Crypto: 6th May 2025

• Sam Altman and Tools for Humanity introduced Worldcoin, a blockchain-based identity project featuring eye-scanning orbs for the US market, alongside a mobile verification device to distinguish humans from AI.
• Bitcoin mining has become unprofitable, with electricity costs surpassing coin values, costing around $137,000 for small operations versus its $94,000 market value.
• World Liberty Financial's stablecoin, USD1, will facilitate a $2 billion investment by Abu Dhabi's MGX into Binance, amid conflicts of interest involving the Trump family.
• Ubisoft launches a decentralized verification network using LayerZero's interoperability protocol to enhance security and facilitate cross-chain asset transfers across multiple blockchains.
• Playtron introduces Game Dollar, a stablecoin for gaming built on the M0 platform, enabling purchases and rewards via programmable transactions on the Sui blockchain.
• PlaysOut launches a Web3 mini-game platform integrated with WeChat, enabling frictionless stablecoin payments and NFT features for global developers.
• Bunq has launched a crypto trading service in partnership with Kraken, allowing users in select European countries to trade over 300 cryptocurrencies.
• Tens of thousands of Nike's CloneX RTFKT NFTs vanished due to unpaid web hosting, highlighting the risks of digital ownership as collectors face losses.

No Asterisk Needed (tomtunguz.com, 2025-05-05). Election night catalyzed a shift from infrastructure investment to applications in Web3, with sectors like gaming and real-world assets gaining focus, driven by advancements in stablecoins and blockchain performance

Bitcoin to $1M by 2029? The CIA Tips Its Hat to Crypto’s Staying Power (cosmicmeta.io, 2025-05-05). Bitcoin could reach $1 million by 2029, with institutional support growing as the CIA acknowledges its stability and potential as a global reserve asset amid increasing economic instability and limited supply

Rewriting Old Narratives (an excerpt) (seanbonner.com, 2025-05-05). Sean Bonner discusses the evolving understanding of CryptoPunks' airdrop and claiming history, revealing nuances in transaction handling and the need for both V1 and V2 contracts for accurate provenance

The Illusion of Easy Money: Why Memecoins Always Burn the Retail Investor (bitquery.io, 2025-05-02). Memecoins often deceive retail investors, driven by volatility and social media hype, while whales exploit low liquidity and high-speed trading infrastructure for profit, leaving new traders as exit liquidity

Programmable Derivatives: a Vision for Variational's Future (quant.am, 2025-05-06). Variational aims to enable programmable derivatives markets on any data source, offering infrastructure for the trade lifecycle, utilizing the Variational Protocol, and fostering permissionless financial networks for innovative market creation

TON Security Primer: Part 1 (zellic.io, 2025-04-30). Explore TON's unique blockchain design, emphasizing its smart contract paradigm, stateful actors, asynchronicity, and cell structure while examining security implications compared to EVM-based ecosystems

Solana at SXSW: Lessons from crypto’s fastest-growing ecosystem (foundationcapital.com, 2025-05-05). In a discussion at SXSW, Solana's Raj Gokal highlights crucial lessons learned during market downturns, emphasizing direct user engagement, leveraging unexpected use cases, and fostering innovation through constraints and a willingness to fail

Why I 'Don't Like' Privacy (paragraph.com, 2025-05-05). The narrative around 'privacy' in crypto overlooks its complexities. Using concepts like control, cryptography, and zero-knowledge proofs can better define the empowerment and sovereignty central to decentralized systems

Human or Bot? The Challenges of Verifying Identity in Crypto (cryptoresearch.report, 2025-05-01). The rise of cryptocurrencies challenges online identity verification, necessitating advanced solutions like cryptographic approaches and behavioral analysis to distinguish real humans from increasingly sophisticated bots and synthetic identities

Can Blockchain Bridge the Trust Gap in SEWA’s Healthcare Network? (platform.coop, 2025-04-30). A blockchain-backed initiative by the SEWA Federation aims to resolve documentation issues that hinder marginalized women’s access to healthcare services in India through a secure Digital Health Passport system

Clementine: A Collateral-Efficient, Trust-Minimized, and Scalable Bitcoin Bridge (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-30). Clementine introduces a secure Bitcoin bridge utilizing BitVM2, enabling efficient, trust-minimized peg-outs, scaling transactions, and enhancing interoperability among zk-rollups while maintaining a robust 50% hash rate security assumption

Publicly Auditable Garbled Circuit (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-30). This paper introduces a Publicly Auditable Garbled Circuit protocol, which is maliciously secure, constant-round, and efficient, bridging the gap in public verifiability for Generic Secure Multiparty Computation in blockchain applications

DNDK: Combining Nonce and Key Derivation for Fast and Scalable AEAD (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-05-02). DNDK combines nonce and key derivation for AEAD schemes, enabling the secure encryption of up to 2^64 bytes of data with minimal overhead, using a derived-key, derived-nonce approach and implemented in DNDK-GCM

Identity-Based Ring Signature from Quantum Token (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-05-03). Quantum-tokenized identity-based ring signature scheme introduces dynamic user participation, with strong existential unforgeability, anonymous authentication, and versatile signature delegation, enhancing security through obfuscated membership-checking circuits

Universally Composable On-Chain Quadratic Voting for Liquid Democracy (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-05-05). The proposed protocol enables quadratic voting in decentralized governance, ensuring privacy, fairness, and verifiability while adhering to Universal Composability under the DDH assumption, demonstrating linear scalability in performance testing

Micro-Patterns in Solidity Code (arxiv:cs, 2025-05-02). Micro-patterns in Solidity, including Security and Optimization patterns, enhance smart contract development. With 99% of analyzed contracts using these patterns, Storage Saver had the highest adoption rate among 18 identified micro-patterns

Security Analysis and Implementation of Cryptocurrency Systems on Blockchain 2.0 (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-30). Blockchain 2.0 enhances decentralization with smart contracts, offering automatic execution but introducing vulnerabilities. This analysis explores Ethereum's security challenges and provides insights for constructing safer cryptocurrency contracts

Bitcoin, a DAO? (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-29). This paper analyzes Bitcoin as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), exploring its governance through proposals like Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) and miner signaling while highlighting risks of economic power concentration

Starfish: Rebalancing Multi-Party Off-Chain Payment Channels (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-29). Starfish introduces a rebalancing approach for multi-party off-chain payment channels, leveraging a star-shaped network to improve efficiency and capacity, reducing the complexity of on-chain operations compared to existing techniques

Leveraging Surplus Electricity: Profitability of Bitcoin Mining as a National Strategy in South Korea (arxiv:stat, 2025-05-01). This study evaluates Bitcoin mining profitability in South Korea using surplus electricity, incorporating tools like the Antminer S21 XP Hyd and models such as Random Forest Regressor and Long Short-Term Memory for price prediction

Pricing options on cryptocurrency futures (ecmiindmath.org, 2025-05-01). A comprehensive comparison of six option pricing models for Bitcoin and Ether futures, including Black-Scholes, Merton Jump Diffusion, and Variance Gamma, highlights their effectiveness and challenges in capturing crypto market dynamics