Archive
136 articles published in this period.
Every on-chain scheme that verifies an LLM by re-executing it and comparing digests assumes a forward pass is bit-for-bit reproducible. It isn't — Thinking Machines got 80 different answers to one prompt at temperature 0. Here's why, and what determinism costs.
Majority voting over LLMs throws away the one node that got it right. Fortytwo's swarm inference ranks answers pairwise instead — +17 points on GPQA Diamond — with on-chain reputation and proof-of-capability for Sybil defense. The mechanism, the math, the tradeoffs.
zkML, optimistic, TEE, FHE all prove the computation. Restaking takes the other road: bond it and slash liars. We do the cost-of-corruption math behind EigenLayer's $18B AI-AVS security, the overloading attack that breaks it, and the probabilistic-audit tax.
Story raised $140M to make IP programmable for the AI era. We read its chain: 6.46M registered IP assets, 230,300 licenses ever minted, one week of royalties totaling $10 — plus the LAP/LRP royalty math and the precompile at 0x0101 that computes the graph.
Render just voted to route 60,000 Salad GPUs' payments through a token burn; Akash auctions its 234 GPUs per-block on-chain. Two opposed pricing mechanisms, live H100 quotes, and the burn-vs-emission math the equilibrium story skips.
An autonomous agent can't sign up for an API key or swipe a credit card. x402 revives HTTP 402 and settles in gasless USDC — here's the EIP-3009 handshake, the facilitator trust model, and where prompt injection breaks it.
DiFR's seed-commitment round-trip is the last synchronization barrier to async verifiable inference. TOPLOC removes it: a locality-sensitive hash of intermediate activations compresses to 258 bytes per 32 tokens — 1,000× smaller than raw embeddings — and validates faster than inference ran.
38.6% of Ethereum blocks today go through censoring relays. FOCIL (EIP-7805) ends builder exclusion with a 16-validator committee and a 1-out-of-16 honesty assumption hardwired into the fork-choice rule — landing in the Hegota upgrade, late 2026.
Solana agents get 400 ms — but only if they declare every account they'll touch before execution starts. The Sealevel write-lock model, hot-account contention, Jito tip economics, and what the declarative execution contract means for AI agent design.
Federated learning keeps raw data local — but the gradients it publishes on-chain are not private. Inversion attacks reconstruct training images from them, and a public ledger makes that window permanent.
Five builders now win 96.7% of Ethereum blocks. Their edge isn't compute — it's exclusive orderflow: 12% of transactions that generate 54.59% of block value. AI agents transacting in public have to understand where they sit in that hierarchy — and when a preconfirmation changes the math.
DeepSeek-R1 emits 8,400 thinking tokens before a 341-token answer on hard math. Every existing on-chain verification scheme — TEE, optimistic, ZK, sampling — was designed when computation and output were proportional. They aren't anymore.