Crypto: 1st April 2025

• Napster, acquired for $207M by Infinite Reality, will be transformed into an immersive social music platform with 3D virtual spaces for concerts and artist analytics.
• Jack Dorsey's Block is laying off 931 employees, about 8% of its workforce, amid a shift from crypto services to buy-now-pay-later schemes.
• Elon Musk's xAI announces acquisition of X in an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion.
• Nearly $13 million was stolen from Abracadabra Finance in a crypto heist involving 6,260 Ethereum coins from its 'cauldrons' product.
• Immutable celebrates a win for Web3 gaming as the SEC ends its investigation, enabling clearer frameworks for investment and digital ownership.
• SingularityNET partners with Star Atlas to integrate advanced AI with Web3 gaming for AI-driven NPCs and enhanced player experiences.
• BlackRock has launched its first European Bitcoin ETP, allowing investors to trade Bitcoin without direct ownership, potentially increasing institutional investment in cryptocurrencies.
• Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted crypto fraudster, was moved to an Oklahoma facility after an unauthorized interview with Tucker Carlson.

Molly White Knows You Don’t Understand Crypto (cjr.org, 2025-03-28). Molly White, a crypto researcher, discusses meme coins like dogecoin and $TRUMP, critiquing crypto culture and explaining how recent policy changes affect consumers amid rising influence in Washington

HyperLiquid loses $13.5 million in alleged JELLYJELLY manipulation incident (web3isgoinggreat.com, 2025-03-28). HyperLiquid incurs a $13.5 million loss following manipulation of the memecoin JELLYJELLY, involving a trader's use of shorts and spot purchases, resulting in the token's delisting and legal inquiries over pricing actions

Symmetry in Chaos: my first generative NFT collection on Polkadot (karimjedda.com, 2025-03-29). Karim Jedda explores generative NFTs on Polkadot, using algorithms inspired by chaos theory to create unique digital artworks, highlighting the interplay between randomness and beauty in the 'Symmetry in Chaos' collection

Q1 2025 Bitcoin Data Special (coinmetrics.io, 2025-03-25). In Q1 2025, Bitcoin miners have stabilized post-halving, focusing on ASIC efficiency and renewable energy, while the network evolves towards a store of value amid low transaction fees affecting miner incentives

Talk at the First Developers MeetUp in Zambia (anitaposch.com, 2025-03-26). Anita Posch introduces Bitcoin and Lightning development at the First Developers MeetUp in Zambia, organized by Bitcoin for Fairness and Bitcoin Zambia, offering resources and insights into effective Bitcoin utilization

On the JPMC/Quantinuum certified quantum randomness demo (scottaaronson.blog, 2025-03-26). JP Morgan Chase and Quantinuum demonstrated a protocol generating certified random bits using a 56-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer, validating quantum supremacy and enhancing cryptographic applications despite current limitations in verification and practicality

Privacy Washing through PETs: the Case of Worldcoin (cacm.acm.org, 2025-03-28). Privacy is not assured with PETs like secure multiparty computation, as demonstrated by Worldcoin's reliance on iris data. EU regulators emphasize that privacy washing occurs despite claims of data protection

How to Extract long-tail MEV Profit from Uniswap (pawelurbanek.com, 2025-03-25). Discover how to extract long-tail MEV profit from Uniswap using skimming strategies, Mempool monitoring, and mevlog.rs to analyze ERC20 token imbalances

How can open social protocols fail us in 2025 (shazow.net, 2025-03-31). Exploration of potential failures in open social protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto, highlighting risks such as identity loss, audience capture, and the significance of decentralized structures for maintaining robustness across social platforms

Building with Bitcoin: A Survey of the Use of Its Scripting System Across Projects (zellic.io, 2025-03-28). An overview of Bitcoin's scripting system, examining its use of Schnorr and ECDSA signatures, common script types, and extensions like Taproot and SegWit, highlighting innovative project implementations

Socially-Scoped Infrastructure (blog.vrypan.net, 2025-03-28). Socially-Scoped Infrastructure utilizes social signals to guide decentralized systems like IPFS and Filecoin, enabling automated resource allocation based on social interactions without central control, fostering a programmable infrastructure layer

The Premium Ethereum DA (taiko.mirror.xyz, 2025-03-26). Ethereum transitions to a data availability (DA) layer, prioritizing blob capacity over execution fees, utilizing tools like PeerDAS and Danksharding to enhance scalability and decentralization within a rollup-centric ecosystem

Nostr, my thoughts on a new decentralized pubsub protocol (clehaxze.tw, 2025-03-26). Nostr is a decentralized pubsub protocol allowing secure content publishing via signed messages and relays, emphasizing censorship resistance and user ownership through private-public key pairs, influenced by cryptocurrency concepts

Public Key Accumulators for Revocation of Non-Anonymous Credentials (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-03-25). This work explores public key accumulators for revocation of digital credentials, utilizing zero-knowledge proofs to enhance privacy, while evaluating computational and communication efficiency against existing certificate revocation schemes

Starfish: A high throughput BFT protocol on uncertified DAG with linear amortized communication complexity (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-03-28). Starfish is a robust BFT protocol utilizing uncertified DAG, achieving linear amortized communication complexity through Encoded Cordial Dissemination, integrating Reed-Solomon coding and Data Availability Certificates for efficient data reconstruction

Precise Static Identification of Ethereum Storage Variables (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-26). Sophisticated static analysis techniques achieve 98.6% precision and 92.6% recall in identifying Ethereum smart contract data structures, significantly outperforming existing tools and often surpassing compiler-generated storage descriptions

On-Chain Analysis of Smart Contract Dependency Risks on Ethereum (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-25). This study analyzes over 41 million Ethereum contracts, revealing risks from contract dependencies, extreme centralization, mutable key contracts, and complex protocol dependencies, impacting transparency and security

A Practical Rollup Escape Hatch Design (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-31). A practical escape hatch for rollups using time-based triggers, Merkle proofs, and resolver contracts ensures safe, verifiable asset withdrawal from Layer 2 to Layer 1, protecting user-owned assets like ETH and ERC tokens

Unveiling Latent Information in Transaction Hashes: Hypergraph Learning for Ethereum Ponzi Scheme Detection (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-27). A hypergraph modeling method, HyperDet, improves Ethereum Ponzi scheme detection by treating transaction hashes as hyperedges and utilizing a dual-channel detection module, outperforming traditional graph-based methods in capturing complex interactions

A Blockchain-based Quantum Binary Voting for Decentralized IoT Towards Industry 5.0 (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-26). Developed a quantum binary voting algorithm for IoT-quantum blockchain frameworks, ensuring secure consensus against attacks, utilizing quantum bit commitment and simulation on IBM Quantum and Simulaqron libraries

Bounded Exhaustive Random Program Generation for Testing Solidity Compilers and Analyzers (arxiv:cs, 2025-03-26). Bounded exhaustive random program generation focuses on creating bug-triggering programs for Solidity using Erwin, a tool that identified 23 unknown bugs, surpassing existing fuzzers and improving code coverage in Solidity compilers