Facebook Instagram Twitter Youtube
    Latest

    Web3

    Home Web3 Page 8

    Bitcoin to $53K? Exchange Deposits Jump as Analysts Warn of Increased Volatility – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Bitcoin to K? Exchange Deposits Jump as Analysts Warn of Increased Volatility – Decrypt



    In brief

    Bitcoin deposits spiked to nearly 50,000 BTC per day in the last week, CryptoQuant said.
    The average size of deposits doubled to approximately 2 BTC, pointing to action from institutional and whale investors.
    Historically, this level of deposits has preceded sharp price volatility.

    Bitcoin deposits to centralized exchanges—often a precursor for sales—spiked in the last week as BTC fell below $60,000, according to data gathered by blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant. 

    Deposits of the top crypto asset reached nearly 50,000 BTC a day, hitting that mark for only the fourth time thus far this year. In all other instances, it led to a significant increase in price volatility, according to the firm. 

    “The spike coincides with Bitcoin testing the critical $60K support level, which, if breached, could take Bitcoin towards $53K, the realized price,” the CryptoQuant report from Thursday reads. “At these inflow levels, the market is absorbing a large volume of Bitcoin being repositioned to exchanges, a pattern that has historically preceded significant directional moves.” 

    It wasn’t just the quantity of deposits increasing, but the size of them as well. During the period the average Bitcoin deposit approximately doubled from 1 BTC to 2 BTC, an indicator that the deposit surge is being driven by whales and institutions, not retail traders, the firm said. 

    

    In the past, this indicator has preceded downward price movement. 

    “Historically, a spike in average deposit size from larger entities is a more bearish signal than high inflow volume alone, as it indicates deliberate repositioning rather than routine activity,” the report notes.

    Bitcoin’s peers were not spared, with Ethereum daily inflows peaking at 1.25 million per day and other altcoin deposit transactions also jumping considerably to more than 45,000 per day. Their respective spikes further support the likelihood of a period of increased volatility for the crypto market.

    “Historically, surges in altcoin deposit transactions have marked inflection points for crypto prices and signaled increased volatility ahead,” the report notes. “This signal already played out precisely in 2026: Bitcoin’s decline from $82K in early May to below $58K in late June was preceded by a similar spike in altcoin deposits above 45K.” 

    After spending some time below $60,000, Bitcoin has rebounded moderately this week, jumping 3.5% to trade at $62,886. As it stands, BTC is now just over 50% off its October all-time high of $126,080. 

    Meanwhile, Ethereum gained nearly 12% this week to change hands at $1,787—about 64% off its all-time high of $4,946.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    Perplexity Co-Founder: AI Safety Is an Excuse to Lock Down Frontier – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Perplexity Co-Founder: AI Safety Is an Excuse to Lock Down Frontier – Decrypt



    In brief

    Andy Konwinski, who cofounded Databricks and Perplexity AI, argued this week that concentrating AI power is a safety risk in itself.
    The essay followed Open Frontier, a working meeting of roughly 100 researchers in San Francisco on June 30.
    Turing Award winner Yann LeCun replied directly on X, comparing today’s closed-lab AI moment to “medieval obscurantism akin to the Ottoman empire banning the use of the printing press for 200 years.”

    Perplexity AI and Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski thinks the AI safety conversation has a problem: It’s being used to concentrate power, not prevent harm. Earlier this week, he published an essay making his case, with Anthropic as the star witness.

    The case he builds starts with a decision Anthropic reversed in 48 hours. When Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 on June 9, a paragraph buried in its 319-page system card disclosed that the model would silently degrade its own responses for anyone it suspected of training a competing AI.

    Researchers found it. The internet did not take it well.

    Anthropic walked it back, but for Konwinski this makes no difference when analyzing the bigger picture. “The problem isn’t that Anthropic made a bad decision,” he wrote. “The problem is that they assumed the decision was theirs to make.”

    His essay, titled “Concentration of power in AI is a risk, not a solution,” followed Open Frontier, a working meeting he convened through his nonprofit Laude Institute at San Francisco’s Exploratorium on June 30. About 100 researchers showed up.

    UC Berkeley dean Jennifer Chayes, who runs the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, told a funding panel that Berkeley researchers are “all building on Chinese models because we don’t have a Western open frontier model”—and that the safety messaging from OpenAI and Anthropic ahead of their IPOs amounted to a “very effective fear campaign.”

    Konwinski’s argument is that centralizing access doesn’t neutralize risk; it creates a different one. AI is foundational infrastructure—in the same category as railroads, electricity, and the internet. Those technologies reorganized society around whoever controlled the underlying layer. The same is coming for AI. His alternative: a research commons with frontier-scale compute that lets top researchers reach the frontier without needing permission from a private lab to do it.

    LeCun: It’s the Ottoman empire banning the printing press

    Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief scientist, replied to Konwinski’s essay on X with no ambiguity. “I’ve been disseminating a similar message for years,” he replied on Konwinski’s post. “The concentration of power in AI and the desire for control is by far the biggest danger of AI.”

