Ken DiCross

The best events in the industry that I’ve been to 🔥

Compare Wire’s blockchain to any others in the space. Then try to find a better one 🔥

It appears people are discovering you can now: 1. Run a Hermes agent 2. Using the Morpheus API 3. Powered by Venice‘s private inference. The DeAI tech stack takes shape.

@0xSammy 😂😂😂 Why are we so excited to live in this centralized world? How about champion the company that solved trustless and decentralized chain abstraction? It’s called @WireNetwork and it’s Universal Transaction Layer. And it’s not just 9 chains…it’s all of them✅

Visa is quietly building the foundations for trillions of dollars in agentic activity I’ll explain: 1) Base is described in Visa’s own release as built for “agentic commerce”, that’s not accidental wording, Coinbase has been positioning Base as the chain where AI agents transact 2) Agents need machine-speed, machine-priced settlement: - traditional card rails settle in T+1 to T+2 with human-scale fees (I know Ramp/Tempo MPP are experimenting with “tokens” or cards for agents, but it’s early) - stablecoins on fast chains settle in seconds at fractions of a cent, this is the only viable rail for high-frequency agent-to-agent or agent-to-merchant payments 3) An agent doesn’t have a bank account, it has a wallet, Visa becoming the settlement layer across nine chains means an agent can pay any Visa-connected merchant from any supported chain without the merchant needing to care which chain or which stablecoin 4) Visa abstracts the chain, which is exactly what agents need, an agent shouldn’t have to negotiate “do you accept USDC on Base or USDP on Solana”, the settlement layer handles it 5) This pairs with the x402 / MPP (Machine payment protocol) momentum, the missing piece has been a trusted settlement counterparty that merchants already have integrations with, Visa is volunteering for that role 6) The $7B run rate today is almost entirely human-initiated B2B settlement, the agentic layer is the second curve, and it’s plausibly larger because agent transaction frequency dwarfs human frequency 7) Tempo’s inclusion fits here too, real-time liquidity routing is a requirement for agent commerce where you can’t pre-fund every chain There’s significant upside for those that build the global infrastructure of the new era of agentic finance It’s just a matter of establishing how to participate in the upside; understanding where the trillions of dollars in economic value will accrue

@debificom Three failures, three attack surfaces, one week. Bridge multisig, oracle feed, web interface. Each protocol has a different single-trust-source bolted on, and one is enough to drain it. We're working on designs where the trust surface is smaller and shared, not stacked.

@Fairu_90 @PushChain Right diagnosis. Liquidity is split because every chain has to import balances via a bridge. UX depends on bridges because there's no shared settlement underneath. Solve settlement at the layer below the chains and both problems collapse. That's what we're building.

Where chain abstraction lives matters. Hiding bridges behind nicer UX still ships the bridge risk. Doing it at the settlement layer, where a contract on one chain can call one on another natively, is the version that actually retires the wrapped-token era.

On Wire, assets stay on their native chain. The Universal Transaction Layer coordinates cross-chain calls, but the asset itself never gets wrapped or bridged. Settlement happens where the asset actually lives. That's the design.

The bigger threat surface most protocols miss: the oracle sits behind the same single verification path as the bridge. One compromise, two failure modes, looks like two incidents. Dual-consensus settlement collapses that path. That's the work worth doing.

DeFi is due for stronger architecture. When assets stay on their native chain and ownership transacts under dual-consensus, whole categories of losses stop being architecturally possible. Builders are doing this work.

The reason these hacks are happening is because barely anyone shares Wire’s values. This document is from March 2024. Wire has been building the Universal Transaction Layer since 2020 which is a trustless, bridgeless, universal interoperability technology. Once companies start building with these values, like we have, the hacks plummet. Until then, what we see now will continue.

Better (innovation) is extremely difficult. We had space rockets since the 60s. Elon wanted a reusable one. That took 13 years. Wire Network has spent 6 years creating a tech stack that will significantly improve security and usability in our industry. True innovation takes time. Btw, we are just putting on the final coat of paint on the Universal Transaction Layer but we ship it later this summer. But it’s much more than a transaction layer. It’s security and determinism.

