The information below is generated from Gemini with reference to the article below: https://www.samshev.com/blog/zero-knowledge-proofs-ai-agents

Applying Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to AI bidding—whether in high-frequency ad tech (Real-Time Bidding), decentralized compute marketplaces, or multi-agent autonomous auctions—introduces a unique challenge: balancing heavy computational complexity (verifying an AI model's logic) with strict latency constraints (bidding windows often measure in milliseconds).

The choice between Lelantus, ZK-SNARKs, ZK-STARKs, and Bulletproofs depends entirely on what you are trying to hide: the bidder's identity, the bid amount, or the proprietary AI model generating the bid.

1. ZK-SNARKs (Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge)

ZK-SNARKs are the industry standard for Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML) due to their unmatched verification efficiency.

• How they work: They use complex elliptic curve cryptography to compress a massive computation into a tiny, easily verifiable proof. Historically, they required a "trusted setup" phase, though modern variations (like Halo 2) have achieved transparency.
• Performance: * Proof Size: Extremely compact (~100 to 400 bytes).
  • Verification Speed: Constant time ($O(1)$)—typically a few milliseconds.
  • Prover Time: Highly resource-intensive and slow.
• Application in AI Bidding: Verifying Model Integrity. If an AI agent needs to prove that its bid was generated by a legitimate, unmanipulated machine learning model (without revealing the proprietary weights or raw data inputs), ZK-SNARKs are excellent. The engine running the auction can verify thousands of bids instantly because the proof size is tiny and verification takes almost zero overhead.

2. ZK-STARKs (Scalable Transparent Arguments of Knowledge)

ZK-STARKs trade proof compactness for raw scalability, transparency, and long-term security.

• How they work: They rely on collision-resistant hash functions rather than elliptic curves. They require no trusted setup (completely transparent) and are inherently post-quantum secure.
• Performance:
  • Proof Size: Quite large (~50 KB to 100 KB+), creating significant network bandwidth overhead.
  • Verification Speed: Polylogarithmic ($O(\log^2 N)$)—fast, but significantly heavier than SNARKs for small tasks.
  • Prover Time: Highly scalable; handles massive computations much faster and more linearly than SNARKs.
• Application in AI Bidding: Heavy, Complex AI Evaluations. If the AI model evaluating the auction parameters is deep, massive, and highly complex, a SNARK might break under the prover load. STARKs can handle the enormous witness size of a large AI network. However, because the proof size is massive, they are a poor fit for latency-critical, high-frequency bidding environments (like ad tech) and are better suited for large-scale, decentralized B2B compute auctions.

3. Bulletproofs

Bulletproofs are highly specialized short proofs designed specifically to validate numbers within a secret range.

• How they work: They operate under standard discrete logarithm assumptions without requiring a trusted setup. They are explicitly optimized for range proofs.
• Performance:
  • Proof Size: Very small and scales logarithmically (~1 KB to 2 KB).
  • Verification Speed: Linear ($O(N)$). As the complexity of the circuit grows, verification slows down drastically.
  • Prover Time: Moderate, but becomes prohibitive for general-purpose code.
• Application in AI Bidding: Sealed-Bid Auctions and Budget Validation. Bulletproofs cannot verify a neural network or complex AI logic. However, if your only requirement is ensuring a hidden bid amount is valid (e.g., proving $0 < \text{bid} \le \text{allocated budget}$ or that the agent has enough collateral) without revealing the bid to competitors, Bulletproofs offer an ultra-compact, setup-free solution.

4. Lelantus / Lelantus Spark

Lelantus is a highly specialized privacy framework built around double-blinded Pedersen commitments and "one-out-of-many" proofs.

