Network news
BITCOIN PROPOSALS THAT COULD FREEZE QUANTUM-RELATED COINS: Bitcoin was built on a promise that no one can touch your coins without your private key. No government, no bank, no one. That promise is now, for the first time in Bitcoin’s 16-year history, being challenged by the developer community itself as part of efforts to build defenses against future quantum computers that could compromise Bitcoin’s blockchain and steal your coins. Jameson Loop, one of the outspoken bitcoin contributors, and other cryptographers have proposed a move that could force bitcoin holders to migrate their coins to new quantum-resistant addresses or face having their coins permanently frozen by the network itself. In that scenario, holders would technically still “own” the coins, but lose the ability to move them. It’s called Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-361 and was updated in Bitcoin’s official proposal repository with the title “Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset.” This comes as a recently released Google report warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could require significantly less firepower to compromise the Bitcoin blockchain than originally estimated. This led some observers to cite 2029 as the quantum deadline for bitcoin. — Omkar Goldbole Read more.
AI AGENTS POWER CRYPTO PAYMENTS: The cryptocurrency industry is moving toward a future where AI agents handle everything from booking flights to executing trades and making payments, but new research suggests the infrastructure supporting this shift may not be secure. McKinsey recently predicted that AI agents could mediate $3-5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. The team found that so-called “LLM routers,” or services that sit between users and AI models, can serve as a powerful attack vector for malicious actors. These routers are designed to forward requests to models like OpenAI or Anthropic, but they also have full access to everything that passes through them, including sensitive data. “LLM agents have moved beyond conversational assistants to systems that book flights, execute code, and manage infrastructure on behalf of users,” the researchers wrote, highlighting how quickly these tools are taking on real-world financial and operational tasks. The LLM routers, or attack points, leave users extremely vulnerable as they assume they are interacting directly with a reputable AI model, such as OpenAI, Grok or others, when in fact many requests pass through intermediate services that can see and modify that data, the researchers said. — Olivier Acuna Read more.
COW SWAP SECURITY BREACH: CoW Swap, a decentralized trading interface, said on Tuesday it temporarily halted its services after discovering a domain name system (DNS) hijack affecting its website, underscoring ongoing security risks at the front-end layer of DeFi platforms. In a post on X, the team said the attack took place at 14:54 UTC and warned users to avoid interacting with its interface until further notice. Although the protocol’s underlying infrastructure, including its backend and APIs, were not directly compromised, both were paused “as a precaution” as the team worked to fix the problem. DNS hijacking allows attackers to redirect users from a legitimate domain to a malicious lookalike site, often to drain crypto wallets or harvest private data. The attack vector has become a persistent weak point in the decentralized economy, where users typically rely on web-based interfaces to access otherwise secure smart contracts. CoW Swap acts as a decentralized exchange aggregator that sources liquidity across venues and uses the “Coincidence of Wants” mechanism to match trades directly between users or batch them for more efficient execution. Orders are handled by competing “solvers” that optimize trade results, a design intended to reduce slippage and limit exposure to maximum extractable value (MEV). — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
ZK PROOF OF XRP LEDGER: XRP Ledger added native ZK (zero-knowledge) proof support by integrating with Boundless, a ZK proof network, in what the company claims is the first implementation of its kind on the ledger. The move is designed to let financial institutions transact privately on the public blockchain while meeting regulatory requirements. It addresses a specific barrier to institutional adoption that has persisted across every public blockchain. Transaction flows, treasury positions and counterparty relationships are visible by default on public finances. For a bank settling cross-border payments or a fund managing OTC positions, this transparency creates competitive risks. Zero-knowledge proofs solve this by allowing a party to prove that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. It’s like passing a credit check, where the bank confirms that a person qualifies for a loan without revealing details of income, debt or account balances to the lender. In practice on XRPL, this means that a payment can be verified as valid, properly funded and compliant without exposing the amount, the sender or the recipient to public finances. — Shaurya Malwa Read more.
