researchers

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

According to Cointelegraph, the Ethereum Foundation has recently faced criticism from the community for selling ETH, unstaking, and having limited public communication. However, blockchain researcher and investor William Mougayar defended it in a post, stating that the outside world has long misunderstood the Foundation's positioning. ETH, the Ethereum network, and the Ethereum Foundation itself are three different aspects: ETH is an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for promoting protocol development, one of its goals even being "to make the founders gradually less important." The Ethereum Foundation is currently on a "subtraction path," strengthening the network by promoting protocol upgrades, funding underlying research, and reducing its own centralized influence.

According to official news, the smart contract auditing platform Code4rena has announced that it will gradually cease operations, and the Web3 security company Immunefi will take over its clients and security researchers. Code4rena posted on social media that it has made the decision to shut down and stated that all ongoing competitions and bounty activities will be completed as usual, and existing collaborations will be "properly concluded." Immunefi stated that it will assist in migrating Code4rena's bounty projects, reward structures, and researchers to its platform.Code4rena is known for its "competitive auditing" model, where independent researchers compete to find vulnerabilities in smart contracts for rewards. This shutdown comes less than two years after blockchain security company Zellic acquired Code4rena in 2024. Previously, Code4rena raised $6 million from Paradigm in 2023 for auditing incentives and platform expansion.This shutdown comes at a difficult time for DeFi protocols and the security sector. Data from DefiLlama shows that there were over 20 crypto vulnerability incidents in April alone, setting a monthly record. JPMorgan analysts believe that ongoing DeFi security incidents are limiting major institutional investors from entering the market. Meanwhile, the total value locked in DeFi has decreased from about $160 billion in October to approximately $83 billion currently.

Researcher Dan Robinson from Paradigm proposed a new scheme called PACT (Verifiable Address Controlled Timestamp), aimed at protecting long-dormant bitcoins, including Satoshi's early addresses, from future quantum computing attacks.This mechanism allows users to prove their control over an address through a timestamp without the need to transfer assets or expose on-chain behavior. Once future quantum attacks occur, assets can be recovered in a quantum-resistant version of the Bitcoin network based on that proof. Compared to mandatory migration schemes (like BIP-361), PACT avoids the privacy exposure issues caused by actively transferring assets, providing long-term holders with a more flexible preemptive protection path.

According to The Block, Ethereum researchers are exploring the "Block-in-Blobs" proposal (EIP-8142), which plans to encode block execution load data into Blobs. Validators can verify data existence through Data Availability Sampling (DAS) without needing to download the complete dataset, reducing bandwidth pressure and improving scalability.In the zkEVM scenario, this proposal can also fill the gap where zero-knowledge proofs cannot guarantee data availability and aims to unify execution Gas and Blob data usage into a single "data Gas" system.In addition, Biconomy, in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation, proposed ERC-8211, which supports executing multiple operations in sequence under a single signature to reduce failed transactions and optimize the DeFi interaction experience.

Bitcoin security researcher and Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake published a discussion on the timeline for quantum computing to crack Bitcoin.Justin Drake believes that the findings of Google's quantum AI white paper are conservative. "By 2032, quantum computers will have at least a 10% chance of recovering the secp256k1 ECDSA private key from leaked public keys. While it still feels unlikely that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) will emerge before 2030, it is undoubtedly time to start preparing."Justin Drake also stated that achieving commercially viable Bitcoin proof of work through Grover's algorithm will not happen in the short term. "We are talking about decades, or even centuries later. This observation should help shift the focus of the discussion onto ECDSA and Schnorr. As an unofficial Bitcoin security researcher, I still believe that Bitcoin proof of work has failed due to the reduction in the security budget."