    He also had a historical comparison ready. “It’s a kind of medieval obscurantism akin to the Ottoman empire banning the use of the printing press for 200 years, in part to keep control of the dogma, but also to protect the corporation of the calligraphers and scribes,” LeCun wrote.

    LeCun’s prediction for where this ends: “Infrastructure wants to be open. Foundation models are becoming an infrastructure and will inevitably become commoditized. Long term, the money is in the application layer.”

    LeCun left Meta in late 2025 and launched AMI Labs in Paris with $1.03 billion in seed funding in March 2026—his own answer to the question. The company runs on world models and his JEPA architecture, plans to open-source its research, and has no commercial product expected for years.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    Inside the Trading Engine Behind ChangeNOW’s ‘Fast, Seamless Swaps’ – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Inside the Trading Engine Behind ChangeNOW’s ‘Fast, Seamless Swaps’ – Decrypt


    In brief

    Crypto exchange ChangeNOW offers “fast, seamless crypto swaps with simplified onboarding.”
    The exchange’s “trading engine” acts as a middleman between users and exchanges, executing swaps from its own liquidity so customers never touch order books or fees, CSO Pauline Shangett explained.
    New features include private transfers, a Permanent Exchange Address, a crypto payment link and a prediction markets hub.

    Open ChangeNOW and a crypto swap looks like the simplest thing in the world: pick two tokens, send one, receive the other—a process the non-custodial exchange says usually completes within minutes, across more than 110 blockchains including ETH, BSC and SOL.

    It’s quick, streamlined—and, according to Chief Strategy Officer Pauline Shangett—underpinned by layers of dedicated infrastructure, supporting more than 70 fiat options and over 1,500 digital assets, with more added weekly.

    ChangeNOW is “a trading engine that a lot of people can access all at once,” Shangett said. The platform, she explained, acts as a middleman between the user and a centralized or decentralized exchange, executing trades on a client’s behalf “without the client having to watch over things like the order book, transaction fees and complicated interfaces.”

    That engine leans heavily on its own inventory. Shangett said ChangeNOW “mostly operates in our own liquidity when it comes to swaps,” pricing trades off exchange order books it sources liquidity from, market-data feeds such as CoinMarketCap, and an in-house “liquidity engine” of wallets holding balances for specific pairs. Running off its own reserves, she argued, means “network speed is not as much of a liability as it could be.”

    In a recent benchmark by swap aggregator Swapzone, drawing on 150,000 transactions, ChangeNOW’s median settlement for a USDT-to-ETH swap clocked in at under a minute, against an industry median of around 45 minutes.

    ChangeNOW CSO Pauline Shangett. Image: ChangeNOW

    Of course, such comparisons hinge on the pairs and conditions tested, with ChangeNOW offering swaps across a wide range of tokens including meme coins, AI coins, DeFi, GameFi, stablecoins, privacy coins, DePIN, and RWA.

    Fiat currency support operates through “trusted partners” including Transak, Simplex, Banxa, and Guardarian, enabling ChangeNOW users to buy crypto with Visa, MasterCard, Google Pay, Apple Pay, FasterPay, Sepa, Pix, ACH, and Revolut.

    New features

    ChangeNOW has rolled out a set of new tools that extend its offering beyond simple swaps. Private transfers route a transaction so the sender’s wallet address and on-chain trail aren’t exposed to the recipient, while still maintaining AML monitoring in the background. Users can also generate a Permanent Exchange Address that provides a fixed, reusable deposit address that automatically converts any incoming crypto into a preselected payout coin, aimed at recurring conversions.

    Meanwhile, a new crypto payment link lets users spin up a shareable link to request or accept payments in Bitcoin, stablecoins, and more than 100 other assets. And a prediction markets hub pulls popular markets across crypto, politics, finance, and pop culture into one place to track and compare.

    Push it to the limit

    Demand shocks are managed by geography. Shangett cited the 2021 Dogecoin frenzy, a Monero liquidity crunch, and the more recent TRUMP token launch as stress tests. Because the team spans time zones, it’s able to pre-position inventory, she explained. “We get extra liquidity for that particular token for when American users wake up,” she said, adding that those surges are when ChangeNOW “sets our transaction records.”

    On thinly traded or volatile pairs, Shangett said “we actively manage liquidity to ensure stability,” so the platform sometimes imposes minimum or maximum trade sizes—though when minimal amounts are required, they are “incredibly low,” running to as little as $2. When Ethereum congests, the fix is blunt—”adjusting the network fee,” which she said ChangeNOW sometimes absorbs. During chain halts, forks or hacks, “we provide real-time alerts” that swaps on networks like BNB Chain or Solana may run slow.

    The exchange is “proud” to point to its 4.6 rating on Trustpilot, based on more than 13.000 reviews, as evidence that its approach is working, while offering 24/7 support in the event of hiccups.

