protocol

Ethereum developer Tom Lehman has released a draft proposal for EIP-8182, which aims to make private transactions a native feature of Ethereum by introducing shared privacy pools, a fixed address system contract, and zero-knowledge proof verification precompiles at the Ethereum protocol layer.The proposal states that the solution will be implemented through a hard fork upgrade, without an administrator key, governance tokens, or on-chain upgrade mechanisms, with the goal of addressing the issues of decentralization and inconsistent trust models in privacy applications. As designed, users can make private transactions to any Ethereum address or ENS name using existing wallets, and it supports atomic "de-sensitization - interaction - re-privatization" processes.

The vault protocol 3F, built on the decentralized lending protocol Morpho, has completed a total financing of $4 million, led by Maven 11, with participation from institutions such as F-Prime, GSR, and Gate Ventures. The company did not disclose a specific valuation.It is reported that 3F is built on top of Morpho, aiming to provide users with RWA leveraged exposure through a "one-click operation." Users only need to select the target asset and leverage multiple, and the protocol will automatically complete the entire position-building process: including purchasing the underlying asset through short-term bridge financing, depositing it as collateral in Morpho, and borrowing stablecoins to repay the financing. This mechanism essentially simplifies the "looping" process in traditional DeFi, which involves repeatedly buying assets, collateralizing, lending, and reinvesting.While this process can be efficiently completed in pure crypto assets through flash loans, it is usually more complex and inefficient in RWA scenarios due to issues such as settlement delays. 3F is expected to officially launch in the second quarter of this year.

AI deep technology and Web3 infrastructure company Cluster Protocol announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, led by DAO5, with participation from Paper Ventures, JPEG Trading, Mapleblock Capital, among others, bringing the company's total funding to $7.75 million.The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of its EVM ecosystem-oriented browser-native IDE product CodeXero, expand the product and engineering teams, and enhance AI systems, developer workflows, deployment infrastructure, and ecosystem growth. Cluster Protocol stated that CodeXero has connected over 300,000 wallets, processed more than 3 billion AI tokens, and supported the deployment of over 25,000 dApps.

AI Smart Routing and Infrastructure Network DGrid AI officially announces the launch of its AI inference API integrated with the x402 payment protocol. This API seamlessly merges payment logic with AI model invocation for the first time, allowing developers and AI Agents to complete authorization, inference, and payment within a single API request lifecycle without managing cumbersome API Keys or requiring centralized account pre-funding.It is reported that this API currently supports BNB Chain (BSC) as the underlying settlement network. With the micropayment features of the x402 protocol, the system can achieve extremely low-friction on-chain real-time settlement while ensuring that invocation costs remain absolutely controllable. Additionally, this API supports streaming responses and real-time usage feedback while being compatible with mainstream AI invocation methods, making it suitable for various application scenarios, including model selection for AI Agents, inference billing, intelligent agents, and multi-task execution.DGrid states that this initiative aims to completely break the prepaid barriers of traditional large model invocation and provide a programmable underlying payment infrastructure for building a fully automated AI Agent economy (machine-to-machine transactions).

Web3 asset data platform RootData issued a daily transparency alert on Twitter (X), highlighting the lack of information such as team details, key calendar events, and token data for projects like Mars Protocol, Anvil, Lynex, AstridDAO, and Hatom Labs. It calls on project teams to submit/update their information on RootData to improve their transparency scores. Additionally, RootData stated that it will continue to monitor and expose "black box" projects that lack core information.It is reported that RootData's transparency score is used to measure a project's integrity and timeliness, aiming to reflect the project's information disclosure status, urging project teams to immediately claim their projects. The transparency score is categorized from A to F, with a total of 5 levels from high to low; the lower the score, the more incomplete the project's information disclosure, and the higher the risk of wrongdoing, requiring investors to be highly vigilant.

According to Decrypt, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, stated during a hearing before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. government is currently running a Bitcoin node for cybersecurity-related testing, but is not engaged in mining.Paparo indicated that the U.S. military's interest in Bitcoin primarily focuses on its value as a computer science tool, including cryptography, blockchain, and reusable proof-of-work mechanisms, with the aim of using the Bitcoin protocol to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance military capabilities, which is still in the experimental stage. He also mentioned that maintaining the global dominance of the U.S. dollar aligns with U.S. military interests and gave a positive evaluation of the stablecoin legalization bill, the GENIUS Act, signed by Trump last summer, believing that the bill helps to solidify the global position of the dollar.

According to the official announcement from Volo, a security vulnerability incident occurred with the BTCFi and LST protocols on the Sui network, resulting in approximately $3.5 million in assets (including WBTC, XAUm, and USDC) being stolen from three specific Vaults.After the incident, the team immediately notified the Sui Foundation and ecological partners, and froze all Vaults to prevent further losses. Volo stated that this vulnerability only involved three Vaults, and the remaining Vaults do not have the same attack vector, with approximately $28 million in TVL assets remaining safe. The official emphasized that they will bear the loss themselves and will not pass the loss onto users, and will release a complete post-incident report and remediation plan after the investigation is completed.

