Consensus, networking, and the core architecture of distributed ledgers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
World Chain reserved top-of-block space for verified humans while 382M smart-account ops poured in. We read the Semaphore tree on Ethereum — 17.59M identities, hourly batches at ~3,300 gas each — decode PBH's month-stamped nullifiers, and find the human-only lane sitting almost empty.
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.