Agentic payments is very early, and we still are figuring out the best way to structure these. So our team just came up with what we thought was the most elegant, minimal, efficient protocol that anyone can extend without our permission.
Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It's a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight.
What I walked through wasn't just an immigration gate. It was a node in a rapidly expanding global infrastructure of digital identity, one being constructed at extraordinary speed, across dozens of countries, by a mix of governments, multilateral organizations, and private technology vendors. The people building it believe they are solving real problems: fraud, statelessness, inefficient public services, financial exclusion.
As HousingWire recently reported, the fragmentation across 3,000-plus local registries has created a multibillion-dollar opening for deed fraud. When ownership data is siloed and verification relies on manual oversight, the system becomes a playground for bad actors. Digitization was supposed to fix this, but moving a paper deed to a PDF doesn't change the underlying vulnerability. If a fraudulent signature is recorded digitally, the speed of the system simply makes the fraud harder to claw back.
Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum's de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift. Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too.
According to data from Statista, approximately 67% of Roblox users were under the age of 17 - and the vast majority were under the age of 13 - in September 2020. Now that distribution appears to be shifting - there now appear to be more daily active users (DAUs) over the age of 13 than below. At the same time, Roblox has been falling short of its financial goals; the company's most recent financial report shows that it missed both its top and bottom lines.
Even worse than that, the DOJ noted in its filing, email evidence shows that a pair of DOGE employees at SSA were approached by a political advocacy group asking them to help the group find evidence of voter fraud in a bid to overturn state-level elections. One of the DOGE employees even signed a "voter data agreement," the contents of which weren't explained in the filing, with the unnamed group.
The blockchain is coming to Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said on Monday that it was developing a platform to trade tokenized securities, digital representations of assets like stocks and bonds. But exactly when the 233-year-old financial institution will turn it on is still up in the air. Supporters of the technology argue that the change could modernize the NYSE, giving traders some of the same advantages that are enjoyed by investors in the cryptocurrency world.
On most modern blockchains, transaction data is publicly viewable in the mempool before it is sequenced, executed and confirmed in a block. This transparency creates avenues for sophisticated parties to engage in extractive practices known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). MEV exploits the block proposer's ability to reorder, include or omit transactions for financial gain.
MEV is especially notorious on Ethereum, where it continues to be extracted at a rate equivalent to 11% of block rewards. Data shows that nearly $300,000 was lost in sandwich attacks in September. This reveals that MEV is a recurring hidden fee, not a minor inefficiency, hitting large trades hardest in volatile markets.