#pay-to-merkle-root

#pay-to-merkle-root

"Earlier today, a malicious actor gained unauthorized access to Drift Protocol through a novel attack involving durable nonces, resulting in a rapid takeover of Drift's Security Council administrative powers."

TezQuest is designed as an interactive layer to TezDev, turning the event into a hands-on experience rather than a series of talks. Attendees are encouraged to explore projects across the ecosystem, complete challenges, and directly interact with teams building on Tezos.

The Open Wallet Standard (OWS) is designed to solve fragmentation in the agent economy by allowing artificial intelligence (AI) agents to hold value and sign transactions without exposing private keys. This initiative is backed by over 15 major organizations, including the Ethereum Foundation and Paypal, and is available on platforms like Github and npm.

Agentic payments is very early, and we still are figuring out the best way to structure these. So our team just came up with what we thought was the most elegant, minimal, efficient protocol that anyone can extend without our permission.

Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum's de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift. Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too.

On most modern blockchains, transaction data is publicly viewable in the mempool before it is sequenced, executed and confirmed in a block. This transparency creates avenues for sophisticated parties to engage in extractive practices known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). MEV exploits the block proposer's ability to reorder, include or omit transactions for financial gain.

MEV is especially notorious on Ethereum, where it continues to be extracted at a rate equivalent to 11% of block rewards. Data shows that nearly $300,000 was lost in sandwich attacks in September. This reveals that MEV is a recurring hidden fee, not a minor inefficiency, hitting large trades hardest in volatile markets.

Sentiment among DeFi users remains positive heading into 2026, with 72% of respondents globally expressing optimism about the sector's future. U.S. users reported one of the highest confidence levels at 83%, while sentiment across Asian markets was comparatively more muted, with respondents in Singapore (64%), Taiwan (63%) and in Hong Kong (56%).