Lucas

Crypto Cards are bridging decentralized finance with real-world spending for professionals. These Visa/Mastercard-linked cards let you use crypto like cash globally, instantly, and often with big rewards. From high-yield staking perks to seamless DeFi integrations, let’s compare the top crypto platform cards transforming everyday payments.

ZK proofs are the foundation of everything we ship at Brevis. Pico zkVM, the ZK Data Coprocessor, Vera, and ProverNet all run on this one cryptographic primitive. Most explainers describe ZK proofs as "proving something without revealing it," and stop there. The actual mechanics usually stay in a black box. We wanted to open it up. Here are the six pieces that make a ZK proof work: 1⃣The Statement. What's being claimed, public and agreed upon before the proof exists. Could be "this computation ran correctly," "I'm over 18," or "this image was edited only in legitimate ways." 2⃣Public Inputs. The parts everyone sees. They bind the proof to a specific context so it can't be reused or replayed elsewhere. 3⃣The Witness. The private data the prover knows. Could be a private key, an account balance, or the original image before edits. The witness can be massive even when the resulting proof is tiny, and it never leaves the prover's machine. 4⃣Commitments. Cryptographic fingerprints that lock the prover into specific values without revealing what those values are. Once committed, the prover can't change their answer. 5⃣Challenges + Responses. The verifier asks questions, the prover answers in a way mathematically tied to the commitments. In modern ZK, this whole back-and-forth gets compressed into a single non-interactive proof using a cryptographic technique. 6⃣Final Proof Bytes. The package that actually gets transmitted. A few hundred bytes for a SNARK. Verifiable in milliseconds regardless of how heavy the original computation was. That last point is what makes the whole thing useful for blockchains. Expensive proving, cheap verification. One prover does the work, and everyone else checks the result for nearly free.

ANTHROPIC IS PAYING PEOPLE $3,850/WEEK TO LEARN AI SAFETY * No PhD or prior AI research experience required for the Fellows Program * Fellows work directly with Anthropic researchers on frontier AI problems * 80% published papers and 40% reportedly converted into full-time hires Devote the time to learning.

Ethereum is for shipping. Here are 22 things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced over the past month. 0/ Ethereum hit a new all-time high of 72.8 Million monthly transactions, the highest in network history. 1/ @ethereumfndn, @chainlink, and @Nethermind launched a $1M audit subsidy program to help Ethereum builders access high-quality security reviews. 2/ South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, Upbit, announced plans for GIWA Chain, an Ethereum L2 built on @Optimism. 3/ @AragonProject introduced Permissions Audits to help protocols secure roles, multisigs, and admin systems. 4/ @fileverse shipped Comments v2, improving the collaboration experience, with privacy by default. 5/ The Ethereum Applications Guild (@EthAppsGuild) launched to support Ethereum-native apps and real-world adoption. 6/ Privacy went live on @Optimism with confidential computing support on OP Mainnet. 7/ @StarkWareLtd brought native proof verification to Starknet mainnet with Shinobi, enabling private trading flows and OTC settlement. 8/ @worldcoin launched World ID 4.0, expanding proof of human credentials across apps, enterprises, and AI agents. 9/ Applications on Ethereum hit ~$310B in user deposits. 10/ @l2beat released a new interactive interoperability map showing how value moves across Ethereum’s expanding ecosystem. 11/ @AlchemixFi launched V3, the latest version of its self-repaying, non-liquidating loan product, with higher capital efficiency and improved peg mechanics. 12/ @OfficialMoonDAO raised $172k + from 157 contributors to send the man who coined the “overview effect” to space. 13/ @ethereumfndn announced the Road to @EFDevcon 8 Academic Program, supporting regional research and academic events ahead of Devcon. 14/ Ethereum core contributors gathered in Svalbard for Soldøgn Interop, a week-long event focused on hardening Glamsterdam implementations to help scale Ethereum securely. 15/ @basepaint_xyz hit 1,000 straight days of onchain art creation, with 121M+ pixels painted and $1.5M + distributed to 4,000+ artists. 16/ New Ethereum community hubs launched in Hong Kong and Floripa, growing local coordination and ecosystem activity across Asia and Latin America. 17/ The EF’s ETH Rangers public goods security program wrapped after helping recover or freeze $5.8M, reporting 785+ vulnerabilities, and identifying ~100 North Korean IT workers targeting Web3 teams. 18/ @centrifuge launched a tokenized S&P 500 fund on @base, bringing 24/7 onchain index exposure to non-U.S. users. 19/ @0xcatalysis launched Covered Vaults on Ethereum, DeFi vaults with built-in onchain risk coverage backed by delegated capital. 20/ @Uniswap processed $3T in all-time volume on Ethereum mainnet. 21/ @RAILGUN_Project hit $5 billion of total all time private volume.

