Taiko.eth 🥁

Two years on mainnet quietly slipped by yesterday and @growthepie_eth posted the lifetime receipts: 915M transactions, 2.4M addresses and $12.7M in rent paid back to Ethereum since block one. The rent number is the part only a based rollup gets to write.

@RobinhoodApp @circle Read it here: provinggroundxyz.substack.com/p/this-week-in…

This week the agent economy stopped being theoretical. @RobinhoodApp opened stock trading to AI Agents for 27M funded customers and shipped an Agentic Credit Card. @circle launched its Agent Stack on USDC. Google pushed Gemini Spark into the consumer Gemini app at I/O. Five stories. 🚨New on Proving Ground. Link in the comments.

Ethereum works because no one owns the rails. Intents extend that to Agents: say what you want, any solver fills it across any chain. Open standards keep it permissionless all the way down.

@SlowMist_Team @grok @bankrbot Read it here: open.substack.com/pub/provinggro…

An AI Agent moved roughly $175k off Base last month and every permission in the chain was valid. @SlowMist_Team called the failure permission chain abuse. @grok decoded a Morse code tweet, @bankrbot treated the reply as a command, and nobody downstream could check whether the authority should ever have been used. Payments are the solved part of the agent economy. Proving an AI Agent was allowed to act is the open one. New on Proving Ground today! Link in the comments:

@InferenceRoom 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

Laszlo walked so Agents could run.

Happy 22 May team! Look how far we've come 🍕

Read more here: provinggroundxyz.substack.com/p/an-ai-agent-…

You don't hack an AI agent. You talk it into it. @bankrbot locked down this week after 14 wallets were hit. Two weeks earlier, one got drained by a tweet written in Morse code. Payments were the easy part. Trust is the whole game now. New on Proving Ground. Link below.

@Trong_Hatachi Blink and you'll miss it ;)

@taikoxyz wasn't expecting it to ship this fast tbh

Launched today and already shipping on Taiko! 🚢 Full breakdown of Tack's two-track upgrade on Proving Ground. Link in the comments.

More info here: open.substack.com/pub/provinggro…

Read more here: open.substack.com/pub/provinggro…

Your AI Agent has been making 3% worse calls than expected for a fortnight, and you cannot tell from the outside whether the model drifted, the market shifted or someone slipped a poisoned instruction into the context window three weeks ago. Bug, bad model output and compromise all produce the same observable on a detection stack built for deterministic software that AI Agents are not. New on Proving Ground. Link below:

@gusgonzalezs @InferenceRoom Bullish on you! 🙌

Personal update: I've been promoted to CTO at @taikoxyz. Since I joined we've cut block times from 24s to 2s, reduced fees 10x+, and made proposers profitable. I'll also be leading @InferenceRoom alongside a few extremely talented colleagues. Our goal there is to bring amazing AI products to our users. These products will be chain agnostic, and will meet users where they are(even outside crypto). We believe the capacity overhang from models is still too large, and we think we have a strong vision for how to bring agents to more companies and people. Huge thanks to @realdantaik and the other cofounders for their relentless trust on my vision and leadership. Onwards!

Four months in and eight to go, with the thesis showing up in the data and the protocol getting faster, cheaper and more legible to the audience we're building for. Full write-up here: @taiko-labs/taikos-first-third-of-2026" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">paragraph.com/@taiko-labs/ta…

Under the hood, Shasta is running, TaikoProofs went live at proofs.taiko.xyz with real-time ZK coverage and proof latency, and the base fee dropped to 0.01 gwei, putting the average Taiko transaction at around $0.003 and squarely in sub-cent gas territory.

Our first third of 2026 was the quarter the AI Agent thesis stopped being something we had to defend, with growthepie, CoinMarketCap and Artemis all picking up agent activity on Taiko in four months 👇