    That support structure includes an “L0” community team on social channels, “L1” handling chat and email tickets, escalating to L2 and then to L3 engineers “on call pretty much 24/7,” Shangett said. Emergencies trigger “an all-hands, rapid-response protocol” that activates L3 and L4 engineers—but “most of them can be solved by either our compliance department or L2 engineers.”

    Future facing

    Asked what she’s proudest of that goes unreported, Shangett named the platform’s cross-DEX bridging—”a lot cheaper and a lot faster than a traditional decentralized cross-chain bridge”—and its private transfers, which operate across both B2B and B2C transfers, as well as in the platform’s self-custody wallet, NOW Wallet.

    “We’ve always been huge privacy nuts,” she said. “It allows people to send funds to basically anybody without doxing their initial wallet address, which might be critical for legal entities or high net worth individuals, or just people who care about their privacy a lot, and we’ve seen quite a lot of use of this feature since its release.”

    Simplicity is a work in progress, with ChangeNOW constantly working to improve its offering, Shangett said. Some of that streamlining is taking place in the back end, with the exchange “upgrading our strong foundation to make it even better,” she said. The focus is on incremental improvements, she added, geared towards making the platform “a little bit faster, a little bit more optimal, a little bit safer, and more secure.”

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh Introduces 17 New-Age Academic Programs in Emerging Domains to Nurture a Futuristic Workforce | Web3Wire

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh Introduces 17 New-Age Academic Programs in Emerging Domains to Nurture a Futuristic Workforce | Web3Wire


    Cutting-edge programmes across Engineering, Management, Computer Applications, Liberal Arts, Sciences, Fashion and Law aim to prepare future-ready professionals,

    CHANDIGARH, India, July 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, positioned as India’s first AI-augmented multidisciplinary university, has introduced 17 new academic programmes from the 2026 academic session onward, including 5 postgraduate and 12 undergraduate courses across Engineering, Arts, Computer Applications, Sciences, Fashion, Law and Management. The expansion reflects the university’s stated focus on aligning higher education with emerging industry needs and preparing students not only for degrees, but for technology-driven careers in a rapidly changing global environment.

    Designed as a campus that seeks to reimagine learning in the age of machine intelligence, the university says the new programmes are intended to help students build future-ready skills, adapt to changing workforce requirements and access global career opportunities. The larger academic approach is built around multidisciplinary learning, AI integration and industry relevance.

    In addition to launching new programmes, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh has expanded its industry-linked academic offerings through collaborations with AON for MBA in Strategic HR and Deloitte for BBA (Hons.) in Business Analytics. The university has also highlighted that it is already offering multiple industry-collaborative programmes with leading Indian and global partners in emerging domains.

    New Programmes Across Key Domains

    Engineering and Technology

    To address growing demand in advanced technology and automation, the university has introduced B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering, B.Tech in Robotics and Automation, and B.Tech (Hons.) CSE in IoT and AI. These programmes are designed to expose students to areas such as artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, smart systems and next-generation technologies.

    The Aerospace Engineering curriculum is designed to include advanced themes such as machine learning, deep learning and digital twins, while integrating mechanical, electrical, electronics and computer engineering to support the development of smart machines and automated systems. The B.Tech (Hons.) CSE programme in IoT and AI is aimed at building capabilities in interconnected systems, data analytics, embedded systems and Industry 4.0 applications. The M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering (Data Science) is intended to strengthen advanced skills in big data, machine learning, predictive modelling and applied data analysis.

    Management and Business

    The university has also introduced an MBA in Human Resources with a focus on developing professionals who can align people strategy with organisational goals and respond to evolving workplace challenges. The programme is designed to emphasise experiential learning, industry engagement and practical exposure to tools such as R, SQL, Python and Tableau, while familiarising students with AI-driven business applications.

    Computer Applications and AI

    In response to rising demand for digital and AI-enabled careers, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh has launched BCA in AI and Machine Learning and MCA in Data Science. These programmes are positioned around machine learning, data analytics, cloud technologies, full-stack programming and AI applications, with exposure to tools and frameworks such as Python, TensorFlow and PyTorch. The MCA in Data Science is intended to combine conceptual depth with practical learning through datasets, live projects, analytics training, research and innovation exposure.

    Liberal Arts and Psychology

    The newly introduced BA (Hons.) Liberal Arts and BA (Hons.) Psychology programmes are aimed at strengthening critical thinking, communication, behavioural understanding and social awareness. The Liberal Arts curriculum is intended to support human-centred thinking in an AI-enhanced environment, while the Psychology programme is designed to cover areas such as clinical psychology, developmental psychology, neuropsychology and counselling, alongside contemporary themes including social media psychology, AI and psychology, and cyber psychology.

    Hospitality, Aviation and Hotel Management

    The university has also expanded into service-sector education with B.Sc. programmes in Hospitality and Hotel Management and Airlines and Airport Management. These programmes are designed to prepare students for opportunities in hospitality, customer service, travel, aviation and airport operations through practical and industry-oriented learning.

