The Trump administration is aggressively pushing forward with executive actions to bolster the cryptocurrency industry as comprehensive regulatory legislation stalls in the Senate.

During a White House meeting with crypto executives on Wednesday, President Trump urged Congress to break its deadlock on the Clarity Act. The bill remains hung up over disputed ethics language designed to prevent government officials from profiting off digital assets. Trump called on industry executives to work with regulators to move the sector forward.

There must be a way to harness the computing power of crawlers.

Ofc bots are just small programs that constantly surf over the internet (so it makes requests to web servers that they generally repond to it giving them public ressources back). A request starts from their server (calculation), then routing servers i believe, then your web server.

Ofc we live in an overcrowded world, where most (opinionated) requests are absolute shit repetitive tasks looking for something with any added value (opinionated ! Believe me I have been experiencing with websites, made fake or empty websites, and got bots like at least 20% of the traffic, so we came to the conclusion that bots are dumb 🙄 i general. Ok you can argue that not... but we agree that there is a huge computing power 🔋 each day all over the globe.

Now, final note.. I talked about the situation/condition, but gave no solutions to harness this power somehow.

So let's discuss!!!

When playing around with these tools (Which I know you should not use for your phrase to store funds), it seems to me the entropy field which can be made visible by checking off the "Show entropy details" box in the BIP39 tool and the master secret field in the SLIP39 tool are the same. They are both hexadecimal values and can be 128 or 256 bits.

Is the SLIP39 master secret also generated by entropy when generating a SLIP 39 Shamir Backup? How is the master secret generated?

I found this article explaining step by step how a BIP39 phrase is generated and it starts with entropy, wouldn't SLIP39 be the same by starting with entropy?

https://medium.com/coinmonks/mnemonic-generation-bip39-simply-explained-e9ac18db9477

https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ https://iancoleman.io/slip39/

Goodbye, Poseidon!

An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.

Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.

In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.

The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.

We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses:

Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023;

See Succinct Arguments over Towers of Binary Fields

Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.

See Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations

With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.

Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.

As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.

On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA.fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk.golf and SNARK.fast. Days ago SNARK.fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.

Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)

Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.

Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.

Believe in something. Believe in hashes.

Credits to Justin Drake

Attackers are exploiting a critical BTCPay Server vulnerability to steal LND credentials and drain funds from Lightning nodes. Foundation and Citadel21 have reported affected nodes. BTCPay released 2.4.2 and is urging operators to update immediately or take vulnerable servers offline.

A serious firmware flaw in COLDCARD hardware wallets has shaken the Bitcoin community after researchers linked it to large-scale wallet thefts. The issue affects seed generation, where some firmware versions produced recovery phrases with significantly lower entropy than intended. That makes the 24-word seed phrase far more predictable, allowing attackers to brute-force private keys in cases where users relied solely on the generated seed. Reports indicate hundreds of wallets have already been drained, with approximately 594 BTC stolen.

Now that the EU is blocking regulated exchanges from dealing in privacy coins like Monero, what are remaining ways to buy Monero?

Bitpapa.com worked in the past, but is increasingly malfunctioning for me. Are there any alternatives?

I am not the author of this video, but found it interesting and wanted to share it.

I've always heard about the concept of doing cryptocurrency mining with excess home capacity. However, what was always missing was the info on costs and scale if it would be worth it. This is the first real-world costs breakdown of all input hardware as well as the amount of bitcoin produced. The video's author even does a number of very good min-maxing strategies to yield the most out of his hardware including solar tracking, water cooling, and even buying some used panels. This was close to as perfect as possible to give the effort the most performance. It was very eye-opening.

tldw; $184,482 spent on hardware. So far this year it has produced 0.1447 BTC. At today's Bitcoin price that is a total of $9,438.43 in bitcoin. The video author estimates about this much production again for the rest of the year, so possibly just short of $19,000 of bitcoin at today's bitcoin price.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/49912885

Hi,

I'd like to have your feedback on a project idea.

I want to build a fast and efficient trustless bridge protocol based on atomic swaps, offering a user experience similar to that of popular custodial bridges.

