Crypto: 19th August 2025

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Published 19th August 2025

📣 Headlines

Gemini files for IPO on Nasdaq Global Select Market, with the Winklevoss twins' crypto exchange reporting 2024 net losses of $158.5M on $142.2M revenue.

Former Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon pleads guilty to fraud in US court, connected to the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies that caused over $40bn in investor losses.

• Recent crypto developments include Trump's crypto empire, PancakeSwap, USD1 coins, and World Liberty Financial gaining attention in the broader crypto ecosystem.

🏛️ Policy & Financial Systems

Would a Blockchain have prevented LIBOR fraud? (shkspr​.mobi). Explores whether blockchain technology could have prevented LIBOR fraud, discussing its decentralization, immutability, and the limitations of blockchain in financial rate manipulation and real-world data verification

We accidentally built the wrong internet (karimjedda​.com). Thought experiment contrasts centralized identity (email/password) with a modern tap-to-auth and pay system, explores security/privacy failures, and advocates self-sovereign identity, passkeys, and social recovery

Criminal dollars, Trump’s crypto trapdoor, and Dalek solicitors (codastory​.com). Explores criminal money laundering via cash, crypto, sanctions evasion by Iran, U.S. policy impacts, British legal ethics, oligarchs' wealth, and societal inequality effects

Issue 90 – Crime szn bro (citationneeded​.news). The article explores Trump-era cryptocurrency policy, focusing on Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm's conviction, the expansion of Patriot Act measures, regulation efforts by SEC and CFTC, and legal cases involving crypto privacy, fraud, and NFTs

Scott Bessent rules out Bitcoin purchases, CPI low: right again (greyenlightenment​.com). Scott Bessent rules out Bitcoin purchases for US strategic reserve; CPI 2.7% surprise; Trump AI investment plans and market reactions; Bitcoin hedging and long tech stocks profitable amid price moves

The Battle Over Traceability: stablecoins, digital VAT and concepts of sovereignty (trfetzer​.com). VAT as state transparency, stablecoins as private traceability; digital VAT, VIDA, invoice metadata, DLT, USDC/USDT, private rails, digital identity, OECD/UN DCO governance, currency sovereignty, financial nationalism

⚡ Development & Architecture

How Keeta processes 11 million financial transactions per second with Spanner (cloud​.google​.com). Keeta Network, a DAG-based layer-1, processes cross-chain transactions with KYC/AML, asset tokenization, and digital identity on Spanner, achieving 11.1M TPS in a verified stress test

“My biggest lesson was realizing that domain expertise matters more than algorithmic complexity.“ (towardsdatascience​.com). Claudia Ng highlights domain expertise over algorithmic novelty in a Web3 credit scoring challenge, emphasizing MVP delivery, problem-driven consulting, multilingual AI learning products, and TTS for endangered languages

From Persistent to Ephemeral: Why AI Agents Need Fresh Identity for Every Mission (unmitigatedrisk​.com). AI agents as user proxies require fresh, mission-scoped identity discs; cryptographic attestation replaces bearer tokens, orchestrator I/O Tower-like management, memory isolation, and session credentials

They Turned Everything Into a Metric, Then Gamed Every Metric Into Meaninglessness (medium​.com/intuitionmachine). Explores how reward hacking in metrics like finance, education, and social media leads to systemic collapse, contrasting Western extraction models with emerging decentralized architectures and network states

Exploring the On-Chain Effects of Ethereum Treasuries (coinmetrics​.io). Analyzes ETH treasury impacts on on-chain supply dynamics, ecosystem, and network implications, highlighting large treasury movements, stablecoins, and Coin Metrics' analytics tools

Web3 Project Analysis Plan (en​.smallyu​.net). Weekly Web3 project analyses, white paper depth, on-chain/off-chain interactions, technical architecture, productization, AI-assisted code limits, Paragraph vs. Medium, Arweave-stored articles

🔐 Cryptography & Security

What’s in your wallet? (johndcook​.com). HD wallets derive private keys from a seed phrase (BIP39); Exodus backups rely on seed phrases; private keys versus metadata; hierarchical deterministic wallets; back up the seed phrase only

Recovering a permuted seed phrase (johndcook​.com). 12-word seed phrases, permutation distances, Cayley and Stirling numbers, transpositions, Kendall distance, exhaustive permutation counts (12! and beyond), and practical attack ordering for recovering permuted seeds

Monero faces 51% attack (web3isgoinggreat​.com). Monero faces a 51% attack threat as Qubic claims near-control over mining hashrate, causing chain reorganizations and raising concerns about network security and decentralization

Ed25519 Support in Chrome: Making the Web Faster and Safer (blog​.ipfs​.tech). Ed25519 in WebCrypto becomes browser default via Igalia collaboration; Chrome 137 (May 2025) joins Firefox and Safari, enabling lightweight, deterministic signatures for IPFS, UCANs, BeeHive, and Verified Fetch

📚 Academic Research

A Dual Framework for Optimized Data Storage and Retrieval using Lightweight Python Blockchain and Scalable Smart Contracts with IPFS (arxiv:math). Develops a lightweight Python blockchain and scalable smart contracts to optimize IPFS-based data storage, retrieval, and migration for IoT applications with improved efficiency

Banking 2.0: The Stablecoin Banking Revolution -- How Digital Assets Are Reshaping Global Finance (arxiv:econ). Stablecoins reshape Banking 2.0 by integrating crypto innovation with traditional finance, enabling global transactions, reduced fraud, GENIUS Act 2025, Pay with Crypto, JPMorgan pivots, and PayPal services

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