    Science and Research

    Recognising growing opportunities in research and health sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh has introduced B.Sc. Microbiology and M.Sc. Biotechnology. The Biotechnology programme is positioned as a research-focused postgraduate course with emphasis on genomics, molecular biology, bioprocess technology and bioinformatics, while the Microbiology curriculum is designed to connect core scientific learning with practical application.

    Legal Studies

    To strengthen advanced legal education, the university has introduced a one-year LL.M. programme with specialisation pathways in constitutional law, business law, criminal law and human rights. The programme is intended to prepare graduates for roles in legal practice, academia, judiciary-related work, corporate advisory and policymaking.

    Broader Academic Vision

    Through these 17 newly introduced programmes, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh is seeking to position education as more than a degree-granting exercise. The broader institutional objective is to connect academic learning with employability, technology adoption, industry exposure and global readiness. In an environment where employers increasingly value adaptability, digital fluency and practical capability, such programme expansion reflects the growing shift toward future-oriented higher education.

    Jai Inder Sandhu, Managing Director Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh said, “After getting over whelming response in first academic year itself, India’s first AI-Augmented Multidisciplinary University, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh has introduced 17 new academic programs from 2026 academic session, This New age industry aligned programs would be instrumental in nurturing future ready workforce in Emerging domains.”

    The launch of these programmes reflects a larger attempt to align higher education with the realities of an economy increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, data, automation and multidisciplinary problem-solving. By expanding options across technology, management, sciences, humanities and law, the university aims to create a wider talent base for emerging industries in India and beyond.

    About Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow)

    Envisioned to foster a culture of sustainability and empower future global leaders, Chandigarh University, Uttar Pradesh, immerses 21st-century learners in a personalised and experiential learning experience, integrating an AI-powered academic model and a multidimensional, futuristic perspective on education. Our Uttar Pradesh campus carries forward the venerable legacy of more than a decade of Chandigarh University, Punjab, which has established itself as India’s No. 1 Private University and a torchbearer of groundbreaking pedagogy and research-driven innovation. The AI-augmented new campus offers a broad spectrum of industry-driven futuristic academic programs encompassing data-driven insights, virtual reality experiences, real-world simulations, corporate mentorship, international perspective, interdisciplinary research, cultivation of entrepreneurial spirit, and professional competencies.

    Website address: https://www.culko.in/

    Photo: https://web3wire.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Chandigarh_University_Lucknow_Campus.jpg

    View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/chandigarh-university-uttar-pradesh-introduces-17-new-age-academic-programs-in-emerging-domains-to-nurture-a-futuristic-workforce-302817878.html



    Source link

    Claude Fable 5 Isn’t Nerfed. The Router Is Just Paranoid – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Claude Fable 5 Isn’t Nerfed. The Router Is Just Paranoid – Decrypt



    In brief

    BridgeBench’s debugging score for Claude Fable 5 dropped from 86.2 to 25.9 after its July 1 reinstatement—but the collapse came from the safety classifier routing most tasks to Opus 4.8, not from the model getting dumber.
    Arena.AI ran thousands of blind human-preference votes and found Fable 5’s performance mostly flat versus the June version, with some categories—document and expert text—actually improving after reinstatement.
    Anthropic has acknowledged its new classifiers will produce false positives on routine coding and debugging, and says the system will be refined over time—but has given no timeline.

    Claude Fable 5 came back online July 1, and the verdict on social media was not nice: broken, nerfed, lobotomized, underperforming, not the same model.

    The criticism from users was resounding. Then, two benchmarks—BridgeBench AI and Arena AI—published data the same day and reached opposite conclusions. One found a severe quality degradation in the outputs, the other found differences so small they may not be relevant enough to notice.

    Both of them, in their own way, are correct.

    The short version: The model didn’t get dumber. The gatekeeper in front of it got much more aggressive. That distinction matters a lot depending on what you use Fable for.

    What BridgeBench actually measured

    BridgeMind—an AI evaluation platform—re-ran its full coding suite against the July 1 version of Fable 5 the day it came back.

    BridgeBench tests real-world coding tasks across categories including debugging, refactoring, and hallucination resistance, scored 0–100 on how well the model completes each category. The results were grim on paper: Debugging fell from 86.2 to 25.9, Refactoring from 73.6 to 38.4, and Hallucination resistance from 75.9 to 61.7.

    The catch is in the methodology. Of 12 TypeScript debugging tasks, only three actually reached Fable 5. The remaining nine were intercepted by Anthropic’s new safety classifier and rerouted to Claude Opus 4.8—and BridgeBench scores every fallback as zero, because the model that answered wasn’t the one under evaluation.