Unlike P2P DEXs such as BasicSwap, Bisq, and Haveno, users would trade against automated market makers. It would be an automated open-source program that anyone could self-host, which would automatically accept users' swap requests for preconfigured pairs, in exchange for a small fee paid to the node operator.

The protocol would automatically aggregate liquidity from multiple market makers to fulfill large swaps, ensuring that liquidity isn't fragmented even if it's not deposited in a common pool.

The protocol would use adaptor signatures based atomic swaps when possible, for greater privacy and efficiency compared to HTLCs. I plan to initially support EVM chains (both native and ERC20), BTC and XMR.

The UI would be a simple web-based app, using RPC providers and light clients for blockchain interaction.

Unlike side-chain based bridges like THORChain, this architecture would not require the users or market makers to trust a separate validator set. Additionally, market makers would not be required to lock up all of their funds in smart contracts until they're participating in a swap. In fact, they could even provide Just-in-Time liquidity and, the rest of the time, leave their funds deposited on another DeFi protocol such as AAVE, withdrawing only to fulfill a swap.

I hope this design could attract users and liquidity providers looking for a simpler and faster protocol than existing P2P DEXs, but with greater security than today's leading bridges.

What do you think about it?

Could it reach a high level of adoption?

Would you use it to bridge, or provide liquidity yourself to this protocol?

The mandate itself is kind of long-winded and lofty, so I think these two tweets captures the essence better.

What do you all think of ethereum potential pivot towards crypto-anarchism/cypherpunk?

Tweet #1: https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2028913738057957433 https://nitter.net/VitalikButerin/status/2028913738057957433

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

• Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
• The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it does weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What are the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

Tweet #2: https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/2032469755614179700 https://nitter.net/VitalikButerin/status/2032469755614179700

This is the new EF Mandate.

For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making.

Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total.

The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to.

There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role.

At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack.

We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum.

At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing.

But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time.

This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.

Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one.

I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

On-chain data shows a sharp increase in activity from major Iranian exchanges in the hours following the February 28, 2026 US-Israeli airstrikes, with roughly $10.3M in cryptoasset outflows between February 28 and March 2. This spike fits a broader pattern we highlighted in our recent analysis of Iran’s $7.8 billion crypto ecosystem in 2025, where trading volumes and on-chain movements tend to surge around major geopolitical shocks and domestic unrest. Further analysis reveals important nuance: most funds are sent to wallets that could be Iranian citizens’ personal wallets, new infrastructure for Iranian exchanges, or withdrawals by state actors. In the immediate aftermath of events like this weekend’s strikes, it’s too early to say how much of the activity reflects each. As more time passes, onward funds movements will sharpen the picture.

Iranian Crypto Outflows Spike After Airstrikes Amid a Year of Rising On-Chain Activity

Bloomberg reported on April 1, 2026 that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was already extracting transit tolls from vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, with ship operators negotiating fees that typically start around $1 per barrel of oil, payable in yuan or stablecoins via an IRGC-linked intermediary and permit system. A subsequent Financial Times report quoted a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union saying shipping companies would be required to pay a $1 per barrel toll in cryptocurrency to pass through the Strait of Hormuz during the ceasefire. While the statement specifically references bitcoin, we suspect Iran could prioritize stablecoins over BTC for these tariffs, consistent with the heavy historical reliance on stablecoins by the regime and its regional proxies to engage in illicit trade and sanctions evasion at scale. This development is the latest extension of the IRGC’s growing crypto footprint, which accounted for approximately 50% of Iran’s total crypto ecosystem in Q4 2025 and has been documented across billions of dollars in transaction volume according to OFAC designations, NBCTF seizure lists, and leaked Central Bank of Iran (CBI) addresses. Shipping companies that make payments to Iran for Hormuz passage face significant sanctions exposure, as Iran is subject to comprehensive U.S. and international sanctions. This typically requires businesses to obtain a specific license or approval from the authorities before transacting with sanctioned entities or jurisdictions. Regulatory bodies, law enforcement, and stablecoin issuers all have a role to play in identifying IRGC-controlled wallets and their counterparties, and freezing illicit assets as this situation evolves.

It has to be a milestone to have a nation-state using crypto to circumvent sanctions during a war.