Archive
136 articles, grouped by date.
To borrow $100 in DeFi, you lock $125–167 in collateral. That gap is the price of trustlessness — and AI agents pay it the same as anyone. On-chain credit scoring is emerging to close it, but the signals that work for humans fail for agents that can spin up new addresses in milliseconds.
Decentralized AI networks have to turn many validators' subjective quality scores into one reward number. Bittensor's Yuma Consensus uses a stake-weighted median and clips the rest — robust to a <50% bloc. Then a parasite shows up: copying the consensus pays better than producing it.
An LLM agent that writes its own working smart-contract exploit isn't hypothetical: A1 hits 63% on real exploited contracts and once pulled $8.59M from a single bug. The economics are the story — at a few dollars a scan, attackers profit at a tenth the contract value defenders need.
A perp has no expiry, so only the funding rate pegs it to spot. On Hyperliquid that's an hourly cash flow AI agents now harvest delta-neutral — a $10k position at +0.02%/8h pays ~21.9%/yr. The mechanism, the carry math on real rates, and why it's carry, not alpha.
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.
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.
EIP-4844 blobs look like cheap on-chain storage, but they vanish in 18 days. Here is why DA windows break AI training pipelines and what to use instead.
Yesterday an AI agent deployed a prediction market on Gnosis; other agents will price it, bet on it, and resolve it. The calibration data behind LLM forecasters, the FPMM math they trade against, and what breaks when the marginal bettor is a model.
You pay per token for a named model; the provider picks the precision. FP8 quantization costs 0.6 MMLU points and is near-invisible to output auditing — so inference markets bond and attest instead of detect.
Give autonomous LLM agents a marketplace and they race each other to bankruptcy and get conned by Sybils. A 2026 study finds capability doesn't help — a 9B model beat frontier models 45× its size on economic alignment. On-chain, both failures get cheaper and worse. The mechanics, numbers, and fixes.
An agent hits an API, gets HTTP 402, signs a stablecoin authorization, and a facilitator settles it on-chain for a fraction of a cent. We trace one real payment on Base down to the gas — and where the trust actually sits.
Olas turned an off-chain AI task into an on-chain contract: 2.1M requests across 100 mechs, a 60-300s priority window, and a Karma ledger that docks no-shows. We read the marketplace off Gnosis and dissect its crypto-economic SLA.