Tech

The second-largest difficulty cut of 2026 reflects what miner earnings have been telegraphing all year: Marathon, Riot and their peers are pulling power and capital out of bitcoin mining and into AI data centres as fast as the contracts can be signed.

Ethereum's co-founder published a long essay on Sunday arguing that machine-checkable mathematical proofs, generated and verified by AI, could become the foundational security layer for blockchains, cryptography and critical internet infrastructure — even as the same AI capabilities accelerate vulnerability discovery on the offence side.

An attacker minted roughly 1,000 unbacked eBTC worth $76.7 million on Echo Protocol's Monad deployment by compromising a single admin key, though the realised loss was around $816,000 after the team regained control and burned the remaining tokens.

The May 1 difficulty adjustment dropped to 132.47 trillion after sustained hashrate fell below the symbolic one-zettahash threshold for the first time since February. The dip says more about how public miners are reallocating capex than about network security.

Base announced on May 4 that its Azul upgrade would integrate Succinct's SP1 zero-knowledge prover alongside its existing TEE proof system, with mainnet activation planned for May 13. The change cuts withdrawal finality from a multi-day challenge window to roughly one day — and makes Base the largest single Ethereum operator to put ZK proofs in production.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko told Ethereum Layer 2 users to "abandon all hope" of being quantum-safe over the weekend, citing fresh production hardening on Solana's Falcon-512 verification suite. The dig is more than tribal — the cryptographic argument has merit.

MoonPay went live Friday with the MoonAgents Card, a virtual Mastercard debit product that lets autonomous AI agents transact using stablecoin balances on Solana. Funds stay self-custodial; a smart contract authorises each purchase one transaction at a time.

Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings has agreed to buy Long Ridge Energy & Power from FTAI Infrastructure for $1.5 billion, lifting its total power capacity by 65 per cent to 2.2 GW and turning its data-centre pivot into the largest deal a public bitcoin miner has ever signed.

Robinhood's crypto trading revenue collapsed 47 per cent year-on-year to $134 million in Q1, but CEO Vlad Tenev used the earnings call to reframe the entire business around tokenisation and a new public testnet of Robinhood Chain.

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that North Korean state-backed hackers stole approximately $577 million in 2026 — 76% of all crypto hack losses — across just two attacks: the Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO exploits.

Bitcoin's daily spot trading volume has fallen below $5 billion across major exchanges, the lowest reading since October 2023, with Glassnode warning that the resulting drop in market depth has historically preceded sharp directional moves rather than calm consolidation.

State Street said it will deliver tokenised fund servicing from Luxembourg by the end of 2026, extending administration, custody and transfer agency to digitally native funds and bringing the world's second-largest custodian into direct competition with BNY Mellon and JPMorgan on-chain.

MegaETH's native token launches on Thursday, with 53.3 per cent of supply locked behind on-chain performance milestones rather than calendar dates. Pre-market perpetuals on Hyperliquid have been trading at an implied $1.5 to $2 billion fully diluted valuation.

Anza and Jump Crypto's Firedancer reached the same conclusion on Falcon without coordinating, and the Solana Foundation has now adopted it as the network's planned post-quantum signature path.

David Marcus put a Bitcoin-settled dollar account onto the Visa network on Tuesday and gave AI agents permission to spend from it. The principal-member status is the rare part — most fintechs rent access to Visa through Marqeta or Stripe Issuing.

Aave on Tuesday published the technical proposal that will determine whether DeFi can claw back the $292 million Kelp DAO lost to North Korean hackers ten days ago. The two-part plan re-collateralises rsETH with fresh ETH and uses a temporary oracle adjustment to liquidate seven attacker positions stranded across Aave and Compound.

A vulnerability in Litecoin's MimbleWimble Extension Block allowed attackers to forge invalid peg-out transactions and attempt double-spends, triggering the deepest chain reorganisation in the network's history. GitHub commits show developers had a fix weeks before the exploit landed.

AWS now lists Chainlink Data Feeds, Data Streams and Proof of Reserve on its marketplace, complete with reference architectures for reserve monitoring and automated trading systems built on Lambda, Fargate and DynamoDB.

Giancarlo Lelli used a variant of Shor's algorithm on publicly accessible quantum hardware to derive a private key from its public counterpart, claiming Project Eleven's Q-Day Prize and advancing the timeline for practical quantum attacks on cryptographic systems.