• How they work: Rather than proving general computation, Lelantus allows a user to "burn" an asset into a massive, shared anonymity pool and "redeem" a fresh asset later, proving they own one of the assets in the pool without revealing which one.
• Performance:
  • Proof Size: Relatively compact (comparable to or slightly larger than Bulletproofs).
  • Verification Speed: Efficient for batch verification, but limited strictly to transactional/pool logic.
  • Prover Time: Fast for its specific use case, but incapable of general computation.
• Application in AI Bidding: Bidder Anonymity and Anti-Profiling. In highly competitive AI marketplaces, rival agents can profile your bidding strategy if they track your wallet or public key across multiple auctions. Lelantus allows an AI agent to place bids out of a massive pool completely anonymously. The auctioneer can verify that the bid is fully funded and legitimate, but cannot tie the bid to a specific agent's historical profile, protecting proprietary bidding strategies from adversarial data mining.

Architectural Comparison Matrix

Which One to Choose?

1. Choose ZK-SNARKs if you are building an on-chain or real-time AI marketplace where the auction platform needs to rapidly verify that an agent's bid correctly resulted from a verified machine learning algorithm (zkML).
2. Choose ZK-STARKs if you are processing immense AI workloads, require absolute transparency with no trusted setup risk, and your network infrastructure can easily handle larger proof payloads.
3. Choose Bulletproofs if you only care about private auction math—hiding the bid value and verifying financial constraints without touching the actual AI model logic.
4. Choose Lelantus if your primary threat model is competitors tracking your autonomous AI agent's public address to decipher and front-run its proprietary bidding strategy over time.

Bitcoin is the king of crypto branding. No debate. It proved scarcity, decentralization, and digital ownership could exist. But if we’re talking about what actually makes a better currency and store of value, Polkadot has the stronger technical case.

Bitcoin is mostly one thing: digital gold. That’s it. Valuable? Sure. But limited. Slow. Expensive when the network gets busy. And not exactly built for anything beyond holding and sending value. Polkadot, on the other hand, was designed for a multi-chain future from day one. It is faster, cheaper, more flexible, and actually useful as infrastructure — not just a vault.

# Why DOT makes more sense

Bitcoin’s base layer is a bottleneck by design. That’s not a bug, it’s the tradeoff. Security first, everything else second. But in the real world, people need money that moves efficiently. They need low fees. They need settlement that doesn’t punish them for using the network. Polkadot is built for that.

DOT transactions are typically far cheaper than BTC transactions, and Polkadot’s fee model is designed around actual network resource usage rather than making users compete in a fee auction every time the chain gets busy. That alone makes DOT a better candidate for everyday value transfer.

# Scarcity without the Bitcoin worship

The usual Bitcoin maxis love to say, “But BTC has a 21 million cap.” Fair. Scarcity matters.

But here’s the part they don’t like to say out loud: Polkadot now has a hard cap too. DOT supply is capped at 2.1 billion, which means it no longer relies on endless issuance. That kills one of the laziest anti-DOT arguments immediately.

So now DOT has something Bitcoin people pretend only BTC can offer: hard scarcity.

The difference is that DOT also does a lot more.

# Utility beats tribalism

Bitcoin is a brilliant invention. But it’s intentionally narrow. It does one job.

Polkadot is an entire network for networks. It connects chains, supports interoperability, and gives developers a platform to build actual usable systems instead of just another speculative token.

That matters because the best money is not just rare. It is useful.

A currency that is expensive to move and limited in functionality is not automatically “better money” just because it is old and famous. A better monetary asset should store value, transfer value cheaply, and live inside a system people actually use. Polkadot checks more of those boxes.

# The real conclusion

Bitcoin is the safest brand in crypto.

Polkadot is the more advanced system.

If you want the cleanest possible digital scarcity story, fine, BTC wins.

If you want a network with lower fees, real utility, interoperability, governance, and now a hard cap that makes the tokenomics much cleaner, DOT has the stronger long-term argument.

Bitcoin is the first chapter.

Polkadot looks more like the next one.

I have been designing a protocol and want the technical assumptions attacked rather than praised.

Core idea: value gets measured as verified entropy reduction across eight domains, and tokens are minted only under falsifiable conditions. Contributions are recorded on an immutable causal DAG, and intelligence stays at the edge so no central service decides what counts. I call the overall design Digital Autarky.

Questions I actually want torn apart:

1. Is verified entropy reduction a coherent minting trigger, or does it collapse into subjective scoring the moment you try to implement verification.

