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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.