Two acquisitions in eight days show privacy companies buying the layer that lets institutions in. Within eight days in May, two of the more serious companies in onchain privacy made acquisitions that, read together, suggest something about where the field is going. On May 20, Zama acquired TokenOps, a token-
The 47th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy wrapped in San Francisco this week. A surface-level scan of the accepted papers list would seem to claim that confidential computing took another beating. Three independent groups published memory-bus and chip-interconnect attacks against Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP.
Engineering
Vitalik Buterin published a long essay on formal verification today. It argued that pairing AI-generated code with machine-checked mathematical proofs is the right response to AI lowering the cost of finding exploits. The gist is that Lean is the language of trust, and ZK proof systems and post-
A new Ethereum proposal landed recently that, together with the architecture it depends on, describes a path to L1-native privacy primitives. But several companies have spent years building privacy infrastructure before this path was articulated. What does this EIP mean for the work already done? The proposal EIP-8250
What "private" actually means when you send a prompt to an AI provider On May 6, Canada's Privacy Commissioner published the results of a joint investigation with the verdict that OpenAI violated federal privacy law and three provincial privacy regimes in the development and deployment of
Verifiable AI
What hardware-rooted trust buys an enterprise AI customer in 2026 On May 1, the Pentagon agreed to deploy commercial AI from eight technology firms on its IL6 and IL7 classified networks. The architectural decision sitting underneath that procurement is the same one Yma Health signed in October when it
Verifiable AI
The dominant industry framing for what is happening in the agent economy is that the bottleneck is identity and "Know Your Agent" (KYA) is the AI equivalent of KYC. The frame is correct as far as it goes, but it also collapses what is actually a set of
Identity & selective disclosure
Google used a ZK proof to disclose a quantum cryptanalysis result without publishing the exploit. Trail of Bits forged a "better" proof two weeks later. The episode is a stress test of a new disclosure norm, and the technology is stronger for it. An Early Field Test On
Verifiable AI
A free iOS SDK, in-camera signing on flagship cameras, default-on C2PA on Pixel 10, and a benchmark showing detection breaks under trivial perturbations. The building blocks of Succinct's "prove what's real" media stack are coming together. From Detection to Proof In late
Confidential finance & markets
Every major custodian, market maker, and stablecoin issuer evaluating public-blockchain rails this year is implicitly choosing among three architectures for confidentiality: operator-controlled environments anchored to a public chain (Tempo Zones), client-side zero-knowledge proofs (Aztec), and fully homomorphic encryption (Zama). Each forces a different conversation with regulators,