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Welcome to the dark side of crypto's permissionless dream

MIT Technology Review

Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a leader of THORChain, a blockchain that is not supposed to have any leaders--and is reeling from a series of expensive controversies. We can do whatever we want," Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen tells me from the pilot's seat of his Aston Martin helicopter. As we fly over suburbs outside Melbourne, Australia, it's becoming clear that doing whatever he wants is Thorbjornsen's MO. Upper-middle-class homes give way to vineyards, and Thorbjornsen points out our landing spot outside a winery. "They're going to ask for a shot now," he says, used to the attention drawn by his luxury helicopter, emblazoned with the tail letters "BTC" for bitcoin (the price tag of $5 million in Australian dollars--$3.5 million in US dollars today--was perhaps reasonable for someone who claims a previous crypto project made more than AU$400 million, although he also says those funds were tied up in the company). Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap ...







Deploying a hybrid approach to Web3 in the AI era

MIT Technology Review

Against a backdrop of insatiable demand for compute, Web3 principles and technologies offer enterprises transparent, flexible, and cost-effective resource. When the concept of "Web 3.0" first emerged about a decade ago the idea was clear: Create a more user-controlled internet that lets you do everything you can now, except without servers or intermediaries to manage the flow of information. Where Web2, which emerged in the early 2000s, relies on centralized systems to store data and supply compute, all owned--and monetized by--a handful of global conglomerates, Web3 turns that structure on its head. Instead, data and compute are decentralized through technologies like blockchain and peer-to-peer networks. What was once a futuristic concept is quickly becoming a more concrete reality, even at a time when Web2 still dominates. Six out of ten Fortune 500 companies are exploring blockchain-based solutions, most taking a hybrid approach that combines traditional Web2 business models and infrastructure with the decentralized technologies and principles of Web3.


Live Graph Lab: Towards Open, Dynamic and Real Transaction Graphs with NFT

Neural Information Processing Systems

Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the properties of large-scale temporal graphs. Despite the ubiquity of these graphs in real-world scenarios, it's usually impractical for us to obtain the whole real-time graphs due to privacy concerns and technical limitations. In this paper, we introduce the concept of {\it Live Graph Lab} for temporal graphs, which enables open, dynamic and real transaction graphs from blockchains. Among them, Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become one of the most prominent parts of blockchain over the past several years. With more than \$40 billion market capitalization, this decentralized ecosystem produces massive, anonymous and real transaction activities, which naturally forms a complicated transaction network. However, there is limited understanding about the characteristics of this emerging NFT ecosystem from a temporal graph analysis perspective.


Optimizing Day-Ahead Energy Trading with Proximal Policy Optimization and Blockchain

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing penetration of renewable energy sources in day-ahead energy markets introduces challenges in balancing supply and demand, ensuring grid resilience, and maintaining trust in decentralized trading systems. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method, with blockchain technology to optimize automated trading strategies for prosumers in day-ahead energy markets. We introduce a comprehensive framework that employs a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent for multi-objective energy optimization and blockchain for tamper-proof data and transaction management. Simulations using real-world data from the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The RL agent achieves demand-supply balancing within 2% of the demand and maintains near-optimal supply costs for the majority of the operating hours. Moreover, it generates robust battery storage policies capable of handling variability in solar and wind generation. All decisions are recorded on an Algorand-based blockchain, ensuring transparency, au-ditability, and security - key enablers for trustworthy multi-agent energy trading. Our key contributions are a novel system architecture, the use of curriculum learning to train the RL agent, and policy insights that support real-world deployment.


Responsible LLM Deployment for High-Stake Decisions by Decentralized Technologies and Human-AI Interactions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

High-stakes decision domains are increasingly exploring the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex decision-making tasks. However, LLM deployment in real-world settings presents challenges in data security, evaluation of its capabilities outside controlled environments, and accountability attribution in the event of adversarial decisions. This paper proposes a framework for responsible deployment of LLM-based decision-support systems through active human involvement. It integrates interactive collaboration between human experts and developers through multiple iterations at the pre-deployment stage to assess the uncertain samples and judge the stability of the explanation provided by post-hoc XAI techniques. Local LLM deployment within organizations and decentralized technologies, such as Blockchain and IPFS, are proposed to create immutable records of LLM activities for automated auditing to enhance security and trace back accountability. It was tested on Bert-large-uncased, Mistral, and LLaMA 2 and 3 models to assess the capability to support responsible financial decisions on business lending.