Researchers | Crypto

Shielded Bitcoin would use zero-knowledge proofs and encrypted notes to hide transaction details without changing Bitcoin consensus, but researchers have raised questions about anonymity and quantum resistance. Researchers at the cryptography research firm Alloc Init have proposed a system for bringing Zcash-style private transfers to Bitcoin without requiring a soft fork.  The proposal, called Shielded Bitcoin, would conceal transaction amounts, senders, receivers and links to previously spent funds using encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs. The paper was published on Thursday by Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov and Aleksei Moskvin. The proposal offers a potential path to stronger privacy for Bitcoin users without requiring consensus changes to the base protocol. Read more

The unpeer-reviewed study links 4,224 contracts to 5,742 victim addresses, while its Avalanche count and collection cutoff conflict. The post Researchers just uncovered 4,200 malicious smart contracts that successfully tricked 5,700 victims into signing away their crypto appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Researchers find AI models steer users toward Catholicism and away from other religions, like Jehovah’s Witnesses.

AI agents are becoming increasingly popular among crypto users, with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire predicting that billions of AI agents will be operating within five years. Security for artificial intelligence-powered agents should be built into the entire system, not just around the model itself, to better prevent failures and attacks from bad actors, according to a new research paper. The amended paper, released on May 20 by researchers from Google, Gray Swan AI, EmbraceTheRed, and several universities, argued that agent security must be approached as a systems problem and that AI agents should be treated as an untrusted component. “Through this lens, efforts to increase model robustness, the dominant viewpoint in the community, are insufficient on their own. Instead, we must complement existing efforts with techniques from the systems security domain,” the researchers said. Read more