Revolutions leave behind artifacts - not always weapons or flags, but the quieter objects that carried a message before anyone knew how far it would travel. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard sign held up in the snow outside a Tokyo office building.
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.
Tokenization is about bringing real-world financial assets onto infrastructure that can support global scale and continuous market access, said Carlos Domingo, Co-Founder and CEO of Securitize.
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.
The transition here is a little bit of a fork. Rocktop Technologies is focused on some of the generative AI applications and data and documents, as well as automating some of the processes attached to default servicing and some of the trade operational pieces and capital markets.
Polymarket's new collateral token, Polymarket USD, is designed specifically for the platform, functioning like a wrapped stablecoin and backed 1:1 by USDC. This change eliminates reliance on Polygon's bridged USDC.e, allowing Polymarket to have direct control over its prediction market outcome tokens.
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.
As HousingWire recently reported, the fragmentation across 3,000-plus local registries has created a multibillion-dollar opening for deed fraud. When ownership data is siloed and verification relies on manual oversight, the system becomes a playground for bad actors. Digitization was supposed to fix this, but moving a paper deed to a PDF doesn't change the underlying vulnerability. If a fraudulent signature is recorded digitally, the speed of the system simply makes the fraud harder to claw back.
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.
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.