0/ Clear signing is now live. An open standard to end blind signing, making human-readable transactions default. This effort brings a major UX and Security upgrade to transaction signing on Ethereum.

🔥 LATEST: Sui plans to launch confidential transactions, bringing free, private payments at scale to the entire internet this year.

Introducing GPT-Realtime-2 in the API: our most intelligent voice model yet, bringing GPT-5-class reasoning to voice agents. Voice agents are now real-time collaborators that can listen, reason, and solve complex problems as conversations unfold. Now available in the API alongside streaming models GPT-Realtime-Translate and GPT-Realtime-Whisper — a new set of audio capabilities for the next generation of voice interfaces.

Our security bug bounty program is now public on HackerOne. We've run the program privately within the security research community, and their findings have strengthened our products. Now anyone can report vulnerabilities and get rewarded. Read more: hackerone.com/anthropic

Claude for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word are now generally available, and Claude for Outlook is in public beta. As Claude moves between your Microsoft apps, it carries the full context of your conversation.

ANNOUNCING: PREDICTION MARKETS ON ARKHAM

How to Track Wallets on Bitcoin Because Bitcoin’s blockchain is fully public, anyone can track wallets using an address, TXID, or known counterparty. Arkham Intel helps users trace funds, monitor wallet activity, and visualize on-chain flows in real time. Check out our guide:

Hello Gracy. The community has not received any update about the investigation of RAVE. While now LAB is running yet another market manipulation scheme via Bitget spot. Every new token running similar scams only hurts the credibility of the industry further. Yes CEXs want fees generated by volume however is destroying retail traders the best way to drive it? (Also Binance/OKX/Bybit perps seems to be a potential source)

Arkham’s Guide to Blockchain Intelligence Blockchain intelligence tools like Arkham turn complex on-chain data into actionable insights - helping users track wallets, trace fund flows, and monitor whales. Our research team wrote a guide to blockchain intelligence. Check it out:

@Honeyxgpt Located the Indian scammer with 73 username changes pretending to be a woman from East Asia while farming engagement for a $50 paid group.

LATEST: Kelp claims that LayerZero approved the setup it blamed for $292 million bridge hack The exploit, linked to a North Korean hacker group, led Kelp to migrate its rsETH off LayerZero's OFT standard to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). @FranciscoMemor reports

⚠️ Ekubo exploited ⚠️ Earlier today, @EkuboProtocol reported an exploited vulnerability in their contracts, which was used to steal approved user funds. A full post-mortem is said to follow, but we've already created an exploit checker below 👇 revoke.cash/exploits/ekubo

Today we're launching Perplexity Computer for Professional Finance. Finance teams can bring licensed data from providers like Morningstar, PitchBook, Daloopa, and Carbon Arc into Computer. We’ve also added 35 dedicated finance workflows for the work analysts repeat every week.

Vitalik Buterin: Why Consortium Blockchains Have Almost Completely Failed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin @VitalikButerin declared the original vision of consortium blockchains a failure in a July 20, 2024 Arbitrum video. He noted that these private chains inherit the drawbacks of both centralized and decentralized systems, resulting in cartel-like structures devoid of real openness or privacy. As a viable alternative, Buterin proposed retrofitting existing centralized servers with cryptographic scaffolding—anchoring proofs and Merkle roots on-chain to enhance security without overhauling current infrastructure.

ON-CHAIN AI AGENTS: GUIDE Agentic payments let AI agents initiate and settle transactions autonomously. From Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal to x402 on Solana, we break down how they work, who’s building them, and how they can be tracked. Read our full guide below:

New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more. Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.