According to The Block, the x402 Foundation, incubated by Coinbase, has announced the launch of the unified platform Agent.market, aimed at providing an "app store"-like service entry for AI robots.The platform is built on the x402 protocol and helps users and robots access hundreds of tools and services. The x402 protocol is named after the unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, allowing websites, APIs, and AI robots to request and receive instant micropayments through blockchain and traditional payment channels. The protocol is managed as an open standard by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation and has the support of over 20 organizations and crypto companies, including Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS, Google, Visa, Base, Circle, and the Solana Foundation.When Agent.market goes live, it will cover seven major categories including reasoning, data, media, search, social, infrastructure, and trading, with service providers including OpenAI and Venice (reasoning); Bloomberg and CoinGecko (data); LinkedIn, X, and AgentMail (social); AWS Lambda, QuickNode, and Alechemy (infrastructure); as well as Bankr and Coinbase RAT (trading). Providers can join the marketplace without permission.Erik Reppel, the creator of the x402 protocol, stated that there are currently about 69,000 active agent robots on the protocol, which have completed over 165 million transactions with a transaction volume of 50 million dollars. He pointed out that agent commerce based on x402 is reshaping the customer acquisition activation costs for businesses, as robots can now access services at a very low setup cost without needing API keys.

Orca posted on the X platform that its frontend is hosted on the cloud hosting platform Vercel. In response to the Vercel security incident, all potentially leaked keys and deployment credentials have been rotated out of caution. Orca's on-chain protocol and user funds were not affected. The official team will continue to monitor the situation and will provide updates as more information becomes available.

The DeFi protocol Fluid officially announced the launch of the aWETH redemption protocol. Due to the ETH utilization rate on the Aave platform reaching 100%, many borrowers are currently unable to withdraw funds, and they will face increasing risks if the market fluctuates. The aWETH redemption protocol will allow ETH borrowers to: • Redeem for wstETH or weETH • Immediately restore liquidity • Reduce liquidation risk.If users only borrow ETH, they can fully redeem it. If users have ETH collateral and other debts, the collateral will be seamlessly converted to wstETH or weETH, while the debt remains unchanged. Fluid is collaborating with Lido Finance, EtherFi, and other ecosystem partners to reduce systemic risks in DeFi, alleviate usage pressure, and support a healthier DeFi market. The initial capacity limit of the protocol is set at $1 billion in ETH.

Lido posted on platform X that the team is aware of the developments regarding the Kelp DAO security incident. Due to the current exposure of the earnETH product to rsETH, they have proactively suspended new deposits to earnETH and are working with relevant partners to assess the situation. More information will be disclosed based on future developments. Lido added that stETH and wstETH have not been affected by the rsETH incident, and this security issue does not involve the Lido staking protocol itself.

Sky (formerly MakerDAO) posted on the X platform stating that it has currently suspended the omnichain fungible token (Omnichain Fungible Token) cross-chain bridging function for USDS. It will further assess the impact of the rsETH-related security incident while emphasizing that its protocol itself and the USDS contract have not been affected temporarily. USDS remains fully collateralized as designed by the protocol and can be verified on-chain at any time.

On-chain data shows that the Kelp DAO's rsETH bridging protocol based on LayerZero has allegedly been exploited by hackers, resulting in a loss of 116,500 rsETH, worth approximately $292 million.Kelp DAO officials stated that they have detected suspicious cross-chain activities involving rsETH, and have now suspended the rsETH contracts on the mainnet and multiple Layer2s. They are working with security experts and will provide updates on the situation.

According to Cointelegraph, since the $280 million attack on Drift Protocol on April 1, at least 12 DeFi protocols and cryptocurrency companies have been attacked in just over two weeks.Since early April, attacks on crypto protocols or companies include CoW Swap, Hyperbridge, Bybit, Dango, Silo Finance, BSC TMM, Aethir, MONA, Zerion, and the recent Rhea Finance and Grinex exchanges.Among them, the DeFi protocol Rhea Finance reported that the attackers "exploited a vulnerability in Rhea's margin trading feature to execute a coordinated liquidity pool manipulation attack," affecting the Rhea Lend smart contract. According to blockchain security company CertiK, the stolen funds amount to approximately $7.6 million.

The decentralized AI economic protocol Mindra AI announced the completion of a new round of strategic financing, with participation from LandScape Capital, Harbor Digital Ventures, and Candaq Fintech Group.Mindra AI stated that the funds from this round will primarily be used to accelerate the development of its full-stack four-layer protocol, advancing the construction of the dynamic reasoning routing layer, Agent collaboration ecosystem, AI-Fi (computing power financialization), and the economic value flywheel, creating a decentralized "Intelligence Grid" to fundamentally address issues such as the centralized monopoly of AI reasoning infrastructure, algorithmic black boxes, and ecological fragility.It is reported that Mindra AI is a full-stack decentralized AI economic protocol that breaks the smart hegemony and reshapes AI production relations through dynamic reasoning routing, Agent cross-chain collaboration, and AI-Fi (computing power financialization).

According to Cointelegraph, stablecoin issuer Circle is facing a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts for failing to freeze the stolen funds from the Drift Protocol during the attack incident.The plaintiffs claim that the attacker transferred approximately $230 million USDC from Solana to Ethereum within hours using Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), and Circle did not intervene. The lawsuit accuses Circle of complicity and incitement to misappropriation and negligence. Crypto analytics firm Elliptic previously suspected that the attack may be related to North Korean-backed hackers, and the related funds were subsequently exchanged for ETH and transferred via Tornado Cash.

Solv Protocol announced a strategic integration with Utexo, launching a native Bitcoin yield solution based on the RGB protocol and the Lightning Network, enabling the conversion between native BTC and USDT through atomic swaps without the need for wrapping, cross-chain bridges, or custodians.This solution emphasizes self-custody, privacy protection, and final settlement, and aligns with Tether's previously announced plan to natively issue USDT on the RGB-compatible Lightning Network. Additionally, it was disclosed that Solv participated as a strategic angel investor in Utexo's $7.5 million seed round financing led by Tether.

Venus Protocol announced on the X platform that the isolated pools on Venus have now stopped operating, all pools have been suspended, but user funds are safe, and withdrawals remain open. Users can choose to migrate or withdraw based on whether their assets are on Venus Core.