Mohammad Nauman

Two weeks ago, Monero, the privacy-focused blockchain, supposedly faced a 51% attack. A company called Qubic incentivized miners to join their pool, calling it a Monero "stress test." With over half of the hashrate allegedly under their control, Monero experienced several chain reorganizations, including a 6-block rollback, which basically means that confirmed transactions were invalidated and replaced, undermining the trust that the network’s finality is built on. A 51% attack is not a theoretical risk. It strikes at the core of blockchain security. It enables double-spending, censorship of transactions, and full reordering of blocks. For any blockchain aiming at institutional use cases, mining pool concentration is the ultimate red flag. This is why governance matters. Without clear rules of play and enforceable mechanisms, blockchain networks remain vulnerable to both hostile and "experimenting" actors. Serious adoption requires more than technology; it requires structured governance that binds ecosystem participants to rules and prevents existential threats and marketing stunts. Monero has a market capitalization of ~5B USD. Other popular networks like Polygon even less (~2,5B USD). This is important because market cap relates to resilience. I hope you can now see why Basel III stresses risk assessment of the underlying infrastructure. Blockchain is infrastructure too. Regulated financial institutions cannot ignore this homework if they want to scale beyond pilots. (Sources: CoinDesk, Cointelegraph)

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Stablecoins are quietly reshaping the global payments landscape. From remittances to cross-border commerce, they’re fast becoming the underlying rails for faster, cheaper, and programmable money movement. I continue to believe that India risks missing out on this next wave if our regulatory framework doesn’t evolve, especially given how uniquely well-positioned our fintech ecosystem already is to build on top of it. I had the opportunity to share this perspective at the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest, quoted in this Reuters piece: Jaspreet Kalra Ashish Fafadia Blume Ventures https://lnkd.in/gS-X6Ff5

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Avalanche Unveils eERC: Revolutionizing Blockchain Privacy with Encrypted Confidential Transfers New encrypted-ERC token standard unlocks unprecedented possibilities for secure, private transactions with full auditability. Key Features and Benefits of eERC: Unparalleled Privacy: Hides token balances and transfer amounts for transaction confidentiality. Seamless EVM Compatibility: Deployable on existing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) networks with high gas efficiency. Protocol-Layer Independence: Operates without requiring modifications to the underlying blockchain protocol. Regulatory Compliance: Includes an Auditability Module to enable selective decryption for authorized entities. Enhanced Encryption Capabilities: Supports encryption of up to 254 bit integers, accommodating an exceptionally large number of tokens. High-Performance Encryption/Decryption: Delivers the fastest client-side encryption and decryption performance. Advanced Auditing Capabilities: Provides external auditors with designated, rotatable keys and asynchronous, off-chain auditing. Granular Privacy Control: Privacy preserving tokens can be supported alongside standard ERC20s, offering users the ability to support confidential transfers and public transactions workflows simultaneously. Versatile Implementation: Offered as both a standalone token, and a converter for existing ERC20 tokens. Wallet Agnostic: The SDK allows any end user wallet to utilize eERC. Lightweight Implementation: No additional hardware or compute resources are required to run eERC, ensuring minimal overhead and maximum cost efficiencies. https://lnkd.in/dDAw5ykv

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Greetings from Dubai and TOKEN2049, I want to highlight three items: 1) Great article out from MIT's CS AI lab. See the link below. https://bit.ly/44Jbz6C 2) J.P. Morgan CiSO just put out an open letter to third party vendors on security. This is a critical item that must be addressed as more and more data is being created, it lives at the edge, and what is at the edge is getting smarter. This is the intersection of ai and dlt. https://bit.ly/4cSCgaZ 3) Schroders published a great research article, that I did not agree with a number of their points, but their focus on private equity, smaller private equity targets, the need for price discovery, and that AI remains attractive. I would argue these two thesis will feed each other. https://bit.ly/4kekTEn The next generation of Private Markets will be data driven, decentralized, and agentic. In this high volume data environment you need an immutable ledger to create the audit trail for agents and a tool for agents to reference and prove, proof of origin of data, proof of state of data, and proof of process of data. This decentralized data architecture using zk proofs is how #2 and #3 connect. With this addition of #1 we begin to see a world where asset owners control their own data, have valuable unstructured data that provides the context for AI to understand the assets, and the ability for adversarial agents and methods to double check the work. The outputs of AI can cite the source data, with context, has an audit trail, and with this produce commercially reliable outputs. This will allow the next generation of private markets to be data driven, auditable, transparent, and decentralized. Real time, or near real time agentic survellience of assets will allow you to understand the Gross Asset Value, run a water fall, calculate the carry, allocate expense, and price the capital stack on an automated basis, with full audit trail and can be re-run daily, or as often as new data effecting the calculation Is detected by the agent. We will have these agents in production with our clients in Q3, right now we are in beta and testing them, this is happening fast, it is the intersection of Data, DLT, and AI which will power the price discovery and trading of private market derivatives, interval funds, Actively managed private market ETFs, lending/collateralization, accounting treatment on capital reserves, secondaries, and eventually digital primary distribution. This is Private Markets Real World Asseets, or PrRWA.

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From Al to Stablecoins What’s next for payments in 2025 and beyond?
 Since Visa Global Product Drop this April, one theme continues to dominate conversations: Agentic AI. These dynamic, autonomous systems have already started transforming how we shop, detect fraud, and move money — making payments smarter, safer, and more seamless every day Just as pivotal is Visa’s spotlight on stablecoins. With increasing regulatory clarity and growing industry adoption, stablecoins are quickly emerging as a key innovation in modern finance, streamlining cross-border payments and expanding access to the global financial system. Want to learn more about the future of finance? Listen to the latest podcast on Visa Navigate, where Godfrey Sullivan, Visa’s Head of Products & Solutions in CEMEA, explores the breakthrough technologies shaping the next chapter of payments: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eX3yfGvu #Visa #FutureOfPayments #Stablecoins

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So much for crypto immutability! https://lnkd.in/gzW3dRkJ "The HNDL (Harvest Now - Decrypt Later) risk is active in networks currently employing traditional cryptography." IS means today! In crypto , Harvest means maintaining a complete history of all transactions. Whoops, that's what miners actually do! "The privacy of data recorded in these networks is theoretically vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum computer in time."  Before 2040, not 2140 (the Bitcoin 'end of days') "We note a particular threat to data privacy for permissionless and decentralized distributed ledger networks reliant upon traditional cryptography. " So much for end of time security 🤔 "We do not 🥵 currently see sufficient mitigations to HNDL’s data privacy risks for distributed ledger networks, although mitigations exist that could curb HNDL’s security, data integrity, and theft risks." "We hold that the poorly mitigated HNDL data privacy risk for DLT networks may allow a bad actor(s) to obtain a currently protected copy of a blockchain network’s distributed ledger, purposefully store it in a non-PQC manner, and, irrespective of POC mitigations deployed within the distributed ledger network, in the fullness of time use a sufficiently powerful quantum computer to break the vulnerable cryptographic protections of the stored ledger replica." Note- "irrespective 🥵 of POC mitigations deployed within the distributed ledger network" Laughably, the answer appears to be that commonsense will break out and magically everyone will change the existing protocols to become Post Quantum compliant - however, in Bitcoin every effort to fork to something special has failed miserably. PS: I know I know - Ethereum may be changed by diktat of Vatalik but of course it is NOT decentralized.

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Walrus Foundation, one of the core entities behind the protocol, announced that it had raised $140 million. The largest investor was Standard Crypto. Other top investors who bought allocations of the yet-to-be-launched cryptocurrency include Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, Electric Capital, and Franklin Templeton.

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