Hey folks! This week: The STABLE Act, the VPU chip beating NVIDIA, zkTLS on the rise, and a DIY SSD upgrade for your Mac Mini, among other things.
News
What we're seeing.
STABLE Act bans yield-bearing stablecoins, enforces 1:1 reserves. The draft legislation released yesterday requires stablecoin issuers to maintain full reserves, while creating a two-tier regulatory framework allowing states to certify their own regimes (if they meet federal standards). Algorithmic stablecoins face a two-year ban, with providers given a grace period to register under the new rules.
Fabric's new VPU outperforms NVIDIA's RTX 4090 by up to 111x. Preliminary benchmarks show Fabric's specialized Vector Processing Unit achieving remarkable speedups across cryptographic tasks, with NTT operations 38.7x faster and EVCHECK operations 111.1x faster than the RTX 4090. These improvements could make zero-knowledge proofs "very fast and ridiculously cheap."
Succinct's SP1 v4.1.4 released with improved gas estimation and invocation tracking. The update also includes fixes to CI pipeline issues, Blake3 implementation for hashing, and improvements to the SDK that allow setting gas limits for networks.
zkTLS adoption grows, Reclaim powering multiple projects. Zero-knowledge TLS is gaining traction with Reclaim Protocol now being used by over a dozen projects.
Pluto launches onchain verifier for web proofs. Pluto's new onchain verifier enables cryptographic proofs to be verified directly on blockchain networks, starting with deployment on Base Sepolia testnet. The system allows for trustless verification through a contract that manages trusted notaries and verification processes. There is a walkthrough here and helper functions available in their GitHub repository.
Lambdaworks adds binary field support with tower-based approach. The implementation represents field elements as polynomials over GF(2), enabling arithmetic in GF(2^(2^n)). The design allows different field extensions to coexist within the same struct, optimizing operations to work simultaneously across all levels.
Mainframe Intermezzo
Mainframe computers from the 1960s are underrated in their beauty.
In the 1960s, the CDC 3000 mainframes were cutting-edge machines powering scientific and engineering breakthroughs, costing between $300k and $2M back then—between $3M and $22M in today’s dollars.
The top-performing CDC 3800, a room-sized mainframe, achieved around 1M FLOPS. A modern $1k smartphone in 2025 enjoys more than 1T FLOPS, outperforming it by a factor of 1M.
Research
What we're studying.
Deep Semantic Versioning for Evolution and Variability (2021). As release cycles get shorter, developers struggle to manage code changes safely across multiple versions. In traditional version control systems, changes are just text differences between files, lacking deeper meaning. Carvalho and Seco make versioning a part of the code itself. Their system embeds version information directly in the program, allowing developers to define how different versions relate and how objects transform between versions. Their key innovation is a "slicing procedure" that can extract correct code for any specific version from a multi-version codebase, ensuring everything works properly. This could improve how developers manage product lines and handle complicated version upgrades.
Data Exploration Through Dot-Driven Development (2017). Exploring data requires either error-prone spreadsheets or complex programming that's hard for beginners. Petricek introduces "dot-driven development" using a tool called a "pivot type provider" that makes data exploration simpler. When you type a dot after your data, the computer automatically suggests only valid operations you can perform, preventing mistakes and eliminating the need to memorize complex commands. This approach unifies many different programming concepts into a single consistent pattern where you just keep selecting from menus after typing dots. Pretty cool.
Perspectives
What we're discussing.
Custom M4 Mac Mini SSD upgrade. These people made a legally compliant, user-upgradable SSD for M4 Mac Mini, which does not require microsoldering. They redesigned it from scratch to avoid legal issues, while maintaining full compatibility and even improving performance in some dimensions.
Intel mandates 512-bit support for AVX10.2 across all cores. Intel has confirmed that all AVX10.2 processors will support 512-bit operations, a significant shift from earlier designs where it was optional. This change is awesome, especially for targeting software running on consumer devices, as it promises improved performance and programming simplicity while supporting x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels.
Trump faces existential dilemma in judicial opposition. Charles Haywood argues that the success of Trump's executive actions is "an existential question, which will determine whether the future of America is renewal or war." He contends that left-leaning judges are illegitimately thwarting Trump's constitutional powers, particularly in immigration and national defense, areas where executive authority has traditionally been acknowledged. Haywood thinks Trump must decide whether to follow the traditional appeals process, or take more dramatic action to reassert executive authority—potentially including threats to the judiciary or outright rejection of court decisions.
That's all for this week. Hit reply if you have any comments, feedback, or want to share what you're working on!
