weeks, and together they sketch the shape of the machine economy: MetaMask Agent Wallet (Jun 8) - a self-custodial wallet an AI agent can drive directly. Keys for machines. Coinbase for Agents (Jun 11) - an MCP + CLI surface that connects an agent to a Coinbase account, riding on x402, which has now processed well past 160M payments. OKX.AI marketplace (Jun 30) - persistent on-chain identity, cross-job reputation, and escrow-backed dispute resolution, all in one platform. Kustodia MCP escrow - a smart-contract escrow on Arbitrum, exposed as MCP tools so an agent can create an escrow, lock funds, monitor for delivery, and release payment through natural-language calls. It also supports x402, Google's AP2, and Coinbase's AgentKit. Add the payment-rail data around all of it: across the tracked x402 flows this year, USDC is the overwhelming majority of value moved, and the median agent payment sits in the cents. This is a real economy forming, not a demo. Every one of those launches is genuine progress. And every one of them, at the moment that matters, has someone other than the two counterparties holding the asset. The pattern: hold, then decide Look at where the money physically sits during a transaction in each model. A wallet holds your keys - fine, that's custody of your own funds by design. A payment rail moves value from your account to theirs - a transfer, one direction. A marketplace with escrow holds both sides' value and releases it when a condition (often a human-designed evaluator or dispute process) says so. Kustodia is the cleanest statement of the escrow model, so it's worth being precise about it rather than vague. Their Arbitrum contract acts, in their own framing, as an impartial re

Autonomous agents are starting to trade real money on-chain. Some run their creator's capital, some run other people's, some are wired into vaults and DAO treasuries. The moment money is delegated to a program, two questions matter more than performance: what was it allowed to do, and did it stay inside those limits? Supported chains: Base · Ethereum · Arbitrum · Optimism · Polygon · Hyperliquid · Solana (beta). The chain answers the first question badly and the second not at all. Every trade an on-chain agent makes is public and tamper-evident — you can see exactly what it did. But nowhere on-chain is it recorded what it was authorised to do . The mandate — the rules the agent was supposed to operate under — lives off-chain, unverifiable, usually as a screenshot or a claim. Why this is not a niche problem Copy trading is the same gap at retail scale, and the data is unforgiving. In a 90-day study of 100,236 copy-trading outcomes, 97% of lead traders were profitable on their own PnL — but only 43.6% produced positive PnL for the people copying them. Fewer than half of copiers (48.5%) finished in profit at all. Leaderboards, as that study puts it plainly, show the survivors, not the full picture. The honest response the industry already reaches for is third-party verification: in forex, platforms like Myfxbook exist precisely because a self-reported track record is worth nothing — the data has to come from somewhere the trader can't fake. Crypto has no equivalent that is both agent-native and tamper-evident. That is the hole. Who actually needs this Three groups, concretely: Anyone allocating capital to an agent — a vault depositor, a copy-follower, an allocator sizing a position. They want to see, before they commit, whether an agent keeps to its stated mandate, instead of trusting a screenshot. Anyone running an agent who needs to raise capital or followers — an honest operator has no way today to prove their agent did what it said. A verifiable record is how they

In January, three researchers built a shopping agent on Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), the standard designed to make agent-led purchases safe through cryptographically verifiable mandates. Then they attacked it with nothing more exotic than adversarial text. The paper, "Whispers of Wealth" ( arXiv 2601.22569 , revised May 2026), reports that simple prompt injections reliably subverted the agent: one attack steered which products the agent ranked and bought, another exfiltrated sensitive user data. The part of the stack that failed was not the cryptography. The mandates verified exactly what they were designed to verify. What folded was the layer that exercises judgment. Hold that result in mind, because the agent economy is currently pouring money into judgment. Everyone is hiring a referee Look at what shipped in the last few months for agent-to-agent commerce, and a single pattern repeats: put the money in escrow, and let a judge decide when it comes out. ERC-8183 formalizes it: funds sit in an escrow contract while an Evaluator - an agent or a human - decides whether the deliverable meets the spec before releasing payment. It is the pattern Virtuals' Agent Commerce Protocol runs on. Circle has piloted an escrow agent for USDC flows. Kustodia and Nava (which raised $8.3M) are startups built on the same shape. And on July 1, BNB Chain and AWS launched agents that bank themselves - agents deployed to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore with their own wallets, identity, and payment stack from birth. Even the category label is contested now: at least one project has declared itself an "MCP Settlement Standard" from a landing page. That is five separate, serious teams independently converging on the same component: a referee who holds the money. The referee exists for a good reason Before arguing against the judge, steelman him. Most agent-to-agent commerce today is hiring: one agent pays another for work. Write this code. Produce this research. Render this video. The de

You built your WooCommerce store. You've got products, a checkout flow, and customers who want to pay in crypto. The question is: which payment gateway do you actually trust with your money? Most crypto payment plugins for WooCommerce work the same way: they collect your customer's payment, hold it in their own wallet, and send you a payout — minus fees, minus a wait, minus any guarantee they won't freeze your account if something looks "suspicious." That's not crypto. That's a bank with extra steps. This guide covers how to accept crypto payments on WooCommerce the non-custodial way — funds go directly from your customer's wallet to yours, on-chain, with no middleman holding anything. What "non-custodial" actually means for your store When a customer pays through a custodial processor, the money lands in the processor's wallet first. You're trusting them to forward it. If they freeze your account, dispute a transaction, or go under, your money is stuck. Non-custodial means the smart contract routes the payment directly to your wallet address. QBitFlow never holds your funds — not for a second. Every payment has an on-chain transaction hash you can verify on Etherscan, Solscan, or BaseScan. There's no one to call to "release" your money because no one ever had it. For a WooCommerce merchant, this matters for three reasons: No chargebacks. Crypto transactions are final. A customer can't call their bank and reverse a payment you already received. No holds. There's no processor deciding whether your business is "high-risk" this week. No conversion. You receive exactly what the customer paid — USDC stays USDC, ETH stays ETH. No auto-swap, no slippage, no surprise exchange rate. What you need before you start A WooCommerce store (WordPress + WooCommerce plugin installed) A crypto wallet — MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, or any wallet that works with Reown/AppKit (browser extension or mobile QR scan) About 10 minutes That's it. No business registration. No KYC. No waiting for

For Paradigm, the technical frontier will stretch beyond its cryptocurrency investment roots. This fund is expected to expand its investment focus to include robotics and AI.

France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption: France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems. Samih Souissi, ANSSI’s chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption...

Nearly 1 million people have lost a total of $3.8 billion after buying President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, while Trump made $636 million.

The 2026 World Cup has $3.89 billion bet on it across Polymarket. That's not retail money — that's whales. I built WhaleTrack to track exactly what those big wallets are doing. Here's the stack: Backend: Node.js server fetching live data via Bullpen CLI Frontend: Vanilla JS, real-time updates Data: Polymarket CLOB API via Bullpen Analytics: Google Analytics for traffic tracking The hardest part wasn't the code — it was getting users. Pure SEO and content distribution (Reddit, Twitter, IH). The site is live at whaletrack.app — would love feedback from devs on the UX and performance. Happy to open source parts of it if there's interest.