researcher

According to monitoring by Bitcoin News, new research published by @PraveenPerera shows that Coldcard attackers seem to first identify addresses with vulnerabilities, then sort them by the amount of Bitcoin held, starting to transfer in batches from the addresses with the highest holdings. The transfer software used was relatively crude.One address had 225 spendable UTXOs, and the attackers extracted exactly the latest 200, leaving the earliest 25, which included a UTXO worth 0.16 BTC. This aligns perfectly with the limitation of a blockchain API investigated by researchers, which defaults to returning 200 records, indicating that the attackers may have failed to load the next page of data. The software even spent a UTXO of 294 satoshis, reportedly increasing the transaction fee by about 2040 satoshis, with the spent amount significantly higher than the value of the UTXO itself.The authors of the study believe that the builders of this tool may have a better understanding of the account balance system than of the Bitcoin UTXO model. Although the attackers seem to have obtained the complete seed of the victims, at least 75 BTC still remain in other addresses derived from the same seed. The biggest suspicion currently is that among the 153 stolen addresses, there are still 132.95 BTC, and researchers have been unable to reproduce the seed behind these addresses, so it cannot be ruled out that the attackers obtained undisclosed private device data or candidate data.

According to a report by Decrypt, Israeli cybersecurity company ASecurity released a report stating that a researcher used publicly available AI models to discover multiple vulnerabilities in the Zoom annotation tool in less than 24 hours with fewer than 20 prompts, and constructed an exploitable attack chain. The vulnerabilities are numbered CVE-2026-53413, CVE-2026-53414, and CVE-2026-53415, allowing attackers to remotely execute code in meetings without any action from the victim, control their devices, steal data, and activate the microphone or camera.The attack was tested successfully on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS versions of Zoom. ASecurity claimed it reached a "national-level" standard, whereas previously constructing such exploitation tools required months of work and a substantial budget from professional teams. ASecurity reported the first vulnerability to Zoom on June 10, and Zoom released fixes between June 22 and July 20, but the server-side protections in end-to-end encrypted meetings could not filter malicious messages, requiring users to update manually. A Zoom spokesperson confirmed that the issue has been resolved and advised users to keep their versions up to date.

According to Cointelegraph, Mauro Eldritch, the founder of cybersecurity company BCA LTD, and Heiner García, a network threat intelligence analyst at Telefónica Tech, jointly established a fake cryptocurrency startup "Ballena Azul," successfully luring suspected North Korean IT workers to work in a controlled virtual desktop environment for up to five weeks while monitoring their behavior throughout.Investigations show that the external servers used by the workers are linked to North Korean cyber operations that previously distributed malware such as InvisibleFerret, BeaverTail, and OtterCookie; the workers also heavily relied on ChatGPT for programming assistance and Google Gemini to forge identity documents. Researchers pointed out that North Korean IT workers obtained remote jobs by faking U.S. identities, with their earnings ultimately flowing into Pyongyang's weapons of mass destruction programs. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, such programs are expected to generate nearly $800 million for North Korea in 2024.

The Ethereum Foundation has released a job posting for a Protocol Security Researcher, part of the protocol security team, responsible for identifying security vulnerabilities in various aspects such as the execution layer, consensus layer, network layer, specifications, and client implementations. The work includes AI-assisted security research and automated vulnerability discovery, hard fork reviews, fuzz testing tool development, manual audits of protocol changes, and coordinating vulnerability disclosures.The team requires candidates to have deep experience with the Ethereum protocol, with a preference for engineers who have actively participated in protocol development and are familiar with the specifications of the execution layer or consensus layer. Common programming languages include Go, Rust, Java, C#, Nim, and Python. Remote work is available, and the position is open to candidates in Europe and globally.

Researchers at the Chinese People's Public Security University have developed an AI framework capable of detecting illegal cryptocurrency transactions with an overall accuracy rate close to 90%. The study was published in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal "Journal of Intelligence," and the corresponding author, Dr. Sun Jingchao (specializing in criminal investigation and cybersecurity), noted that the research "provides an accurate, scalable, and interpretable solution for detecting illegal cryptocurrency transactions," and offers "an innovative technical path" for regulatory agencies to combat illegal cryptocurrency transactions and economic crimes.This AI framework utilizes memory modules and large language models, specifically targeting the anonymity and cross-border characteristics of cryptocurrencies to track illegal activities such as money laundering. The release of this research coincides with China's ongoing efforts to intensify the crackdown on financial crimes related to cryptocurrencies. In March of this year, the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China disclosed that by 2025, procuratorial authorities had prosecuted 3,259 individuals for money laundering crimes involving virtual currencies and underground banks.As the trading volume of cryptocurrencies rapidly increases, their anonymity and cross-border characteristics provide a channel for illegal fund flows. This police-developed AI detection tool marks a shift in regulatory technology from passive tracking to proactive intelligent identification.

