Journal
136 articles on the craft of AI × blockchain engineering. or filter by topic:
Zero-knowledge proofs promised to make machine learning trustless. A field survey of where zkML actually stands — proving systems, quantization tradeoffs, and what's deployable today.
We ran multi-agent LLM pipelines against historical exploit corpora and live audit engagements. The results reshape where AI fits in a security review — and where it absolutely doesn't.
Zero-knowledge proofs aren't the only path to trustworthy on-chain AI. Optimistic schemes trade latency for a 1000x cost reduction — here's how dispute games over inference actually work.
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.
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.
zkML costs 1000x, optimistic schemes cost a challenge window. Hardware attestation verifies AI inference at under 7% overhead and ~$0.26 on-chain — if you're willing to trust Intel. Part 3 weighs the third leg of verifiable inference.
Intent-based DEXes don't route your trade — they auction it. Solvers compete as autonomous optimizers to settle a batch at one clearing price. Inside CoW Protocol's contract, the optimization problem, and the metaheuristic solvers now winning it.
We pulled a live x402 settlement off Base: a $0.013 USDC transfer relayed by a facilitator wallet with a nonce past 1.7 million, at an 11% gas-to-value ratio. What on-chain evidence and 100M transactions actually say about the agent economy.
ERC-8004's agent registries went live in January. We read them straight off the chain: ~90,000 registrations across Ethereum and Base, a $0.003 ERC-4337 registration dissected — and a reputation registry already farmed with vouch spam.
The gradients never touch the chain. What Solana actually stores when Psyche trains a 36B model across 24 nodes, how TOPLOC audits untrusted GPUs in 258 bytes, and why the flagship 'decentralized' model still shipped from a 512-GPU cluster.
Bittensor let AMM prices decide which AI subnets earn 3,600 TAO a day — until a memecoin subnet gamed the formula. Inside the TaoFlow upgrade: the constant-product math that got exploited, the EMA flow accounting that replaced it, and why refundable manipulation is the design smell to hunt for.
FHE left the lab: confidential ERC-7984 tokens settle on Ethereum for ~$0.09 in gas, with 48,000 transfers since December. We dissect a live encrypted transaction, the 13-node MPC committee underneath, and why encrypted inference is still 11 seconds per token.