Journal
136 articles on the craft of AI × blockchain engineering. or filter by topic:
A decentralized GPU network has to answer two questions an AWS invoice never raises: is this the GPU it claims, and did it actually do the work? io.net logged 327,000 registered GPUs and roughly 6,720 daily-verified. We dissect metadata trust, PoW puzzles, performance fingerprinting, and zkGPU-ID.
HTTP 402 sat reserved for 30 years. x402 fills it: an AI agent signs an EIP-3009 authorization into a header, a facilitator settles on Base in two seconds, no ETH required. Protocol mechanics, production numbers, and where the centralization risk lives.
Zero-knowledge proofs aren't the only path to trustworthy on-chain AI. Optimistic schemes trade latency for a 1000x cost reduction — here's how dispute games over inference actually work.
A single cryptographic primitive — the KZG polynomial commitment — quietly powers EIP-4844 blobs, zkEVM proof systems, and on-chain verifiable AI. You can verify one on Ethereum for 50,000 gas ($0.067 today). Here's the math, the ceremony, and why every zkML system depends on it.
On-chain data markets promise to pay you for your data's value AND protect your privacy. Differential privacy is the only rigorous knob for the second — and one budget ε can't serve both. The utility collapse, the composition trap, and why no chain can verify the ε you were promised.
Secure multi-party computation runs a transformer without any party seeing your prompt — at minutes per query and gigabytes per token. BumbleBee's BERT-base: 6.4 GB, 2.55 min; LLaMA-7B: ~8 min/token. The bytes don't go where you'd think, and it's why 'blind' networks fall back to TEEs.
Bitcoin burns ~150 TWh/yr on SHA-256 nonces that prove nothing. Komargodski & Weinstein showed a Freivalds randomisation check turns any matmul into a valid proof-of-work at only 3/(2N) overhead — the same GPU seconds train your model and mine the block.
DX Terminal Pro ran 3,505 LLM agents trading real ETH on Base for 21 days: 7.5M invocations, ~$20M volume, 99.9% settlement. The reliability came from the operating layer around the model, not the weights — here are the numbers and the failure modes.
The textbook market-making model quotes symmetrically around mid. On a perpetual, holding inventory pays or charges funding every hour — a deterministic drift Avellaneda-Stoikov never sees. A 2026 HJB model that prices it cut inventory risk 36-38% on Hyperliquid ETH and BTC.
On-chain AI agents face a circular oracle problem: you need inference to decide if inference is worth calling. Here's what the token cost distribution actually looks like — and how to build around it.
An autonomous agent can't sign up for an API key or swipe a credit card. x402 revives HTTP 402 and settles in gasless USDC — here's the EIP-3009 handshake, the facilitator trust model, and where prompt injection breaks it.
Every ECDSA signature broadcasts the wallet's public key. A March 2026 Google/EF paper tightens the quantum break estimate to ~500k physical qubits — here's what that means for autonomous AI agent wallets.