Tech

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.

Brussels published a policy paper framing distributed ledger technology as the foundation of an 'internet of value' and confirmed that Pontes, the Eurosystem's DLT settlement platform, will go live in the third quarter of 2026 — making Europe the first major jurisdiction to offer central bank-settled tokenised asset trading.

The release replaces Bitcoin's decade-old transaction queuing system with a cluster-based architecture and introduces private broadcasting through Tor and I2P, marking the protocol's most significant infrastructure upgrade in years.

A security incident at web infrastructure provider Vercel, traced to a compromised Google Workspace connection through AI tool Context.ai, has sent Web3 teams scrambling to lock down credentials and audit their supply chains.

Crypto protocols have lost $606 million to exploits in the first 18 days of April, driven by two enormous bridge attacks attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, making it the worst month for crypto security since the Bybit breach in February 2025.