Crypto: 7th October 2025

• UK police seized 61,000 BTC worth over £5bn after a Chinese woman was convicted, in what's being called the world's biggest bitcoin seizure.

• Privacy-focused browser adoption grows as Brave hits 100M monthly users and 1.6B monthly search queries.

• VC markets rebounded with AI driving a 38% surge to $97B in Q3, with megarounds dominating late-stage deal flow.

• Major labels near deals to license music to AI platforms, with Universal and Warner pushing streaming-like payments across Google, Spotify, Suno, Udio and others.

• Opera unveiled an AI-centric Neon browser with agentic workflows (Tasks, Neon Do) and prompts.

• OpenAI reversed course on Sora IP, giving rights holders more control and takedown options for character use.

• In the AI hardware arms race, AMD will supply six gigawatts of GPUs to OpenAI starting with MI450s in 2026, challenging Nvidia’s dominance.

Checkpoint #6: Oct 2025 (blog​.ethereum​.org). Glamsterdam headliners enshrined: ePBS and BAL, Fusaka testnet progress, and gas limit push beyond 60M with Hoodi and Pectra lessons

Futureverse announces restructuring two years after raising $54 million (web3isgoinggreat​.com). Futureverse restructures to focus on AI, omitting blockchain, NFTs, and metaverse plans after $54M Series A and Candy Digital acquisition talk

Abracadabra loses more "Magic Internet Money" to third hack in two years (web3isgoinggreat​.com). Abracadabra’s $1.8M hack follows two prior breaches, involving a contract bug, Tornado Cash laundering, and treasury buyback

Ethena 2026: Attack the Titans (medium​.com/@kido​.kim). Ethena 2025 updates: ENA demand, Converge, Hyperliquid, SAAS, sENA rewards, and plans to become a true stablecoin

Scam Cities (asteriskmag​.com). Myanmar’s Shwe Kokko Yatai city hosts crypto-enabled scams, forced labor, and regional SEZs fueling cyber fraud across Southeast Asia

Memorizing a list of seed words (johndcook​.com). Memorizing seed phrases with peg systems and the Major system; uses BIP39 word list, shuf command, and mnemonic recall techniques

Reimplementing PKCS#11 module (blog​.ubavic​.rs). Reimplementing PKCS#11 module: reverse engineering Smart Box, PKCS#11, Go, Zig, OpenSSL, Wireshark, CCID, ISO 7816, and smart cards

Cashing out (greaterfool​.ca). Canada’s Bill C-2 bans cash payments over $10,000, explores CBDCs, privacy, and fears of digital control and surveillance

The Gaslit Asset Class (blog​.dshr​.org). Explores digital cash, Nakamoto's vision, trustless systems, and Proof-of-Work as foundational concepts

Bitcoin Faces Its 1913 Moment (bombthrower​.com). Bitcoin debates Core vs Knots echo early 1913 Fed debates on centralization, with ordinals, protocol inflation, and fee themes framing sound money vs central control

Bitcoin update: three negative factors, and more correct predictions (greyenlightenment​.com). Bitcoin remains volatile; three negative factors include no progress on a Bitcoin reserve, Treasury rejection, and UK police seizure of 6.5B in Bitcoin

Bitcoin Is the Wheel, Everything Else Is Sledges (anitaposch​.com). Bitcoin as the wheel of money, contrasting with sledges like Papss and institutional finance in Africa and beyond

Privacy Cluster Leadership Announcement (blog​.ethereum​.org). Ethereum Foundation announces leadership for Privacy @ EF, appointing Igor Barinov and Andy Guzman to lead PSE across research, product, and engineering

Intel and AMD trusted enclaves, the backbone of network security, fall to physical attacks (arstechnica​.com). Battering RAM and Wiretap interposers exploit deterministic memory encryption in SGX and SEV-SNP to read, replay, or backdoor data

An open letter to llms.txt (olshansky​.info). Proposes a 'Leave a Tip' section in llms.txt to enable micropayments for content creators via Ethereum, Zcash, and USDC on Base

The Decentralized Future of Private AI with Illia Polosukhin - #749 (twimlai​.com). Illia Polosukhin discusses private, decentralized AI with NEAR-like confidential computing and verifiable inference

QScale: Probabilistic Chained Consensus for Moderate-Scale Systems (arxiv:cs). QScale achieves sub-linear per-block and sub-quadratic total communication with probabilistic chained consensus for moderate-scale ledgers (hundreds to thousands of processes)

ZK-WAGON: Imperceptible Watermark for Image Generation Models using ZK-SNARKs (arxiv:cs). ZK-WAGON uses ZK-SNARKs to watermark GAN and diffusion models, enabling verifiable origin proofs without exposing weights or prompts

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