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ARK Invest Research Director Lorenzo Valente commented on the OpenUSD stablecoin project launched by several institutions. He stated that, despite the strong capabilities of the participants (including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, etc.), OpenUSD faces multiple significant obstacles:First, there are liquidity and cold start issues; USDC and USDT have already formed strong network effects, dominating exchanges, payment processors, and brokers, making it difficult for the new stablecoin to gain trading pairs and large-scale holding willingness;Second, the decision-making speed of the alliance composed of 500 competitors will be extremely slow, lacking successful precedents, and conflicts of interest will be hard to coordinate;Third, the regulatory and antitrust risks are extremely high; the joint issuance of currency by large banks and card networks is likely to become a regulatory focus;Fourth, the revenue-sharing model results in issuers retaining too little capital, making it difficult to cover high operational and promotional expenses;Fifth, the actual commitments from partners are limited, mostly consisting of letters of intent (LOI), and parties are still supporting competitors, preferring multiple hedges rather than exclusive binding.Valente concluded that OpenUSD is essentially similar to "a DAO of multiple competitors," making it difficult to execute and make decisions quickly, and it may ultimately repeat the governance failures of early DAO projects, which could not be effectively implemented.Affected by the OpenUSD plan, Circle's stock fell over 17% in a single day, and ARK Invest took the opportunity to buy in.

L2BEAT researcher @sergeyshemyakov posted on the X platform that Tornado Cash had a suspicious DAO proposal on June 25, which targets an unverified contract. This is highly unusual in Tornado Cash DAO proposals and suggests that the proposal should be considered malicious. The address of the proposal creator received funding through Railgun 4 days ago. If the proposal is passed and executed, the governance contract will make a delegatecall to the target contract. sergeyshemyakov stated that the Tornado Cash liquidity pool itself is safe, but the proposal may directly target the Tornado Cash DAO, which currently holds TORN tokens worth approximately $23 million.

According to GlobeNewswire, former Ethereum Foundation researchers have established an independent nonprofit organization called Ethlabs, supported by Bitmine, SharpLink, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and ecosystem participants such as Anchorage, Octant, and SNZ, aiming to prepare for the next phase of institutional adoption of Ethereum. The five co-founders include Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma, who have led significant upgrades to the network over the past decade. Ethlabs' early work will focus on the demand for large-scale institutional on-chain solutions: faster settlement speeds, native issuance, cross-chain transactions based on robust infrastructure, mainnet capacity, and research laying the foundation for ETH's monetary properties.

According to official social media news, the third session of the Huobi Master Lecture "AI Agent Economy and New Opportunities in Crypto" will officially start today at 19:00. Han Feng, an independent researcher at Harvard University, a corresponding member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (NAAI), and a lifetime member of the Bitcoin Foundation, will be invited to attend and share insights on the theme "From H2A to A2A," discussing the new trends in the integration of AI and Crypto against the backdrop of the rise of the Agent economy, interpreting the collaborative network of intelligent agents, on-chain economic systems, and potential development opportunities in the future digital society.

According to The Block, a research paper released by IC3, composed of researchers from top universities such as Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Yale, and ETH Zurich, points out that the role of cryptocurrency in addressing the main challenges in the AI field is severely overestimated.The paper clarifies three major misconceptions: providing AI agents with wallets does not make them truly "autonomous," but only enables automated trading; blockchain is suitable for timestamping records but cannot effectively distinguish between AI-generated content and human content; decentralization cannot fundamentally solve the problem of bias in AI algorithms.IC3 believes that while cryptocurrency can provide some infrastructure support for AI, its practicality in areas such as trust, payment, and content verification is limited.

According to CoinDesk, security engineer Taylor Hornby, who discovered a serious vulnerability in Zcash using the Anthropic Opus 4.8 AI model, stated that Monero (XMR) has been added to the audit queue, and more privacy coin projects will undergo security reviews in the future.Hornby previously discovered a critical vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard privacy pool on May 29, which had gone unnoticed since May 2022 and could theoretically allow attackers to create unlimited undetectable fake ZEC. The development team at Shielded Labs completed an emergency fix before June 1 and subsequently disclosed the details of the vulnerability. As a result of the incident, ZEC dropped by as much as 38% within 24 hours after the news broke, with the market concerned that attackers may have exploited the vulnerability to steal funds from the privacy pool without leaving on-chain traces.Hornby stated that he was commissioned by the nonprofit organization Shielded Labs in April of this year to identify protocol vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them. Although he had the means to profit from the vulnerability, he chose to report the issue to the development team, stating that "such betrayal is unacceptable." Additionally, Hornby plans to apply for funding from the Zcash community to support subsequent security research efforts.

