Inference markets charge a flat price per query. A cascade arbitrageur routes easy tasks to a cheap model and escalates only failures — capturing the spread. Olmedo, Schölkopf & Hardt (2026) show 40% net margins with no model-dev risk.
Majority voting counts hands — it can't rank quality. Fortytwo's Bradley-Terry protocol achieves 85.90% on GPQA Diamond vs. 68.69% for majority voting, extracting ranking signal from pairwise comparisons and making Sybil attacks economically unattractive.
Nova replaces expensive SNARK-in-SNARK recursion with a random linear combination that folds two R1CS instances into one — 10× less overhead per step. For N-step AI inference: O(N) prover work, one constant-size final proof. NANOZK delivers this at GPT-2 scale: 6.9 KB, 23 ms verify.
EIP-7702, live in Pectra, lets an EOA borrow smart contract code for one transaction — no migration, no bundler. For AI agents: atomic batching closes the approve-to-swap MEV window, and session key delegation bounds the blast radius of a compromised agent without touching the master key.
BERT-base under FHE takes 149 seconds, needs 112 GB, and sustains 0.007 samples/sec. Best-case MPC takes 2.3 seconds and 4 GB. The gap traces to one operation: bootstrapping — the noise-refresh that makes FHE theoretically unlimited but practically expensive.
Skill marketplaces let any agent buy trading capabilities off a shelf — and every skill is an execution vector. SAE's non-bypassable execution guards cut max drawdown from 46.4% to 3.2% (↓93%), CVaR by 97.5%, and the Delegation Gap by 97% on live perp data. The defense isn't in the model.
Reasoning models hide their chain-of-thought but bill for every token of it. CoIn proves a provider can inflate that hidden count 5× with 94.7% detection — but only if the escrow contract enforces a commitment root before payment clears.
Ethereum's blob fee market held at 1 wei for twenty months after Dencun, then broke in December 2025. Here's what the data shows, what drove the cycle, and what it means for L2s and AI agents that depend on cheap calldata.
Zero-knowledge proofs can slash a double-signer but not a lying AI oracle. EIGEN's intersubjective fault model closes this gap via social consensus-driven forking — and it's live on EigenAI mainnet.
HTTP 402 sat reserved for 30 years. x402 fills it: an AI agent signs an EIP-3009 authorization into a header, a facilitator settles on Base in two seconds, no ETH required. Protocol mechanics, production numbers, and where the centralization risk lives.
ERC-7683 gives users cross-chain swaps in 8 seconds by converting bridge latency into a solver capital float problem. The 4–7 bps spread is a rental rate on cross-chain inventory — here's the lifecycle, the capital math, and what AI agents pay to move capital across chains.
Shared-state multi-agent LLMs exhibit three formal anomaly classes — stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade. Three 2026 papers prove them unavoidable without isolation primitives and measure the fix: zero corruptions across 884,110 commits under Observable-Read Isolation.