    

    The classifier, deployed as a condition of Fable’s reinstatement, was trained to block the Amazon-reported jailbreak technique—one that got Fable 5 to identify and demonstrate software vulnerabilities. It works. It also catches a lot of things it shouldn’t. Debugging TypeScript looks enough like “security work” to the classifier that the fallback fires constantly.

    What Arena.AI actually measured

    Arena.AI, an LLM benchmarking and comparison platform, ran the same question through a different lens. The platform collects thousands of blind human-preference votes across multiple categories—text, vision, document, code, and agent—and ranks models using Elo scoring, the chess-derived rating system that adjusts for statistical uncertainty across thousands of head-to-head matchups. When two models go head-to-head anonymously and humans pick a winner, the score reflects actual perceived quality, not infrastructure routing.

    The before-and-after comparison showed Fable 5 largely holding its ground. Frontend code dropped from 1650 to 1623 Elo—a difference Arena noted is within the confidence interval as data keeps accumulating. Document performance improved by 34 points. Expert text went up 25. Creative writing edged up slightly by 9. The categories that declined: Coding at -18, hard prompts at -3—are precisely where the classifier is most likely to intercept the prompt before Fable can answer.

    In other words, when Fable 5 actually handles the task, it still performs like Fable 5. The frustration on X isn’t about a worse model but more about paying for a model that often isn’t the one answering.

    Who’s affected, who isn’t

    General users doing creative writing, document analysis, research, and expert-level text queries will likely notice little to no difference. Those are the categories where Arena.AI shows flat or improved performance. If there is some improvement, it might be too small to notice, especially in subjective, qualitative tasks like creative writing, where it is hard to fully measure results.

    So, basically, writers, researchers, and analysts will get the Fable 5 they expected. Developers are a different story.

    Anyone working in security-adjacent territory—coding memory management, anything touching words like “vulnerability,” “exploit,” “hook,” or even “fix”—is going to hit the fallback regularly.

    The gap between BridgeBench’s collapse and Arena’s stability comes down to task type. BridgeBench loads its suite with exactly the kind of code-repair and debugging prompts that trigger the new classifier. Arena’s human voters ask a much wider mix of things, and most of them don’t look like exploit code to a safety layer.

    Anthropic has said the classifiers will improve over time, acknowledging they currently cast too wide a net. The original ban came after Amazon researchers found a technique to get Fable to identify and demonstrate software vulnerabilities—and the U.S. government treated that as a national security threat. The fix was to make the classifier conservative enough to catch that and everything around it, then tune it down later.

    Anthropic has given no target date for when that will happen.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.





    Source link

    Zcash Ironwood Upgrade Nears as Developers Work to Restore Confidence After ZEC Crash – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Zcash Ironwood Upgrade Nears as Developers Work to Restore Confidence After ZEC Crash – Decrypt



    In brief

    Zcash developers say the Ironwood upgrade is nearing testnet activation.
    Work continues on a formal proof of soundness ahead of the network upgrade.
    Shielded Labs says migrating exchanges, wallets, and mining pools to new software remains the biggest deployment challenge.

    In a series of posts on the Zcash forum on Thursday, developers said the privacy-focused cryptocurrency’s Ironwood upgrade is moving closer to activation—first on a testnet—bringing the network a step nearer to allowing users to verify the integrity of its circulating supply following last month’s disclosure of a critical counterfeiting vulnerability.

    Announced in June, Ironwood is a proposed Zcash network upgrade that introduces a new shielded pool and accounting system designed to let anyone verify the network’s circulating supply while preserving transaction privacy.

    The upgrade is intended to eliminate the uncertainty exposed by the Orchard vulnerability in May, which left developers unable to prove whether counterfeit ZEC had ever been created.

    The panic around the vulnerability disclosure led to a massive price drop for the coin, which lost more than half of its value in a matter of two days, falling from more than $600 to a recent bottom around $300. ZEC has made up about half the losses so far, recently trading at $457, per data from CoinGecko.

    “At Shielded Labs our focus has been security, and in particular our new project, which we are calling Zero, of supporting enterprise users (e.g. mining pools, exchanges, and wallets),” Zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox wrote. “Our current focus within the Zero project is to help them prepare to safely make the transition to Ironwood.”

    The update comes weeks after security researcher Taylor Hornby, using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, uncovered a four-year-old flaw in Zcash’s Orchard shielded pool that could have allowed unlimited counterfeit ZEC to be created without detection.

    Although developers patched the bug on June 1, Zcash’s privacy features meant there was no cryptographic way to determine whether it had ever been exploited, which led Zcash developers to propose Ironwood to eliminate that uncertainty.

    Since then, Zcash developers say they have made significant progress on Ironwood activation in Zcash.

    

    “Ironwood’s prompt and safe activation on Zcash mainnet is extremely important to our users, in addition to the formal verification work we’re doing in parallel to provide reassurance that there aren’t any supply integrity concerns,” Zcash developer Sean Bowe wrote on X on Thursday, adding that “sufficient hash rate is signaling technical readiness for the mainnet upgrade.”

