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Cinderella isn't just a childhood icon — she's becoming one of the most valuable assets in modern tech. Elf Labs [4] spent nearly a decade securing 100+ historic trademarks to characters like Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel, then fused that IP with patented AI/AR tech to build a new category of connected entertainment.
Anthropic tested AI “attack agents” using Claude 4.5 and GPT-5 against real-world smart contracts in a sandbox and found they could autonomously exploit 17 of 34 recent hacks, stealing $4.5M in simulated funds, and 207 of 405 historical targets for $550M. Even more worrying, when pointed at ~2,800 fresh contracts with no known bugs, the agents found two new vulnerabilities that would have enabled them to steal more funds. The vulnerabilities were mostly classic issues, but AI made finding and chaining them cheap and fast.
Bank of America will allow wealth management advisers to recommend 1-4% crypto allocations starting January, reversing its prior policy that permitted client investment but prohibited adviser recommendations. The announcement came hours after Vanguard reversed its longtime crypto ETF ban, aligning BofA with BlackRock and Morgan Stanley while intensifying pressure on holdouts Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. CIO Chris Hyzy positioned 1% for conservative risk profiles and 4% for higher volatility tolerance among investors with a strong interest in thematic innovation.
Railworld is the first privacy-enabled launchpad on Ethereum Layer 1 that uses Railgun ZK proofs to enable anonymous token deployments from zk-addresses with anti-snipe protections and fair vesting mechanics. Users create private accounts to deposit and shield ETH for trading through Cypher's v4 AMM or launching tokens that seed directly into dynamic fee pools with immediate liquidity and price discovery. The platform, launching in the coming weeks, combines Railgun's zero-knowledge infrastructure with Cypher's custom v4 plugins to deliver permissionless private swaps and token creation. Railworld positions itself as bringing liquid, efficient privacy to Ethereum versus isolated privacy solutions by integrating directly with Cypher's AMM infrastructure.
Backroom, a full-stack internet capital markets launchpad on Base, has launched Fan360, a sports prediction and gaming ecosystem with AI agents where 90% of fees fund buyback and burn with team lockups at 6 months full lock plus 2-year linear vesting. $ROOM stakers receive multipliers based on time and value weight to reduce dilution as Backroom positions itself as Base's gateway for onchain capital formation, combining curation, acceleration, liquidity, and distribution in a closed, aligned loop, contrasting with permissionless ICO/IDO chaos that drowned quality builders in speculation.
Fusaka, Ethereum's big scaling + UX upgrade, goes live on December 3. It introduces PeerDAS and blob-only forks (December 9 and January 7) so rollups can use up to ~8× more data bandwidth, cutting blob costs and speeding confirmations. On mainnet, there's a higher block gas limit (45M → 60M) plus a per-transaction gas cap and code-efficiency tweaks that lower fees while keeping blocks safe. Wallets get native R1/passkey support, enabling Apple/Google-style “tap to sign” flows built directly into Ethereum.
Gold outperformed Bitcoin by 58% versus a 12% decline since January 2024 spot ETF launches. Analysts attribute the gap to Bitcoin being "too young" for institutional trust. Central banks and sovereign wealth funds prefer gold's established infrastructure and trade utility. Gold's centuries of trust and financial channels versus Bitcoin's absence from international settlement systems created a slower path to reserve asset status than crypto proponents expected.
Crypto debit and credit cards are increasing, with dozens of teams now issuing physical and virtual Visa/Mastercard products that let you spend stablecoins and crypto anywhere cards are accepted. Rewards are aggressive, and cards plug directly into wallets, DeFi positions, and on/off-ramp rails. Under the hood, new “card-as-a-service” providers like Rain, Bitnob, Qbit, and Zebec make it easy for any app to launch a branded card, so we're seeing rapid experimentation rather than a few dominant players.
Restaking tried to let many new networks (“AVSs”) reuse staked ETH for security, but the target market was tiny, slow-moving infra teams, early AVS partners often weren't great fits, and EigenLayer over-engineered slashing while being muzzled by US regulatory risk. Even so, EigenLayer crushed competitors in restaking and data availability, shipped EigenDA as key Ethereum DA infra, helped keep Lido from dominating staking, and proved demand for “verifiable compute.” The next chapter is EigenCloud with EIGEN at the center, tools for verifiable applications (not just AVSs), and a big push into verifiable AI agents using EigenAI, EigenCompute, and EigenDA.
Base now has a full stack of onchain prediction apps doing real volume.
Ether.fi's credit card product just hit a record $453K in weekly revenue, or about $23.6M annualized.
The Circle Foundation is a philanthropic initiative seeded by its Pledge 1% equity commitment.
Strategy's company structure has flexibility for BTC purchases thanks to long-dated convertible notes with first debt maturity in December and the ability to raise via both at-the-market equity programs and zero/low-coupon convertibles, depending on market conditions.