Crypto

• Crypto companies gain political favor after spending big to boost Trump, who signed a crypto-friendly executive order clearing major investigations.
• Garantex administrator arrested in India at the request of US authorities for allegedly facilitating money laundering linked to North Korean hackers.
• Robinhood launches prediction market allowing users to trade contracts on outcomes of major events, partnering with regulated exchange Kalshi.
• Argentina seeks Interpol arrest for Hayden Mark Davis, creator of the failed $LIBRA memecoin promoted by President Milei, with losses exceeding $250 million.
• El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment turns disastrous, leading to economic downturns and increased poverty despite legislative efforts and BitGo investment.
• Binance secures $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi's MGX, marking the largest funding round in crypto history to enhance digital finance and compliance.
• Binance in talks with Trump family to sell stake in Binance US and seek pardon for co-founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to anti-money laundering violations.
• Sony's Soneium blockchain partners with Line to integrate four mini-apps, enhancing Web3 adoption with community building and IP collaboration tools.

Bitcoin vs. CBDCs: The difference is control (proton.me, 2025-03-11). Governments' exploration of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) raises privacy concerns, contrasting with Bitcoin's decentralized control, enabling individuals to manage their wealth autonomously through secure tools like Proton Wallet

Cryptocrats fear regulation will stymie a new crypto era (codastory.com, 2025-03-12). El Salvador remains steadfast in its Bitcoin strategy despite IMF pressures, while Tether's recent sanctions compliance against a Russian exchange highlights the challenges cryptocrats face amid increasing regulatory scrutiny and market volatility

Invalid mining jobs by AntPool & friends during forks (b10c.me, 2025-03-12). AntPool and related mining pools published invalid Bitcoin jobs due to code bugs during block races, raising concerns on selfish mining strategies and code reliability

Episode 167 – What happened to the SEC? (feat. Corey Frayer) (cryptocriticscorner.com, 2025-03-13). Cas Piancey, Bennett Tomlin, and Corey Frayer discuss the SEC's approach to crypto regulation, including investor protection, the Howey Test, and challenges faced by cryptocurrency tokens in meeting registration requirements

The State of the Ethereum Blockchain with Andrew Koller (softwareengineeringdaily.com, 2025-03-11). Andrew Koller discusses the current state of the Ethereum blockchain, its history, security considerations in exchanges like Kraken, L2 solutions, and the future of decentralized applications as it approaches its 10th anniversary

#243 Greg Osuri: Why the Future of AI Depends on Decentralized Cloud Platforms (aneyeonai.libsyn.com, 2025-03-18). Greg Osuri discusses decentralized cloud computing through Akash Network, tackling AI energy bottlenecks, privacy risks from hyperscalers, and the role of blockchain in developing a sustainable cloud infrastructure

How to Discover long-tail MEV Strategies using Revm (pawelurbanek.com, 2025-03-17). Explore long-tail MEV strategies using the Rust CLI tool mevlog, which leverages EVM tracing and advanced filtering methods to analyze blockchain transactions and detect niche opportunities overlooked by common MEV tools

Ultra Low-Latency Block Synchronization at High TPS: Consensus Observer (AIP-93) (medium.com/aptoslabs, 2025-03-14). Consensus Observer (CO) enhances Aptos blockchain by reducing block synchronization time by over 50% at high loads through immediate block propagation, improving transaction latencies for ultra-low-latency applications like micropayments and streaming

proof of work (evilcookie.de, 2025-03-13). Proof of work utilizes hash functions like SHA1 for secure networking and DDoS protection, necessitating computational effort to generate specific hash outputs, illustrating the non-reversibility and complexity of hashing

Attacking & Fuzzing Polkadot Node – Triggering Denial-of-Service via Gossamer RPC Flaws​ (fuzzinglabs.com, 2025-03-13). A deep dive into exploiting Gossamer RPC vulnerabilities in Polkadot nodes using fuzzing techniques, highlighting automation with Python and tools like Websocat to trigger Denial-of-Service attacks and identify security flaws

Still confused by Plonk's permutation? (cryptologie.net, 2025-03-13). David explains Plonk's permutation using a visual diagram, showcasing how column and row encoding is achieved through distinct cosets and column compression, while ensuring wiring consistency across the table

zkAML: Zero-knowledge Anti Money Laundering in Smart Contracts with whitelist approach (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-03-12). zkAML utilizes zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) to enhance Anti Money Laundering compliance without exposing personal information, achieving up to 324 transactions per second on private networks

A note on "industrial blockchain threshold signatures in federated learning for unified space-air-ground-sea model training" (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-03-13). The threshold signature scheme discussed is proven insecure against forgery attacks, enabling adversaries to produce valid signatures for any message by manipulating legitimate signatures

NumScout: Unveiling Numerical Defects in Smart Contracts using LLM-Pruning Symbolic Execution (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-13). NumScout identifies five new types of numerical defects in smart contracts through symbolic execution and LLM pruning, analyzing 6,617 contracts with 89.7% precision, highlighting the importance of addressing complex computational errors

RaceTEE: A Practical Privacy-Preserving Off-Chain Smart Contract Execution Architecture (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-12). RaceTEE is a privacy-preserving off-chain smart contract execution architecture utilizing Trusted Execution Environments, decoupling transaction ordering from execution while ensuring confidentiality, inter-contract security, and compatibility with existing blockchains

Heuristic-Based Address Clustering in Cardano Blockchain (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-12). Heuristic-based clustering algorithms are proposed for linking Cardano payment addresses using the Union-Find algorithm, revealing an average of 9.67 addresses per medium-sized entity in the Cardano blockchain from 2017 to 2023

Efficient Query Verification for Blockchain Superlight Clients Using SNARKs (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-11). An architecture for superlight clients allows query outsourcing to untrusted servers, using SNARKs for efficient computation, ensuring decentralized and reliable access to blockchain data, validated by experimental evaluations

Optimal Reward Allocation via Proportional Splitting (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-13). Proportional Splitting (PRS) enhances blockchain reward mechanisms, proving theoretical equilibrium, while outperforming existing systems in practice through accurate mining power estimation using 'workshares' and ensuring fairness in diverse metrics