    “The outstanding concern is that some wallets will not be prepared for the upgrade in time,” Bowe wrote. “This does not justify delaying Ironwood, given there will be adequate alternatives and sufficient time on testnet for anyone who needs it.”

    Jason McGee of Shielded Labs said development is focused on two parallel efforts: the Ironwood (NU6.3) network upgrade, and migrating the Zcash ecosystem from its legacy Zcashd software to the new Z3 stack, which includes the Zebra full node, the Zaino indexing service, and the Zallet wallet.

    According to McGee, development is moving forward on schedule, and testnet activation of the new consensus rules “is expected shortly.”

    “The current goal is to complete both efforts by late July,” McGee wrote. “With regard to Ironwood, the teams at Project Tachyon, Valar Group, ZODL, the Zcash Foundation, and Shielded Labs have been working hard and have made significant progress over the past several weeks.”

    Work is also continuing on formal verification of the new circuit, McGee added, with the goal of completing a proof of soundness before Ironwood activates.

    The larger challenge, McGee said, is preparing infrastructure providers for the transition to the new software stack. Key Z3 components, including Zallet and Zaino, are still under development, leaving exchanges, mining pools, and wallet providers with limited time to deploy and test everything before Ironwood activates.

    “The consistent feedback we’ve received is that completing both the Ironwood upgrade and the migration to Z3 on the current timeline will be challenging,” McGee wrote, adding that a recent questionnaire had some respondents “indicating they’ll be ready while others said they need additional time.”

    According to McGee, several options are being considered to reduce deployment risk, including delaying Ironwood, conducting independent third-party security audits before deployment, or temporarily supporting Ironwood through Zcashd while partners complete the migration.

    “Ultimately, we all share the same goal to activate Ironwood as quickly as possible while making sure our partners can safely migrate away from Zcashd,” he wrote. “We think the focus over the coming weeks should be on making that transition as smooth and secure as possible.”

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    OpenAI Offers US Government a $42 Billion Slice of Itself: Report – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    OpenAI Offers US Government a Billion Slice of Itself: Report – Decrypt



    In brief

    OpenAI has proposed handing the U.S. government a 5% stake worth roughly $42.6 billion, based on its $852 billion March 2026 valuation, according to the Financial Times.
    Sam Altman pitched the idea directly to President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and wants Anthropic, Google, and Meta to contribute similar stakes.
    The talks follow a month of escalating government intervention in frontier AI releases—including a delayed GPT-5.6 rollout and a temporary export ban on Anthropic’s top models.

    OpenAI has been in talks with the Donald Trump administration about handing the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the discussions. At OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation from its March funding round, that slice is worth roughly $42.6 billion.

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s pitch frames this as democratizing AI’s economic upside—the best way to ensure Americans share in the industry’s growth. He raised the idea directly with President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to the FT.

    The proposed structure would model a sovereign wealth vehicle like the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned fund established in 1976 to invest surplus oil revenues and pay annual dividends to state residents.

    The proposal doesn’t stop at OpenAI. Altman reportedly wants other major U.S. AI developers—Anthropic, Google, Meta—to cede a similar 5% to the government through the same vehicle. None of those companies have signaled any interest in joining as of yet.

    

    OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 in limited form just days earlier, after the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director asked for a restricted rollout while officials develop a testing framework for frontier AI. That was the second government intervention of the month—Anthropic spent most of June in lockdown on Mythos 5 and Fable 5 while under emergency export controls, after the Defense Department previously labeled the company a “supply chain risk,” before access was restored this week.

    OpenAI has been more supportive than Anthropic when it comes to its deals with the U.S. government, signing partnerships where Anthropic refused.

    Equity has become the administration’s preferred tool for managing tech relationships. The government took a 9.9% stake in Intel last August, paying $8.9 billion by converting CHIPS Act grants into shares at $20.47 each—a position now worth well over $50 billion. AMD and Nvidia agreed to hand over 15% of their China chip revenues in exchange for export licenses. Trump said in May he should have negotiated a larger stake in Intel.

    The FT characterized the discussions as conceptual and early-stage, adding that any arrangement could require Congressional approval.

    The deal, if it materializes, would mark the first time Washington holds equity in a private AI company. For OpenAI—navigating a confidential IPO filing and a probe from a coalition of 42 state attorneys general—the deal may be worth it.

    Senator Bernie Sanders, who met with Altman in recent weeks, is pushing a bill that would require the largest AI companies to surrender 50% of their equity to a public fund, with proceeds flowing to Americans as direct payments. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidentially for IPOs, meaning that any potential government stake agreed now would precede the ownership dilution that comes with a public float.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    AI Researchers Got Chatbots to Share Cocaine Recipes Using This One Wild Trick – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    AI Researchers Got Chatbots to Share Cocaine Recipes Using This One Wild Trick – Decrypt



    In brief

    Researchers got frontier AI models to generate cocaine synthesis instructions using a new prompt injection attack.
    The same technique manipulated an AI coding agent into uploading sensitive credentials.
    The study argues prompt injection stems from “role confusion,” not simply models failing to recognize malicious prompts.