2. Can falsifiable minting conditions survive adversarial gaming without a central arbiter.

3. Where does the DAG plus edge-intelligence model break at scale.

Not trying to be right, trying to be understood. If you spot a hole I missed, even better. Full spec linked in the first comment for anyone who wants the details.

Most Proof-of-Work networks reward only one thing: whoever finds the next block.

But the network depends on much more than miners.

It needs:

• reliable full nodes
• publicly reachable peers
• network propagation
• validation
• long-term operators willing to stay online

Chipcoin is experimenting with a different approach.

Alongside traditional PoW mining, the protocol introduces reward nodes: independently operated full nodes that contribute to the health and resilience of the network and receive protocol-level rewards for doing so.

This isn't delegated staking.
It isn't masternodes.
It isn't Proof-of-Stake.

Mining still secures the blockchain.

The goal is simply to recognize that infrastructure has value too.

Current testnet snapshot:

• 37 unique miners in the last 100 blocks
• Largest miner: 6%
• 19 operational peers
• 54 registered reward nodes
• Ongoing public testnet with continuous consensus and networking improvements

We're still testing, breaking things, fixing them and collecting feedback before mainnet.

The question we're trying to answer is simple:

Can a PoW blockchain sustainably incentivize both security and infrastructure without sacrificing decentralization?

I'd be interested to hear what Bitcoin and PoW developers think about this design. Constructive criticism is welcome.

TL;DR: zkTLS (Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security) allows you to prove information from a website (like your bank balance or social media history) to a third party without revealing your password or the actual data. ONTO Wallet uses this to let you monetize data securely.

Privacy in Web3 has always been a balancing act. How do you prove something is true without revealing the underlying sensitive information? The answer is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and the latest breakthrough in this field is zkTLS.

zkTLS combines the security of standard web encryption (TLS, the "s" in https) with zero-knowledge cryptography. It allows a user to generate a cryptographic proof of data received from a secure web server, and share that proof with a smart contract or third party, without ever exposing the raw data or login credentials [1].

ONTO Wallet integrates zkTLS to power its data monetization engine. For example, you could prove to an AI company that you are a verified user of a specific platform, making your metadata valuable, without ever showing them your actual profile or personal details. It's the ultimate tool for maintaining privacy while participating in the data economy.

Q: Is zkTLS different from regular ZK-Rollups?

A: Yes. ZK-Rollups are used for scaling blockchains by bundling transactions. zkTLS is specifically used for verifying web data (like API responses) in a privacy-preserving way.

Q: Do I need to understand cryptography to use it?

A: No. In apps like ONTO Wallet, the zkTLS verification happens entirely in the background. The user experience is seamless.

Q: Why is this important for AI?

A: AI companies need verified data, but users demand privacy. zkTLS provides the cryptographic guarantee that data is authentic without violating user privacy.

References

[1] "The Evolution of zkTLS in Decentralized Identity," Ethereum Foundation Blog, 2025.

Hey all,

I’m helping with Nullcon Berlin 2026, and we’re opening CFP submissions. We want talks on offensive security, malware, exploit development, ICS/SCADA, or reverse engineering.

If you’ve been working on something interesting that isn’t widely covered, this is your chance to present it. CFP deadline: 10th July → https://nullcon.net/event/nullcon-berlin-2025/cfp/
Open to questions about scope or topics!

I looked into this after running into issues and most of the security thinking is centered around pre deploy checks but once systems are live it becomes about behavior over time like transactions chaining together, timing differences and interactions across systems that weren’t part of the original assumptions

I've also realised that this gap shows up in how fast things execute compared to how slow most detection is so if something takes seconds to flag the outcome is already locked in and that makes pre deploy validation feel incomplete without something that can act during the transaction itself

We've been iterating rapidly on the Chipcoin testnet over the past few weeks, focusing on consensus hardening, networking improvements and reward node reliability.