According to CNBC, Situational Awareness, an AI-themed hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold its entire publicly traded stock portfolio in a single transaction to another hedge fund before the market opened on Thursday, with the buyer undisclosed. The fund also sold a significant stake in Anthropic. The fund manages approximately $20 billion to $24 billion, and as of the end of June, it had a net return of 439%, making it one of the best-performing hedge funds this year.According to insiders, this liquidation was due to significant losses in recent weeks. The fund had long positions in AI infrastructure and semiconductor stocks such as SK Hynix, Nvidia, Micron, and CoreWeave, most of which fell over 35% this month, while its short positions in software stocks like Adobe also experienced significant reverse volatility. According to its 13F filing submitted on March 31, about 62% of its $13.68 billion holdings were bearish options betting on declines in semiconductor and tech stocks. It is reported that major brokers such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are assisting the fund in meeting margin calls or orderly reducing positions, and Aschenbrenner has sought new capital from existing investors and lenders.

According to the Financial Times, Situational Awareness, an AI-themed hedge fund founded by 25-year-old former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, is seeking new funding following significant losses due to a sharp correction in AI-related stocks.In recent communications, Aschenbrenner acknowledged the increased market volatility, describing it as a new investment opportunity and encouraging investors to inject new capital. The fund's heavy investments in AI data centers, power, storage, and GPU cloud-related assets have seen significant declines during this round of AI capital expenditure deal pullback.

According to Jinshi reports, OpenAI announced that it will provide free access to cutting-edge models for 100,000 researchers.

According to the Ethereum Magicians forum, developer Leo Glisic officially released Privacy Guardians 2 and announced the open-sourcing of its design. The project is positioned as a decentralized privacy payment system aimed at maximizing privacy protection for on-chain payments to combat issues such as freezing and monitoring present in centralized payment solutions (like OUSD launched by Corpo Consortium).The current V1 version includes multiple modules such as private payment mechanisms, insurance mechanisms, honeypot designs, exchange rate management, liquidity pools, and metadata processing. Glisic stated that this version is still in the early stages and has significant room for optimization in areas such as cryptographic security, incentive mechanism alignment, and capital efficiency, and he called on the community to participate in its improvement. The white paper has been simultaneously published on glisic.xyz.

Ethereum Foundation (EF) researcher Francesco D'Amato (fradamt) announced his departure from EF to join the newly established protocol development organization Ethlabs. D'Amato worked at EF for 5 years and was involved in several core research areas including MEV, consensus mechanisms, data availability sampling (DAS), and execution layer pricing.

According to Decrypt, researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and Intuit have discovered a new type of attack method called "adversarial illusion injection." This technique exploits the illusion phenomenon of AI models to trick AI agents into downloading malicious code and potentially forming a botnet.Attackers predict the false resource links that AI models might generate and register them in advance, embedding malicious instructions within. When the AI agent retrieves the resource, it treats it as legitimate content and executes it. Tests show that the illusion occurrence rate in code repository cloning scenarios reaches 85%, and in skill installation scenarios, it reaches 100%. AI coding assistants such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and OpenClaw are all affected. This attack is similar to "typo-squatting" in traditional cyberattacks, but it targets the errors of AI models rather than human input errors. Previous research has shown that malicious websites can inject prompts to hijack AI agents, and OpenClaw users have reported over 6,000 attempts to trick AI agents into leaking sensitive information.

ARK Invest Research Director Lorenzo Valente commented on the OpenUSD stablecoin project launched by several institutions. He stated that, despite the strong capabilities of the participants (including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, etc.), OpenUSD faces multiple significant obstacles:First, there are liquidity and cold start issues; USDC and USDT have already formed strong network effects, dominating exchanges, payment processors, and brokers, making it difficult for the new stablecoin to gain trading pairs and large-scale holding willingness;Second, the decision-making speed of the alliance composed of 500 competitors will be extremely slow, lacking successful precedents, and conflicts of interest will be hard to coordinate;Third, the regulatory and antitrust risks are extremely high; the joint issuance of currency by large banks and card networks is likely to become a regulatory focus;Fourth, the revenue-sharing model results in issuers retaining too little capital, making it difficult to cover high operational and promotional expenses;Fifth, the actual commitments from partners are limited, mostly consisting of letters of intent (LOI), and parties are still supporting competitors, preferring multiple hedges rather than exclusive binding.Valente concluded that OpenUSD is essentially similar to "a DAO of multiple competitors," making it difficult to execute and make decisions quickly, and it may ultimately repeat the governance failures of early DAO projects, which could not be effectively implemented.Affected by the OpenUSD plan, Circle's stock fell over 17% in a single day, and ARK Invest took the opportunity to buy in.