Hyperbridge lost over $2.5M Rhea Finance got hit for $7.6M $9.5M stolen via a fake Ledger Live app CoWSwap over $1M gone That's just THIS WEEK And we're only counting the 7 figure hacks How much has to burn before we demand better?

Many videos of me speaking about this on stage in 2023 and 2024 at DeAI events. It was always inevitable. Open source will always ship their best models. Centralized will turn it into the iPhone. Slightly better camera, little bit bigger battery. Never what it’s capable of. “It’s too powerful and, therefore, dangerous in the hands of the general population.”

Interesting that they are now showing these benchmarks side-by-side with Mythos, to reinforce that you do not have access to the most intelligent model. I always wondered when we'd get here. But we have now for the first time entered the undemocratic era of AI. You are not important enough to have access to the greatest intelligence, and Anthropic wants you to know that.

Most validator rankings are someone's spreadsheet with extra steps. Ours is fully on-chain. No backend, no admin override. You can't game your commission down for a week then jack it back up. The chain remembers. Top performers get stake delegation programmatically.

Another "decentralized" protocol got exploited because one off-chain key controlled minting. No hard caps. No multisig. No rate limits. $100K in, 50M unbacked tokens out. Token hit $0.02. Protocol paused.

AI agents that can operate across every chain without bridges. That's the goal. @AtenKrotos from ZKAGI in the Wire Incubator on what Wire Network makes possible.

@KOREIT_IO @WuBlockchain @WireNetwork It is. We are in a technical industry where most aren’t technical and don’t understand the requirements actually needed for it to function safely and properly.

@KenDicross @WuBlockchain @WireNetwork Ken, is independent thinking really that rare these days? 😌 Bro saw a sensible take and got concerned 😭

Just In: Hackers minted 1 billion DOT tokens on the Ethereum mainnet and then sold them off. According to Certik, the attack was primarily due to a Hyperbridge gateway vulnerability, which allowed attackers to forge messages and manipulate the administrator of a Polkadot token contract on Ethereum, profiting approximately $237k.

@KOREIT_IO @WuBlockchain Is this an anonymous account of one of my devs from @WireNetwork 😂

Bridges fail when minting is based on messages not tied to real locked assets on the source chain. Multi-layer proofs, admin controls and monitoring alone don’t fix that. Security comes from binding asset state, verification, and minting into a single, enforceable system, otherwise you’re validating messages, not value.

Trustless and decentralized systems are going to win. Centralized systems can always get an early advantage cuz they centralize the hard parts and ship product quickly…but you are seeing the inherent flaw they can’t escape from. Dont misinterpret Web2 companies labeling themselves Web3. If it’s not trustless and decentralized it’s not Web3. Simple litmus test.

ZachXBT just dropped receipts on Circle and $420 million in illicit funds not frozen since 2022… But I think many are missing the important message here: The real issue is that centralized stablecoins are fundamentally broken and that we have strayed too far from Web3 ideals Using centralized stablecoins that can be frozen, burned, or wiped at any given time. Seriously? Basically just a CBDC in disguise. What are we doing?!? Anyways, the Drift exploit is the headliner with $285 million in stolen USDC moved through Circle's own CCTP bridge for 6+ hours during US business hours. Easy to see and easy to track and nothing done While the same company froze 16 unrelated business wallets last month for a sealed civil case Instantly with no public explanation 🤨 So the freeze button works. It just works selectively and is controlled by a single entity. Here's what most are missing though Circle isn't just being hypocritical. They're trapped in a lose lose situation. Freeze too much? Centralized dystopia Freeze too little? Enabling crime They freeze when there's clear legal authority Court orders Sealed cases Government pressure But a real-time exploit? That's messy and possibly a liability risk Does that excuse $420 million in inaction? No. But the real issue is that we built an entire ecosystem dependent on centralized gatekeepers and we don’t think twice about it Don’t know about you but thats not the Web3 I signed up for!