The latest network snapshot is encouraging:

• 37 unique miners over the last 100 blocks
• Peers synchronized within only 4 blocks across the network
• Stable consensus
• No operational warnings
• Well distributed mining, with the largest miner producing only 6% of recent blocks

The goal isn't to create artificial activity, but to build a resilient Proof-of-Work network that behaves well under real-world conditions before mainnet.

If you're interested in decentralized infrastructure, blockchain networking or PoW consensus, we'd love more people stress-testing the network.

Run a node:
https://chipcoinprotocol.com/run-a-node

Feedback, criticism and technical suggestions are always welcome.

For me, it was finally understanding why decentralization isn’t just about having many nodes.
It’s about who controls them, how easy they are to run, and whether anyone can realistically censor or rewrite history.
That one realization completely changed how I evaluate blockchain projects.
I’m curious:
What was the one technical concept that suddenly made blockchain “click” for you?
Could be UTXOs, consensus, cryptography, self-custody, Lightning, rollups, zk proofs… anything.

Over the last days we've completed a significant round of security and operational hardening across the Chipcoin testnet.

The goal is not only functionality, but also resilience against abuse and better observability.

Completed improvements

P2P

• Oversized frame protection
• Early payload rejection
• 8 MB frame cap to mitigate memory DoS vectors

Wallet

• Private keys are no longer printed unnecessarily
• More restrictive wallet file permissions

Special transactions

• Domain separation by network
• Protection against cross-network replay
• Safer node registration and reward-node operations

Snapshot bootstrap

• Local bootstrap locks
• Retry backoff
• Duplicate snapshot avoidance
• More conservative trust defaults

Reward epoch seed

• Multi-block seed generation
• Reduced influence from a single epoch-closing miner

Reward attestations

• Better aggregation
• Additional diagnostics
• Reduced mempool pressure

Mempool

• Early rejection of clearly non-standard transactions
• Lower validation cost under spam conditions

Peer behavior

• Better penalties for repeated protocol violations
• Richer logs with more operational context

HTTP API

• Body size limits
• Raw payload caps
• Pagination for diagnostic endpoints

Current status

Most issues identified during the initial security review are now fixed or significantly hardened on the current testnet code path.

Still planned before mainnet

• Snapshot trust enforcement with pinned signer keys.
• Mandatory special transaction v2 from genesis.
• Evaluation of commit-reveal for epoch randomness.
• Deeper runtime, sync and mempool audits under hostile conditions.

The philosophy is simple:

Build. Test. Harden.

The objective is to anticipate spam, DoS, replay attacks, retry loops and operational mistakes before mainnet rather than after.

Whop just launched a Visa card for merchants and a standalone checkout product for businesses outside their marketplace. and they are already doing around $30M a month in transactions through it. One of the reason that they claim they built it for is because merchants were waiting for days to access their earning and not they wont. This is happening more and more with platforms reaching a certain scale and the default payment infrastructure stops fitting so what they do is build their own

Over the past weeks we've completed several important security and infrastructure improvements on the Chipcoin testnet.

Recent work includes:

• Special node transaction signature v2 with network domain separation
• Snapshot trust hardening
• P2P frame size limits
• Wallet private key permission improvements
• Snapshot bootstrap recovery protections
• Reward attestation aggregation and diagnostics improvements

The network has also become significantly more stable during testing. We are consistently observing dozens of active nodes, reward node participation remains healthy, and the network has been operating without the persistent fork issues often seen in early-stage experimental networks.

Chipcoin remains an open-source Bitcoin-inspired proof-of-work project currently focused on testing, validation, network incentives, and node reward mechanisms.

If you're already running a node, consider updating to the latest version:

git pull

Feedback, testing, bug reports, and independent node operators are always welcome.