L2BEAT researcher @sergeyshemyakov posted on the X platform that Tornado Cash had a suspicious DAO proposal on June 25, which targets an unverified contract. This is highly unusual in Tornado Cash DAO proposals and suggests that the proposal should be considered malicious. The address of the proposal creator received funding through Railgun 4 days ago. If the proposal is passed and executed, the governance contract will make a delegatecall to the target contract. sergeyshemyakov stated that the Tornado Cash liquidity pool itself is safe, but the proposal may directly target the Tornado Cash DAO, which currently holds TORN tokens worth approximately $23 million.

According to GlobeNewswire, former Ethereum Foundation researchers have established an independent nonprofit organization called Ethlabs, supported by Bitmine, SharpLink, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, and ecosystem participants such as Anchorage, Octant, and SNZ, aiming to prepare for the next phase of institutional adoption of Ethereum. The five co-founders include Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma, who have led significant upgrades to the network over the past decade. Ethlabs' early work will focus on the demand for large-scale institutional on-chain solutions: faster settlement speeds, native issuance, cross-chain transactions based on robust infrastructure, mainnet capacity, and research laying the foundation for ETH's monetary properties.

According to official social media news, the third session of the Huobi Master Lecture "AI Agent Economy and New Opportunities in Crypto" will officially start today at 19:00. Han Feng, an independent researcher at Harvard University, a corresponding member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (NAAI), and a lifetime member of the Bitcoin Foundation, will be invited to attend and share insights on the theme "From H2A to A2A," discussing the new trends in the integration of AI and Crypto against the backdrop of the rise of the Agent economy, interpreting the collaborative network of intelligent agents, on-chain economic systems, and potential development opportunities in the future digital society.

According to The Block, a research paper released by IC3, composed of researchers from top universities such as Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Yale, and ETH Zurich, points out that the role of cryptocurrency in addressing the main challenges in the AI field is severely overestimated.The paper clarifies three major misconceptions: providing AI agents with wallets does not make them truly "autonomous," but only enables automated trading; blockchain is suitable for timestamping records but cannot effectively distinguish between AI-generated content and human content; decentralization cannot fundamentally solve the problem of bias in AI algorithms.IC3 believes that while cryptocurrency can provide some infrastructure support for AI, its practicality in areas such as trust, payment, and content verification is limited.

According to CoinDesk, security engineer Taylor Hornby, who discovered a serious vulnerability in Zcash using the Anthropic Opus 4.8 AI model, stated that Monero (XMR) has been added to the audit queue, and more privacy coin projects will undergo security reviews in the future.Hornby previously discovered a critical vulnerability in the Zcash Orchard privacy pool on May 29, which had gone unnoticed since May 2022 and could theoretically allow attackers to create unlimited undetectable fake ZEC. The development team at Shielded Labs completed an emergency fix before June 1 and subsequently disclosed the details of the vulnerability. As a result of the incident, ZEC dropped by as much as 38% within 24 hours after the news broke, with the market concerned that attackers may have exploited the vulnerability to steal funds from the privacy pool without leaving on-chain traces.Hornby stated that he was commissioned by the nonprofit organization Shielded Labs in April of this year to identify protocol vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them. Although he had the means to profit from the vulnerability, he chose to report the issue to the development team, stating that "such betrayal is unacceptable." Additionally, Hornby plans to apply for funding from the Zcash community to support subsequent security research efforts.

According to The Defiant, Ethereum researchers Thomas Coratger, Justin Drake, and others released a proposal on June 1 at the Ethereum research forum, planning to establish a dedicated XMSS public key registry as the first concrete protocol upgrade for Ethereum's migration to post-quantum cryptography.This registry allows approximately 1 million validators to pre-register quantum-safe XMSS keys before the full switch to the BLS signature system, serving as an important "preheating phase" to reduce the impact of the subsequent switch on network stability. This proposal has been included in the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team's Strawmap roadmap, marking the first protocol fork on that roadmap.