Hey folks! In this issue, the largest crypto heist ever, a judicial victory for decentralized protocols, more drama in the Ethereum community, and the secret of ancient Rome's concrete, among other things.
News
- In largest crypto heist ever, North Korean hackers steal $1.5B from ByBit. The Lazarus Group compromised a Safe{Wallet} developer's machine to inject malicious JavaScript, which tricked ByBit's multi-signature wallet signers into approving unauthorized transfers of 401,347 ETH. While ByBit has fully replenished its reserves through emergency loans and deposits, this incident highlights how supply chain attacks can bypass even robust smart contract security.
- Second Circuit ruling protects Uniswap creators. A federal appellate court in New York has ruled that Uniswap cannot be held liable under securities law for scam tokens traded on its platform because it doesn't own the tokens and only provides standardized computer code. If this ruling sticks, it would establish that DEX protocols are closer to user agreements than securities transactions. The ruling maintains state law claims for further review, but dismisses all federal securities charges.
- Circle CEO calls for US registration of stablecoin issuers, accused of seeking regulatory capture. Circle's Jeremy Allaire argues that stablecoin issuers selling to US customers should register domestically, criticizing competitors like Tether who operate offshore. This comes at a time when Trump's administration is prioritizing stablecoin legislation and aiming to make the US a global crypto hub. Vance Spencer and others accuse Allaire of seeking regulatory capture, urging Allaire to compete on merit.
- Ethereum Foundation shakeup amid community pressure. Aya Miyaguchi has transitioned from Executive Director to President of the Ethereum Foundation following intense community criticism over scaling solutions and ETH's price performance. This leadership shuffle seems to be a symptom of ongoing challenges in the Ethereum community, with Vitalik Buterin indicating a focus on improving technical expertise and stakeholder relations.
- Arkansas moves to protect critical infrastructure from China. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced sweeping legislation to divest state resources from China and restrict CCP-linked companies from owning property near critical infrastructure. The package includes bans on Chinese sister cities, Confucius Institutes at universities, and state purchases of Chinese promotional items, while also prohibiting lobbying on behalf of China and other foreign adversaries.
Research
- Efficient NIZK Arguments with Straight-Line Simulation and Extraction (2025). How do you build a Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) argument of knowledge without programming the random oracle while allowing for a quasi-polynomial time simulator? The authors demonstrate that merely assuming the existence of “dense puzzles,” combined with a modified Fischlin transform, suffices to answer this question in the affirmative. Their methods achieve perfect witness indistinguishability and construct an argument of knowledge under restricted concurrency assumptions. The result stays close to Fischlin’s original efficiency, showing that a puzzle-based approach need not slow things down too much.
- Zero-Knowledge Proof Meets Machine Learning in Verifiability: A Survey (2023). How can machine learning computations—often outsourced, privacy-sensitive, and large-scale—be verified as correct without revealing training data or intermediate steps? Traditional secure computation tools (e.g., homomorphic encryption, MPC) are usually overkill or too expensive. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are surprisingly capable of confirming honest execution of model training/inference—even with large decimal or convolution layers—while concealing data and parameters. This pushes “verifiable machine learning” beyond regular correctness checks toward integrity and privacy in untrusted, outsourced settings.
Perspectives
- Balaji: Beware dismantling the American Empire. While both nationalists and socialists oppose American empire for different reasons, Balaji suggests that abandoning empire could lead to dramatic declines in living standards, similar to post-USSR Russia, due to the loss of global dollar dominance. He argues that American empire, though largely hidden, was deliberately built through a combination of capitalism, trade, democracy, and allies—enabling the US to spread inflation across billions globally rather than concentrating it among Americans.
- The durability of ancient Roman concrete has finally been explained. MIT researchers discovered that Roman concrete's legendary durability comes from 'hot mixing' quicklime directly with volcanic ash and water, creating distinctive lime clasts that enable self-healing properties. When cracks form, these lime clasts react with water to form calcium carbonate, naturally sealing the damage. Now we can make "conformal concrete" to build Dyson spheres! Scale-free concrete with lime clasts, inside concrete with lime clasts, inside...
- We're happy to have sponsored the latest issue of IM-1776, Issue 6: Health of a Nation.
That’s all for this week. Hit reply if you have any comments, feedback, or want to share what you’re working on!