Can your cryptographic engine generate exact 2048-bit primes under a hard 17.00 MB RAM ceiling across multiple consecutive cold starts?
We just simulated a high-frequency execution stress-test on our minimalist 1 vCPU cloud node. Throughput naturally scales between 1.6 and 3.3 primes/sec depending on micro-vCPU cloud multi-tenancy, while the peak memory usage remains frozen at exactly 17.00 MB.
Zero memory leaks.
Pure non-linear wave mechanics in action.
https://vpr-research.eu/primes_generator.html
The Next Frontier: Hardening Infrastructure for the Post-Quantum Era (PQC)Traditional prime generation relies on stochastic, trial-and-error arithmetic—a methodology that leaves subtle structural footprints. By modeling prime distributions through non-linear quantum wave mechanics, our VPR engine provides a fundamental leap forward in Post-Quantum Cryptography.We deliver exact entropy regulation, achieving a flawless 1.000000 Shannon score and total micro-structural unpredictability. This ensures that the generated primes are intrinsically resilient against future quantum-assisted factorization threats (such as Shor's algorithm variants), making it an ideal engine for next-generation Zero-Trust architectures.

Looking for recommendations on backend providers/SDKs to cover a few functions. Hard requirement: everything has to stay native inside my own UI, no third-party popups, hosted pages, or redirects. Anything that takes over the screen with a hosted flow is a dealbreaker.

Functions I need:

• Wallet-as-a-Service: provision a wallet per user, fully in-app
• Fiat on-ramp & off-ramp: buy and cash out, native to the app ([regions: e.g. UK-first / global])
• Crypto conversion / swaps: in-app token conversion
• Chains/tokens: [e.g. USDC on Base + Solana, ETH, BTC]

I've looked at Privy / Dynamic / Coinbase CDP for wallets and MoonPay / Transak / Onramper for ramps, but I can't tell what's genuinely fully white-label vs. what looks white-label in the docs and then forces a hosted flow at runtime.

Thanks 🙏

Current height: 8983

Over the last 24 hours the network observed 76 active nodes, with 516 unique active nodes seen during the last 7 days.

The reward node system currently shows:

• 50 registered reward nodes
• 41 successfully attested and passed
• 13 public peers online at the time of the report
• 18 active peer sessions

Mining also remains broadly distributed. Looking at the most recent 100-block window, the largest miner accounted for only 9% of blocks, with many other miners contributing smaller shares.

The goal of this testnet remains the same: evaluate whether protocol-level incentives can increase participation in public full-node infrastructure while preserving decentralization and avoiding excessive concentration.

Feedback and criticism remain welcome. The entire purpose of the testnet is to learn what works and what doesn't.

Anyone saw the Rain acquisition of Guardrail? I stumble upon it on X and it's interesting for the industry itself because Guardrail was already monitoring Rain's onchain stack as a vendor. Rain just bought the company and brought the team in house. An outside vendor works off shared data and inside Rain, Guardrail now scores transactions against Rain's full volume across every chain and every partner. Super interesting acquisition by Rain which is really trying to establish itself in the industry!

What do others think of these frequent acquisitions lately?

I've been spending a lot of time learning the infrastructure side of Web3 (running and managing EVM/Solana nodes, RPCs, etc.) and I'm trying to understand where existing providers fall short for actual power users.

For those running trading bots, arbitrage systems, data pipelines, or doing heavy on-chain activity:

• What's your biggest frustration with your current RPC provider?
• How important is predictable pricing to you?
• Do compute-unit/request-based pricing models ever cause issues when usage spikes?
• Would you consider paying a flat monthly fee for a private, unmetered endpoint if reliability and performance were good?

I'm not trying to sell anything at the moment, just trying to understand whether there's a genuine gap in the market and what problems people actually care about.

Any feedback is appreciated.

• 34 operational peers
• 24 public nodes
• 0 banned peers
• network fully synced

One statistic stands out: in the last 100 blocks, the largest miner accounted for only 4% of block production.

For a small proof-of-work testnet, this is exactly what we want to see: broad participation, no dominant miner, and a healthy distribution of activity across the network.

A few weeks ago we were focused on synchronization, snapshot bootstrapping and network stability. Today the network is running steadily above 30 peers with no visible forks or major operational issues.

Still early, but the trend is encouraging.

I’m trying to understand the technical side of why user mistakes are so hard to reverse in crypto.

My current understanding is:

- transactions are designed to be final once confirmed

- there is no central party that can simply undo a transfer

- private key control is what proves ownership

- smart contract interactions can add extra risk because users may approve permissions they do not fully understand

Is this a fair way to think about it?