In other news
- The Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial has proposed to unlock 62.3 billion WLFI governance tokens on Tuesday, less than a week after CoinDesk reported that the company had used 5 billion of its own tokens as collateral on lending platform Dolomite to borrow $75 million in stablecoins. WLFI’s token was initially sold as a governance-only token with no transferability and indefinite locks. A vesting plan with a defined path to liquidity changes the financial profile of what the holders have purchased. The proposal will unlock liquidity for insiders who previously had no exit, thereby changing the token’s economics. The proposal divides the locked tender into two groups. Early supporters with 17 billion WLFI would receive a 2-year cliff followed by a 2-year linear vest keeping all tokens. Founders, team members, advisors and partners with 45.2 billion WLFI would face a 2-year cliff and 3-year vest, but with 10% of their allocation, about 4.5 billion tokens, they burned immediately at the passage. (Burns refer to the permanent removal of tokens from the supply, usually by sending them to an address not controlled by anyone.) In practice, this means that insiders would surrender 4.5 billion tokens in exchange for unlocking 40.7 billion previously locked indefinitely, with no vesting plan attached. These tokens had no path to liquidity before this proposal. — Shaurya Malwa Read more.
- About 572 bitcoins worth $42.77 million have been moved from a Gemini hot wallet to wallets owned by Winklevoss Capital and deplunge in the past 24 hours, according to Arkham Intelligence data, the first significant transfers to the fund’s addresses in over a month. The transfers came in two batches. One at 372 BTC and one at 200 BTC, about 11 hours later. Both moved from addresses marked by Arkham as belonging to the crypto exchange to addresses marked as Winklevoss Capital and Gemini Custody. Winklevoss Capital now holds 9,328 BTC worth $689 million across 128 tracked addresses, up from about 8,800 BTC after a $128.5 million deposit into Gemini about a month ago that brought holdings to their lowest level since 2012. It also holds 70,588 ETH.31 million for a total value of $31.66 million. million, the Arkham data shows. The onchain data shows the direction of movement, not the intent. The transfers could reflect new purchases, internal rebalancing between Gemini’s exchange and custody infrastructure, or a partial reversal of last month’s deposit. — Shaurya Malwa Read more.
Legislation and policy
- The Central Bank of Pakistan notified all banks and financial institutions in the country that the ban on providing crypto services has been lifted. However, according to the new state banking rules, banks are prohibited from investing, trading or holding crypto assets using their own funds or customer deposits. The State Bank of Pakistan’s move follows the recent passage of the 2026 Virtual Assets Act, which establishes the Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (PVARA) to license, regulate and oversee the sector. The central bank replaced its 2018 ban on crypto with new rules that allow regulated banks and other financial institutions to open accounts for PVARA companies approved to provide virtual PVARA services to banks approved under the state’s crypto framework. providers of asset services (VASPs) licensed under the new crypto law, as well as for those seeking approval, subject to strict compliance with anti-money laundering (AML), know-your-customer (KYC) and other anti-terrorist financing rules. Olivier Acuna Read more.
- Tom Duff Gordon, vice president of international policy at US cryptocurrency platform Coinbase (COIN), has left the company to go green. Duff Gordon, who had been with Coinbase for close to 4 years, left the exchange to join OpenAI as head of EMEA Policy, a Coinbase spokesperson said via email. Duff Gordon had previously spent 8.5 years working as a banker at Credit Suisse. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Crypto regulation expert Duff Gordon recently pointed out that UK banks are blocking millions of customers from accessing legal and compliant services by failing to distinguish between Financial Conduct Authority-registered companies with low fraud rates and higher-risk operators. — Ian Allison Read more.
Calendar
- 15-16 Apr. 2026: Paris Blockchain Week, Paris
- 5.-7. May 2026: Consensus, Miami
- September 29-1. October 2026: Korea Blockchain Week, Seoul
- 7.-8. October 2026: Token2049, Singapore
- 3.-6. November 2026: Devcon, Mumbai
- 15.-17. November 2026: Solana Breakpoint, London