According to The Block, Ethereum researchers demonstrated a proof of concept for "native Rollups" based on the execution client Ethrex, implementing EIP-8079 through the addition of an EXECUTE precompile, which directly replays and verifies Layer 2 block state changes on the Ethereum base layer.This solution does not rely on zero-knowledge proofs or fraud proofs, but instead is executed and confirmed by Ethereum itself to validate Rollup transaction validity. The related contracts are used to track Rollup state, bridge cross-layer messages, and verify withdrawals based on Merkle-Patricia proofs. Developers claim that native Rollups can simplify long-term maintenance of Layer 2, allowing them to directly inherit Ethereum's security and upgrade properties, and they are still in the exploration and proof of concept stage.

Ethereum researcher Thomas Thiery (also known as soispoke) proposed FOCIL as a core anti-censorship feature in the Hegota upgrade. Hegota is Ethereum's second major upgrade scheduled for the second half of 2026. FOCIL is a protocol layer mechanism that modifies Ethereum's fork choice rules to enforce the inclusion of any valid transaction in on-chain blocks within a limited time.The main goal of this proposal is to reduce Ethereum's reliance on centralized validators to mitigate the potential risk of large-scale transaction censorship in the future, thereby enhancing Ethereum's core value as a neutral, censorship-resistant blockchain. An Ethereum researcher stated, "Without FOCIL, the protocol would be vulnerable to large-scale censorship events. Ethereum should proactively design for long-term resilience rather than reactively respond to sudden censorship."

Pantera Capital researcher Jay Yu published 12 predictions for the cryptocurrency market in 2026 on the X platform:Capital-efficient consumer credit: Combining on-chain and off-chain credit modeling, modular design, and AI user behavior learning will become the new frontier of crypto lending;Divergence in prediction markets: It will split into financial directions combined with DeFi and cultural directions capturing pop culture and long-tail enthusiasts;Rise of Agentic Commerce: The x402 protocol will expand into conventional payments, with Solana potentially surpassing Base in tiered trading volume;AI as the crypto interface layer: AI-assisted analytics, project research, and wallet tracking will permeate most consumer-grade crypto applications;Tokenized gold rises: It will become a leading asset in the RWA space as a safe-haven asset;Bitcoin quantum threat panic: Technological breakthroughs may trigger discussions about quantum computing threats, prompting holding institutions to develop contingency plans;Unified privacy development experience: Privacy-as-a-service bundles will emerge, simplifying the integration of privacy technologies into enterprise workflows;DAT integration: DAT will undergo consolidation, retaining only 2 to 3 in each major area through mergers or liquidations;Breaking the boundaries between tokens and equity: Convertible equity tokens may emerge, and the regulatory framework for token legal ownership will tend to solidify;Hyperliquid maintains Perp DEX dominance: The USDC share on HYPE may be replaced by USDe and USDH;Professional-grade AMMs moving to multi-chain: They will account for over half of Solana's trading volume and begin pricing assets like RWA;Stablecoin international settlements: Fintech companies like Stripe, Ramp, Brex, and Klarna will use stablecoins for international settlements.

Kalshi announced on platform X that it has launched Kalshi Research, aimed at providing internal data from Kalshi to scholars and researchers interested in exploring topics related to prediction markets. Currently, the first research report has been released, showing that Kalshi outperforms Wall Street in predicting inflation.

According to DL News, Blockstream researchers Mikhail Kudinov and Jonas Nick proposed in a revised paper published on December 5 that hash-based signature technology could be a key solution to protect the $1.8 trillion Bitcoin blockchain from the threat of quantum computers.The researchers believe that hash-based signatures are a compelling post-quantum solution because their security relies entirely on mechanisms similar to the hash function assumptions already present in Bitcoin's design. This scheme has undergone extensive cryptanalysis during the post-quantum standardization process at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), enhancing the credibility of its robustness.It is estimated that older Pay-To-Public-Key Bitcoin wallets created before 2012 (including Satoshi Nakamoto's holdings worth $98 billion) contain about $600 billion in Bitcoin, and these wallets will be the first to face the threat of quantum computers.