Journal
136 articles on the craft of AI × blockchain engineering. or filter by topic:
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.
LRTs promise compounded yield from staking and EigenLayer restaking in a single token — but their soft peg to ETH hides two distinct failure modes with very different implications for your DeFi collateral positions.
An autonomous agent that swaps in the open broadcasts its intent to every searcher in the mempool. We solve the optimal sandwich on a live Base pool, show why an agent's slippage default is the searcher's profit knob, and price the defenses.
Deposit ETH in Aave, borrow USDC, buy more ETH, repeat. Three loops creates 2.97× leverage from a single ETH — and all three positions share one liquidation trigger at −3% ETH price. The math, the cascade, and why AI yield optimizers find themselves here by default.
An on-chain agent reports its work in prose — and some of those sentences are fabricated tool calls. zkML proves the wrong thing at minutes per query. The blockchain already wrote an unforgeable receipt for the actions that matter, and a 12ms signed receipt covers the rest.
FRI-STARKs are fast and trustless, but their proofs are megabytes wide. Groth16 is 256 bytes but needs a ceremony. STARK→SNARK wrapping resolves the tension — and it's why SP1 and RISC Zero can settle any ML inference on L1 for under 300k gas.
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.
Chainlink's push oracle only updates when price moves ≥0.5% or an hour passes. That gap costs AI agents real money — and Pyth's pull model closes most of it.
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.
Three require() calls in Ondo Finance's CashKYCSenderReceiver block every address without KYC from $3.2 billion in permissioned US Treasury tokens — and AI agents can never pass them.
ERC-4337 lets AI agents transact without holding ETH — but the alt-mempool has its own fee market, bundler economics, and MEV surface every builder must understand.
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.