Peace be with you this Good Friday, and an early Happy Easter.
News
What we're seeing.
Aztec Launches Permissioned Sequencer & Prover Network. Aztec has reached a milestone toward their public testnet. Their current testnet has been running continuously for over a month with 120 participants, producing 70,000+ blocks.
Snarkify Claims June 2025 for Real-Time Ethereum Block Proving. Snarkify aims to prove every Ethereum block with ZK proofs, within Ethereum's 12-second block time, using GPU acceleration and SP1 Turbo.
Base's "Content Coin" Prompts Protest. Base tokenized a post on Zora as an artistic "Content Coin," not intended as an investment. Despite clear disclaimers, speculative trading drove the token's value to $17 million before it crashed 95%, sparking accusations of a pump-and-dump. Base insists it was an experimental effort to normalize on-chain content.
Reclaim Protocol Advances zkTLS for iOS. Reclaim continues building developer resources bringing ZK to iOS. This week they shared a new SDK that lets you integrate Reclaim's in-app verification process into your iOS application.
Ambient Raises $7.3M for "AI-infused" L1 Blockchain. The project secured seed funding from a16z crypto (CSX), Delphi Ventures, and Amber Group to develop its novel "Proof of Logits" consensus mechanism, which rewards nodes for performing AI inference tasks on LLMs. Ambient claims to offer "hyperscaled verified inference" 100x faster than legacy systems.
From the Archive
Western high culture was born through a politically protected pairing of theatre and religion. In ancient Athens, each tragedy was performed only once, and during designated religious festivals, in order to ensure the work's theophanic integrity. The policy was a cognitive security measure. The relaxation of these controls in 386 BC, which Plato vehemently opposed, initiated a process where the terrifying power of art would become far too accessible. We're still grappling with the consequences.
Learn more in A Brief History of Cognitive Insecurity.
Nockchain
Perspectives
What we're discussing.
Hashpower, Blockspace, and... Proofpower? Hashpower was the original permissionless digital commodity, enabling the creation of the second digital commodity: Blockspace. Projects like Filecoin, Arweave, and Sia have followed suit, commoditizing decentralized storage, while Helium targets wireless bandwidth commoditization. Nockchain is positioning itself to commoditize verifiable computation through zero-knowledge proving. "Proofpower," Logan calls it.
Plato's Cave of High FDV: How VC-Backed Projects Game the Float. The manipulation of token float is crypto's equivalent of Plato's cave: Investors are misled by distorted projections of value orchestrated by projects that artificially inflate their fully diluted valuations (FDV) while suppressing circulating supply. VannaCharmer explains how token issuers maintain high "false floats"—large theoretical market caps—while controlling a tightly restricted "real float." This distorted dynamic not only increases volatility, posing extreme risks for short-sellers and leveraged traders, but ultimately undermines the integrity of crypto markets—suggesting exchanges and token data providers like CoinMarketCap should report actual float rather than issuer claims.
Don't Return the Capital. In response to a critic who says Monad should return investor funds, Qureshi argues that abandoning blockchain infrastructure development now would be shortsighted. He draws parallels to other technologies that saw compounding improvements long after initial breakthroughs.
CVE Dodges Sudden Death After CISA Extends MITRE Contract. MITRE's Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program—a 25-year-long cornerstone for identifying and cataloging software vulnerabilities—was hours from a total shutdown after DHS unexpectedly declined to renew its contract. Cybersecurity experts called the prospect of losing CVE "tragic," pointing to the role it plays in vulnerability management and threat intelligence. At the eleventh hour, CISA stepped in with an interim 11-month extension, temporarily preserving the status quo, but the near-collapse has led many to question the stability of critical cybersecurity infrastructure.