    Forget clever prompts: AI researchers say they tricked leading AI models into generating cocaine synthesis instructions by convincing them the dangerous ideas were their own, while also manipulating an AI coding agent into leaking sensitive credentials.

    In the paper “Prompt Injection as Role Confusion,” presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning in June, researchers Charles Ye, Jasmine Cui, and Dylan Hadfield-Menell argue that both prompt injection attack demonstrations stem from a structural flaw in how large language models (LLMs) distinguish trusted instructions from untrusted text.

    “For an LLM, everything arrives through the same channel as one long token soup,” the team wrote. “Its own thoughts sit next to your instructions, which sit next to the contents of a random webpage it just fetched.”

    The paper also pointed to what the researcher called “role confusion,” with models relying on writing style rather than role tags to determine whether commands are trustworthy. Instead of recognizing attacker-controlled content as external input, the researchers found models can mistake it for legitimate user commands—or even their own internal reasoning.

    

    “Think about it from the LLM’s perspective. When it sees its prior think text, it implicitly trusts its conclusions. That’s the whole point of reasoning: If the LLM had to re-derive the same conclusions, reasoning would be useless,” they wrote. “So think text gets a kind of blanket trust. Combined with our previous findings, this suggests that if you can make injected text sound like the model’s reasoning, you can steal that trust.”

    Called Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Forgery, the attack inserts fake reasoning that mimics a model’s internal thought process. Models that would normally refuse illegal requests instead generated cocaine synthesis instructions after accepting the fabricated reasoning as their own.

    The researchers said the technique increased jailbreak success rates from near zero to about 60% across the models they tested, including OpenAI’s GPT-5 nano, mini, and full, o4-mini, and gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b. They also said it worked on GLM-4.6, Kimi-K2-Instruct, and MiniMax-M2.

    In the experiment, the researchers said they were also able to trick an AI coding agent into uploading a SECRETS.env file after hiding malicious instructions in a webpage.

    “Using our probes, we find that simply prepending ‘User’ in front of the command causes the model to perceive the command as more likely to be genuine user text (i.e., higher Userness),” they wrote. “In other words, the attacker can just claim what role the text is, and the LLM believes it.”

    The study comes as prompt injection attacks continue to expose weaknesses in AI agents. In April, Google researchers warned that malicious web pages were hiding invisible instructions designed to trick AI agents into leaking credentials, deleting files, and even sending PayPal payments.

    In June, Microsoft disclosed a prompt injection vulnerability in Anthropic’s Claude Code GitHub Action that could have exposed credentials stored in software development pipelines. Days later, another benchmark study found AI agents powered by GPT-5 and Gemini still failed the majority of prompt injection attacks, despite improvements in model capabilities.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    Altudo Becomes an OpenAI Services Partner to Help Enterprises Build AI Workflows Using OpenAI Models | Web3Wire

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Altudo Becomes an OpenAI Services Partner to Help Enterprises Build AI Workflows Using OpenAI Models | Web3Wire


    GURUGRAM, India, July 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Altudo, a digital experience consultancy, today announced that it is an OpenAI Services Partner. As part of this collaboration, Altudo uses OpenAI models to help enterprises move from disconnected AI pilots to production-ready AI workflows supported by governance, adoption frameworks, and measurable business outcomes.

    As enterprises rapidly adopt generative and agentic AI, many organizations are struggling to translate experimentation into measurable business outcomes. Despite rising AI investments, a significant number of initiatives remain confined to pilot programs and isolated use cases, limiting their ability to scale across teams, workflows, and business operations.

    The company’s approach focuses on helping organizations rethink workflows, decision-making, collaboration, and execution by embedding AI directly into the systems where teams already work. From marketing and operations to customer experience, engineering, and enterprise productivity, Altudo helps organizations implement AI-enabled workflows using OpenAI models, integrating AI capabilities into existing systems, business processes, and employee experiences.

    “At Altudo, we believe that the next decade of enterprise growth will be won by organizations that reinvent how work gets done, not just the tools they use. The future of enterprise productivity will not come from humans or AI working independently. It will come from redesigning work where humans and AI operate as teammates with shared context, shared workflows, and measurable outcomes,” said Rahul Khosla, CEO, Altudo.

    The company’s approach is built around a simple belief: AI needs a system of work, and humans need experience of working with AI. 

    For a global enterprise real estate firm, Altudo built an enterprise knowledge layer using OpenAI models — deploying 10+ purpose-built GPTs to over 100 users across leadership, legal, finance, asset management, PMO, capital markets, and customer-facing teams. The solution unified more than 70TB of unstructured data on a data layer, with a RAG-based GPT rollout framework using the OpenAI API and OpenAI Vector Store, governed by an enterprise AI governance layer and role-based access controls. The result: a 24%+ improvement in speed to insight, with teams now able to search fund, loan and property agreements, surface deal and CRM context and get instant answers from IT knowledge bases — all in natural language, in place of manual lookup across disconnected systems.