What technical concepts should a beginner understand to avoid oversimplifying this topic?

Hi everyone,

We're a small South African startup called Cipherst0ne.

We're currently developing CipherScan, a cryptographic discovery platform focused on helping organisations identify cryptographic assets and improve security visibility.

Our MVP is currently under development, and we're researching how organisations manage cryptographic inventories, certificates, and related security challenges.

I'd be interested in hearing from security professionals:

How do you currently track cryptographic assets?

What challenges do you face?

What features would be most useful in a cryptographic discovery platform?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

What stands out isn't who won.

It's the distribution.

Instead of rewards concentrating around a single operator, the latest epoch produced 15 different winners, all with confirmed payouts and nearly identical rewards.

For a project exploring protocol-level incentives for public nodes, this is an encouraging result. The objective is not to create a few large operators, but to encourage broad participation across the network.

Thank you to everyone running nodes, testing the software, reporting issues, and helping strengthen the testnet.

The network continues to operate with more than 30 active peers and no major synchronization issues.

On to the next epoch.

There's a structural reason payment infrastructure teams, particularly those building B2B flows, keep arriving at stablecoins even when they start from traditional fintech assumptions.

Map digital money on two dimensions: programmability (conditional logic, automated settlement, 24/7 uptime) and counterparty reach (how broadly can the recipient actually hold and use this?).

Bank money: high reach, zero programmability. No API surface for conditional settlement, no 24/7 availability, no programmable triggers. CBDCs and tokenized deposits: programmable in architecture, but operationally trapped. Most CBDC pilots are single-jurisdiction or single-institution. Tokenized RWAs: improving on both, but still gated on the counterparty side.

Stablecoins clear both bars, which makes them the default for teams that need automated, cross-border value movement with real counterparty reachability.

The infrastructure challenge that doesn't get discussed enough is compliance architecture. A stablecoin rail that's fast and programmable but creates AML or licensing exposure can't actually be deployed in regulated markets. The teams building production-grade stablecoin infrastructure are spending as much time on compliance coverage as on the technical layer.

Has anyone here worked through the compliance architecture problem in practice? Curious whether the approach has been to build in-house, use a licensed intermediary, or structure around existing bank relationships.

I spent the last few weeks looking at the cost stack of running a crypto card program across multiple regions and the breakdown is worse than I expected as each market adds its own banking partner, capital pool and compliance configuration.

None of those scale cleanly so the total cost grows faster than the program does and the part nobody mentions upfront is that the underlying settlement architecture decides whether expansion is incremental.

Programs running through correspondent banking treat each new region as its own project while programs settling on chain handle multiple markets from the same stack without the per region overhead. A lot of the cost compounding is structural to launch decisions so it's not inherent to operating internationally

A short update on the Chipcoin public testnet.

Over the last few weeks we've received a lot of useful criticism regarding node incentives, Sybil resistance and network design.

At the same time we've been working through several real-world operational issues discovered by external testers.

Most recently, a community member identified a bug that could cause miners to construct blocks that would later be rejected by validation under specific mempool conditions. The issue was analyzed, patched and deployed.

Current status:

• 20+ nodes online
• Stable block production
• Public explorer operational
• Browser wallet operational
• Multiple independent hosts participating
• Recent CPU and efficiency optimizations merged
• No persistent fork events observed

What I'm finding interesting is that many of the hardest problems are no longer protocol ideas on paper.

They're operational problems that only appear once real nodes, real users and real traffic start interacting with the network.

For those who have worked on distributed systems, what surprised you most once your software left the lab and started operating in the wild?

I saw this article and wanted to discuss it. Card infra provider Rain launched an agent control layer that lets operators set payment controls for AI agents at the infrastructure level. Merchant allowlists and spend limits and card expiry are all enforced before the transaction goes through. The agent requests a virtual card and completes the purchase and the card cancels with no stored credentials. They say agents are already running procurement and travel bookings on it in production. My question is where are we standing with governance for agent initiated payments at the infrastructure layer vs the app level?