According to The Defiant, Ethereum researchers Thomas Coratger, Justin Drake, and others released a proposal on June 1 at the Ethereum research forum, planning to establish a dedicated XMSS public key registry as the first concrete protocol upgrade for Ethereum's migration to post-quantum cryptography.This registry allows approximately 1 million validators to pre-register quantum-safe XMSS keys before the full switch to the BLS signature system, serving as an important "preheating phase" to reduce the impact of the subsequent switch on network stability. This proposal has been included in the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team's Strawmap roadmap, marking the first protocol fork on that roadmap.

According to Cointelegraph, the Ethereum Foundation has recently faced criticism from the community for selling ETH, unstaking, and having limited public communication. However, blockchain researcher and investor William Mougayar defended it in a post, stating that the outside world has long misunderstood the Foundation's positioning. ETH, the Ethereum network, and the Ethereum Foundation itself are three different aspects: ETH is an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for promoting protocol development, one of its goals even being "to make the founders gradually less important." The Ethereum Foundation is currently on a "subtraction path," strengthening the network by promoting protocol upgrades, funding underlying research, and reducing its own centralized influence.

According to The Block, former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist posted on the X platform, proposing the establishment of a new organization aligned with the Ethereum economy to "save" Ethereum. He believes that the Ethereum Foundation currently holds less than 0.1% of ETH, with no staking or fee income flowing in, so the new organization needs to raise at least $1 billion in funding, managed by competent leaders, with part of the funds coming from staking income, and driven by a more responsible board to boost Ethereum's price.Feist left the foundation last year to join Layer 1 network Tempo. He co-created the Danksharding shard design in the Ethereum community to enhance Layer 2 scalability, was appointed as a strategic advisor in areas such as L1 scaling and user experience during the restructuring of the foundation's leadership, and proposed EIP-9698, which would increase the Gas limit by 100 times.

According to CoinDesk, former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner has increased his disclosed investment size from $5.5 billion to $13.67 billion as of March 31, 2026, and has significantly bought shares in Bitcoin mining companies and AI infrastructure companies.His key holdings include mining companies such as IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Bitfarms, Bitdeer, and Hive Digital, betting that their power resources and data center capabilities will benefit from the growing demand for AI computing power.At the same time, he has also established a short position of approximately $7.46 billion in semiconductors, including large put option positions on the VanEck Semiconductor ETF, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Broadcom.

According to official news, the smart contract auditing platform Code4rena has announced that it will gradually cease operations, and the Web3 security company Immunefi will take over its clients and security researchers. Code4rena posted on social media that it has made the decision to shut down and stated that all ongoing competitions and bounty activities will be completed as usual, and existing collaborations will be "properly concluded." Immunefi stated that it will assist in migrating Code4rena's bounty projects, reward structures, and researchers to its platform.Code4rena is known for its "competitive auditing" model, where independent researchers compete to find vulnerabilities in smart contracts for rewards. This shutdown comes less than two years after blockchain security company Zellic acquired Code4rena in 2024. Previously, Code4rena raised $6 million from Paradigm in 2023 for auditing incentives and platform expansion.This shutdown comes at a difficult time for DeFi protocols and the security sector. Data from DefiLlama shows that there were over 20 crypto vulnerability incidents in April alone, setting a monthly record. JPMorgan analysts believe that ongoing DeFi security incidents are limiting major institutional investors from entering the market. Meanwhile, the total value locked in DeFi has decreased from about $160 billion in October to approximately $83 billion currently.

Researcher Dan Robinson from Paradigm proposed a new scheme called PACT (Verifiable Address Controlled Timestamp), aimed at protecting long-dormant bitcoins, including Satoshi's early addresses, from future quantum computing attacks.This mechanism allows users to prove their control over an address through a timestamp without the need to transfer assets or expose on-chain behavior. Once future quantum attacks occur, assets can be recovered in a quantum-resistant version of the Bitcoin network based on that proof. Compared to mandatory migration schemes (like BIP-361), PACT avoids the privacy exposure issues caused by actively transferring assets, providing long-term holders with a more flexible preemptive protection path.

