Chainalysis: blockchains are becoming malware command-and-control infrastructure Chainalysis documents “blockchain dead drops”: malware reads C2 pointers or encrypted instructions from transactions/contracts instead of relying on a takedown-able domain. One DPRK-linked implementation uses TRON and Aptos as redundant pointers to BSC, where encrypted instructions live

A rhyming tale of logic old, Of paths made straight, not bent or bold. From Turing’s shelf to proofs anew! A Christmas Gift from us, to you 💝 Merry Christmas from all the team @ModulusZK 🎄🎅

Modulus is being rebuilt as an L1. Contracts are first-order logic predicates, enforced with ZK proofs. No bytecode & no VM. This can solve every smart contract level exploit in existence. Currently updating website, docs & deciding what we want to make public on GitHub.

Every wave of technological change brings new privacy risks. This time, AI is the threat. $ZEC is the response. Wave 1: 1970s. Computers digitized records and automated financial systems. Wave 2: 1990s. Rise of the internet brought concerns of online identities. Wave 3: Today, AI can track financial activity at scale. $ZEC shielded transactions were designed for exactly this. Read more: grayscale.com/the-stack/zcas…

The great hacks of this industry all lived in one place. The gap between what a contract promised & what its code did. This update, we publish that gap’s deletion. On @ModulusZK, the rule you read is the rule the chain enforces. A transaction that can’t be proved never happens.

Central banks cannot run modern monetary policy on a fully transparent ledger. Every large transfer, reserve movement, or intervention becomes visible to rivals in real time. Adversaries can front-run, counter, or weaponize that information. Privacy is a strategic necessity.

Ownership and accountability matter. The work has begun to integrate a @ModulusZK verification protocol into Totem LLM to prove that a text, image or video has been created by a specific Totem instance. Much more to come. Just getting started.

The outcome of @ModulusZK just being correct; publishing our tech for all to test & verify. Is all VM based chains become archaic overnight. We're up to 10-100X faster with 100X+ less compute. I am Cassandra & the prophecy they won't read in their DMs, will be their destruction

After 5+ years, we're winding down POAP. Over the years, we: * minted millions of collectibles across hundreds of communities. * did incredible collaborations with world-class organizations - Coinbase, Amex, WMG, Bayer, and a long tail of others, including countless in crypto. * ran one of the biggest activations at Devcon, minting 8000+ collectibles over the course of a week. * built an Airport Rally to let collectors get POAPs at airports around the world. POAP meant something to a lot of people. Unfortunately, crypto's funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something. Building on a fragile and quickly evolving stack, in the middle of an incredible hype cycle, only added to the challenges. Still, there are some big lessons I am carrying from the POAP story. First: Customer communities are the most undervalued asset a company can have. If you build something with soul, people who use it and love it will take your brand everywhere. Do not underestimate the power of customer communities. Second: Connection is still the point. It's easy to lose that thread when the conversation is about the latest bubbly tech or price speculation, but the people using POAPs at events, in classrooms, at hackathons were getting something real out of it. Third: Longevity and brand equity are the only moats left. With the time to building and shipping something new collapsing quickly, and distribution becoming increasingly an engineering problem, customers increasingly want to make sure they can trust that the things they are buying will grow and evolve with the market, without changing radically. Grateful for everyone who believed in what we were building. It's too soon for me to say what's next, but for now, I'm thinking a lot about what GTM looks like in the age of AI.

🔥 JUST IN: Vitalik published a new Ethereum proposal for an “Extremely Lean Chain.” The proposal aims to shrink consensus state, move validator balance updates into ZK proofs, and re-anonymize validators daily for stronger staking privacy.

🚨 BREAKING: Europe will ban cash payments above €10,000 and require identity verification for @Bitcoin transactions starting in 2027. The move intensifies the global debate over privacy, surveillance, and financial freedom.