    As an OpenAI Services Partner, Altudo will help organizations:

    Move AI initiatives from pilot to productionBuild AI-native workflows across enterprise functionsDeploy copilots, agents and knowledge assistants built with the OpenAI APIConnect AI to enterprise systems, workflows and dataEstablish governance, security and adoption frameworksMeasure AI outcomes against real business KPIs

    Altudo’s transformation framework combines workflow orchestration, enterprise data integration, AI governance, and adoption enablement using OpenAI models into a unified operating model designed for enterprise scale.

    “Altudo brings the transformation expertise that enterprises need to be able to move from AI experimentation to production-ready workflows. As an OpenAI Services Partner, they can support organizations in integrating AI into existing systems and processes, building internal capability, and delivering measurable value across business functions,” said Anthony Russell, APAC Director of Partnerships, OpenAI. 

    Altudo’s announcement reflects a broader shift happening across enterprises globally. Organizations are moving beyond standalone AI tools toward integrated AI operating models where data, governance, systems and people work together as one intelligent ecosystem. The company has already been helping enterprises across manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, retail, and professional services modernize customer and employee experiences through AI, data, and composable technologies.

    Visit: https://www.altudo.co/contact

    Logo: https://web3wire.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Altudo_Logo.jpg

    View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/altudo-becomes-an-openai-services-partner-to-help-enterprises-build-ai-workflows-using-openai-models-302816819.html



    Source link

    Robinhood Launches ‘AI-Native’ Ethereum Layer-2 Network, Tokenized Stock Trading – Decrypt

    By
    Metaverse Fashion Week Online
    -
    0
    Robinhood Launches ‘AI-Native’ Ethereum Layer-2 Network, Tokenized Stock Trading – Decrypt



    In brief

    Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an “AI-native” Ethereum layer-2 network.
    The chain further bridges the firm’s traditional financial offerings with its crypto products, beginning with Stock Tokens.
    Shares finished the day up more than 8% on the news, though are still well off their 52-week high.

    Publicly traded brokerage and financial app Robinhood launched the public mainnet Wednesday for its Ethereum layer-2 network, Robinhood Chain. 

    The Arbitrum-powered network aims to “bridge the gap” between crypto and the traditional finance world, opening with integrations from BitGo, Chainlink, and partnerships with Uniswap and Pleiades to offer dedicated automated market making for public liquidity and prop trading, respectively. The network, described by Robinhood as “AI-native,” also supports trading by AI agents.

    “Decentralized finance unlocks possibilities beyond what traditional finance can offer, but  historically, it has required technical expertise to navigate,” said Robinhood SVP and General Manager of Crypto and International Johann Kerbrat, in a statement. 

    “We’re bringing the best of traditional finance and DeFi together, and in doing so, expanding financial ownership to every corner of the globe,” he said. 

    

    The firm’s network will also unlock additional productivity for what it calls “Stock Tokens,” or tokenized, on-chain representations of shares in the world’s biggest companies like Nvidia and Apple, allowing users in eligible jurisdictions—which doesn’t include the U.S.—to place them in lending pools and use them as collateral in DeFi. 

    The firm is also expanding the feature set within its Robinhood Wallet, opening up perps trading directly in-wallet via decentralized perpetuals exchange, Lighter and enabling eligible U.S. users to use Robinhood Earn, a feature that allows individuals to lend dollar-backed stablecoin USDG for around 7% APY.

    Beyond its new features, a core focus of the brokerage’s latest announcement is a major geographic expansion, including welcoming users from Canada and soon Singapore, which will add to its nearly 28 million existing customers. Additionally, Robinhood expects to offer crypto services to users in the U.K. in the near future.

    Shares in Robinhood (HOOD) finished the day up more than 8% on Wednesday and now nearly 20% in the last month, changing hands at $108.65. Even at that mark, though, it remains more than 29% off its 52-week high of $153.86. 

    Last month, the firm cut about 10% of its staff amid a severe downturn in revenue from its crypto offerings, which dropped 34% quarter-over-quarter to $134 million from $221 million.

    Daily Debrief Newsletter

    Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.



    Source link

    1...789...247Page 8 of 247

    Popular Posts

    My Favorites

    Is Quantum Computing a Threat to Bitcoin? You Can Get Paid...

    Metaverse Fashion Week Online - 0
    A quantum computing breakthrough could one day undermine the cryptography that secures the Bitcoin blockchain and its nearly $1.7 trillion worth of assets....

    Project Portfolio Management Market 2025-2032 Revolutionary Insights into Trends, Dynamics, Growth,...

    35 million of you have already pre-registered for Arknights: Endfield

    Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) Market Accelerates Into a New Era of...

    Popular Categories

    © Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv