Crypto: 30th September 2025
📣 Headlines
• The UK will roll out a mandatory GOV.UK Wallet digital ID by 2029, a move likely to influence eID, KYC, and on-chain identity interoperability.
• The EU opened inquiries into Apple, Google and Microsoft over scam prevention under the DSA, signaling potential tightening of crypto advertising, app-store policies, and anti-fraud UX.
• The US–TikTok deal advances as Trump signs an order to keep the app in the US with Oracle-managed data security and Abu Dhabi’s MGX takes a 15% stake in TikTok US, highlighting data-localization and foreign-ownership constraints that could echo into crypto platforms.
• The Secret Service disrupted a covert SIM network of 300 servers and 100,000 SIMs, underscoring the fragility of SMS OTP and the need for hardware keys/passkeys for crypto account security.
• A security lapse exposed 273,000 Indian bank transfer PDFs across 38 banks on an unsecured AWS server, escalating KYC/PII leakage risks relevant to exchange onboarding and anti-fraud.
• Aikido acquired Allseek and Haicker to deliver autonomous, continuous AI-driven penetration tests, promising sub-hour assessments and real-time exploit-path mapping for exchange and protocol security teams.
• Greptile raised $25M for AI-powered code validation, adding momentum to automated code review/CI pipelines for high-stakes software like smart contracts.
• Developers are adopting Apple’s on-device Foundation Models in iOS 26 apps, strengthening private, low-latency wallet assistants, transaction explainers, and edge threat detection.
🧩 Decentralized Social & Indie Web
Open Social (overreacted.io). Open Social: AT Protocol (atproto) and personal data repos enable user-owned data, domain handles, and interoperable social apps
Indie Web Before Web3: Owning Your Domain Since 2001 (brajeshwar.com). How owning a personal domain since 2001 echoess indie web values ahead of Web3, with FTP, hosting, RSS, and portable identities
The ‘New’ Social Media (transmutableexplorations.com). Explores blockchain-based, decentralized social media with Farcaster, Zora, creator coins, wallets, and interoperability
ENS, Blogs, and IPFS Walk into a Bar (bearblog.stevedylan.dev). Explores ENS, IPFS, blogs, and RSS as a resilient decentralized web stack
⚖️ Policy, Regulation & Geopolitics
Cryptocurrency, Collapsing Governments and Captain James T. Kirk (battlepenguin.com). Analysis of Charlie Kirk assassination narrative, Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm case, Nepal/UK digital regulation, and global media manipulation
The Tehran-Washington Crypto Connection (codastory.com). Explores USDT, Tether’s US-based stablecoin, USAT, Hines' switch from White House role to Tether, and Iran's use of USDT for oil sales amid sanctions
What Would the New Crypto “Market Structure” Bills Do, and What Dangers Do They Pose? (rooseveltinstitute.org). House and Senate market-structure crypto bills create weak investor protections and expand CFTC oversight with broad exemptions
Comparing Oranges to Onions: What Is Crypto “Market Structure,” and Why Is It Important? (rooseveltinstitute.org). Explains crypto market structure, SEC vs CFTC regulation, Howey test, securities vs commodities, and regulatory implications for Bitcoin and other assets
🔧 Protocol Design, Cryptography & Mechanisms
Fusaka Testnet Announcement (blog.ethereum.org). Fusaka testnet activates with PeerDAS, Blob-Parameter-Only forks, ModExp optimizations, and network upgrades across Holesky, Sepolia, and Hoodi
Silent Payments (johndcook.com). Silent payments use ECDH to create one-time-style addresses for donations, concealing sender–receiver link while revealing public B for address derivation
Threshold Signatures for Central Bank Digital Currencies (lars.hupel.info). Threshold ECDSA for CBDCs: CGGMP21 in Filia, KMN architecture, DKG, pre-signing, and end-to-end performance measurements
Incentives & Outcomes in Humans, AI, and Crypto (olshansky.info). Incentives across humans, AI, and crypto; Parkinson’s Law, bonuses, loss aversion, RL reward functions, and Proof-of-Stake mechanics
Value Derivations (benmilne.com). Explores ValueType and TransferType abstractions, stablecoins, protocols as transfer derivations, and onchain rails shaping global, instant liquidity
🛡️ Security Incidents, Fraud & Governance
crates.io: Malicious crates faster_log and async_println (blog.rust-lang.org). Rust crates.io reports malicious faster_log and async_println crates exfiltrating data and using typosquatting to imitate legitimate logging crates
UXLINK exploited for around $28 million, then hacker gets phished (web3isgoinggreat.com). UXLINK breach minting billions, $28M cash-out, then phishing contract sent 542M tokens amid low liquidity
Police Arrest 5 in €100M Cross-Border Cryptocurrency Fraud Case (occrp.org). Five suspects arrested across Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria in €100M crypto fraud; funds diverted to Lithuania
It's Knot a Serious Project (blog.lopp.net). Controversial actions and statements by Luke Dashjr, Examining Knots leadership, security practices, and open-source governance issues
📈 Market Risk, Analysis & Industry Reflections
Cloudflare’s NET Dollar: AI Agents, Crypto Rails, and Web Payments (thejaymo.net). Cloudflare NET Dollar stablecoin and x402/A2A protocol integration enable AI agents to pay for services over HTTP rails
Reactions: Going Infinite, Michael Lewis (jackusher.com). Personal reflections on Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, SBF's behavior, crypto markets, and the FTX saga with calls for an Epilogue postmortem
It’s finally here (brendandawes.com). Brendan Dawes discusses NFTs, The Art of Cybersecurity, and The Dawesome Digest with notes on Aesthetic Magazine 2025 prize
Uncertainty Analysis: Gold vs. Bitcoin (datageeek.com). Uncertainty analysis compares gold and Bitcoin returns using monthly data and Gaussian uncertainty plots with R tools
📚 Academic Research
Generic Adversarial Smart Contract Detection with Semantics and Uncertainty-Aware LLM (arxiv:cs). FinDet: LLM-based generic adversarial smart-contract detection from EVM bytecode with semantic extraction and uncertainty-aware multi-round reasoning
LLMs as verification oracles for Solidity (arxiv:cs). GPT-5 evaluated as verification oracle for Solidity contracts, comparing with SolCMC and Certora Prover on real-world tasks
chainScale: Secure Functionality-oriented Scalability for Decentralized Resource Markets (arxiv:cs). chainScale: secure hybrid sidechain-sharding to boost throughput and reduce latency for decentralized resource markets with functional workload splitting
Voting-Bloc Entropy: A New Metric for DAO Decentralization (arxiv:cs). Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE) measures DAO decentralization by modeling voter similarity and centralizing blocs across voting rounds
Filtering amplitude dependence of correlation dynamics in complex systems: application to the cryptocurrency market (arxiv:stat). q-dependent detrended cross-correlation with qMSTs reveals fluctuation-size effects in evolving cryptocurrency networks
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