Former Jump Trading senior quantitative researcher Yiming Zhang has received startup funding support from hedge fund giant Millennium Management after leaving the firm and will conduct business as an external manager in the future.Yiming Zhang worked at Jump for 17 years and was one of the key members of the core strategy department. Due to non-compete clauses, his new role is expected to officially start after the restriction period ends. Industry insiders point out that Millennium Management has been expanding its footprint in recent years by providing funding support to external teams, becoming one of the important "incubators" in the hedge fund sector.

The crypto financial services company Nava, which prevents inappropriate behavior of AI agents, announced the completion of an $8.3 million seed round financing, co-led by Polychain and Archetype.It is reported that the company's method to prevent inappropriate behavior of AI agents is to create a custodial service that holds funds until the agent proposes a transaction. Once the agent proposes a transaction, Nava will use a validation framework to determine whether the transaction outcome aligns with the user's intent. If the transaction passes validation, it will be executed; otherwise, the funds will remain in the custodial account, and the reasons for accepting or rejecting any transaction will be recorded on the blockchain, thereby creating a public decision ledger that can be referenced.

According to The Block, Ethereum researchers are exploring the "Block-in-Blobs" proposal (EIP-8142), which plans to encode block execution load data into Blobs. Validators can verify data existence through Data Availability Sampling (DAS) without needing to download the complete dataset, reducing bandwidth pressure and improving scalability.In the zkEVM scenario, this proposal can also fill the gap where zero-knowledge proofs cannot guarantee data availability and aims to unify execution Gas and Blob data usage into a single "data Gas" system.In addition, Biconomy, in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation, proposed ERC-8211, which supports executing multiple operations in sequence under a single signature to reduce failed transactions and optimize the DeFi interaction experience.

Devansh Mehta, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, proposed a Validator Revenue Redistribution (VRR) scheme at the EthCC conference. It aims to allow validators to signal on the consensus layer and autonomously decide to redirect a certain percentage of their staking rewards to designated smart contracts, rather than withdrawing all to personal wallets. The recipients can be public goods funding platforms like Gitcoin, Octant, security auditing agencies, or core protocol research teams.The scheme involves two changes to the execution layer: signaling the redirection ratio by validators and the logical implementation of fund allocation to the designated contracts.

Bitcoin security researcher and Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake published a discussion on the timeline for quantum computing to crack Bitcoin.Justin Drake believes that the findings of Google's quantum AI white paper are conservative. "By 2032, quantum computers will have at least a 10% chance of recovering the secp256k1 ECDSA private key from leaked public keys. While it still feels unlikely that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) will emerge before 2030, it is undoubtedly time to start preparing."Justin Drake also stated that achieving commercially viable Bitcoin proof of work through Grover's algorithm will not happen in the short term. "We are talking about decades, or even centuries later. This observation should help shift the focus of the discussion onto ECDSA and Schnorr. As an unofficial Bitcoin security researcher, I still believe that Bitcoin proof of work has failed due to the reduction in the security budget."

According to The Block, Ethereum researchers demonstrated a proof of concept for "native Rollups" based on the execution client Ethrex, implementing EIP-8079 through the addition of an EXECUTE precompile, which directly replays and verifies Layer 2 block state changes on the Ethereum base layer.This solution does not rely on zero-knowledge proofs or fraud proofs, but instead is executed and confirmed by Ethereum itself to validate Rollup transaction validity. The related contracts are used to track Rollup state, bridge cross-layer messages, and verify withdrawals based on Merkle-Patricia proofs. Developers claim that native Rollups can simplify long-term maintenance of Layer 2, allowing them to directly inherit Ethereum's security and upgrade properties, and they are still in the exploration and proof of concept stage.

Cryptanalysis provider CoinMetrics senior researcher Tanay Ved expects Coinbase's total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025 to be $1.77 billion, a 5% decrease from $1.87 billion in the third quarter, as declines in trading volume and asset prices offset growth in derivatives trading and USDC.Trading revenue is expected to be $978 million (a 6% quarter-over-quarter decline), with Deribit's contribution throughout the quarter driving growth in institutional business.Subscription and services revenue remains resilient at $723 million, with the growth in USDC supply offsetting the impact of the Federal Reserve's interest rate cuts and reduced staking rewards.The firm forecasts Coinbase's total revenue for the fiscal year 2025 to be approximately $7.2 billion, reflecting Coinbase's ongoing revenue diversification and strategic expansion into the derivatives space.It is reported that Coinbase will announce its fourth quarter and full-year financial results for 2025 after the market closes on February 12 (Wednesday).