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Mischief is one thing, but the incident makes one consider more damaging behaviour. There has been betting on the extent of wildfires on Polymarket and at wyldfyre.io, a startup focused solely on fires in California, which attracted so much negative attention that in August several senators demanded the CFTC shut it down. It isn’t hard to start a wildfire, or to help an existing fire grow. You can’t bet on assassinations or other violent crimes on Polymarket or Kalshi, though Polymarket’s offshore status and crypto-based anonymity mean that it monopolises trades on such events as Maduro’s capture or the ‘removal’ of the Iranian leadership. But it is easy to trade in predictions related to pandemics, say, or the screwworm outbreak currently killing cattle across the US. None of this is immune to deliberate human influence.

From: Geoff Mann · What’s the truth? Prediction Markets.

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The key feature of prediction markets is that, unlike stock markets, there is a point at which the event being traded takes place or concludes, and the market then ‘resolves’ to ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

From: Geoff Mann · What’s the truth? Prediction Markets.

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A TEE (such as Intel SGX or ARM TrustZone) allows the agent’s code to run in an isolated, hardware-protected enclave. We utilize TEEs to ensure the agent’s internal decision logic and cryptographic keys cannot be tampered with by an outside attacker or even the host of the agent process. When an agent is running inside a TEE, it can produce a remote attestation – a cryptographic quote from the hardware proving that the agent’s code is genuine and untampered. Our system can verify this attestation on-chain (e.g., via a known attestation contract or oracle) before an agent’s actions are accepted. In practice, this means the Agent Wallet Contract would require the agent to provide an attestation quote (or have a set of whitelisted enclave public keys) along with transactions.

From: Secure Autonomous Agent Payments: Verifying Authenticity and Intent in a Trustless Environment.

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Part of the reason that markets are so effective in organizing innovation via “creative destruction” is that markets efficiently assign credit to individual actors and firms in ways that incentivise working to make products and services better, more reliably, and cheaper. Crucially, for this mechanism to work in an agentic economy, it must offer granular mechanisms to represent and propagate credit across complex, distributed AI collaborations. Or, for want of a better word, money. In scenarios where a primary AI agent leverages the capabilities of other agents to deliver a final user-facing result, the value generated is a collective effort. An outcome-based credit system transcends mere participation, focusing instead on the utility and efficiency of each contributing agent, thereby echoing principles of distributed cognition in human groups where knowledge and contributions are collectively managed and implicitly attributed.

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This may well result in high-frequency negotiation (HFN), as an analogue to HFT. In a world where most people may have access to personal AI assistants to negotiate on their behalf, negotiation between AI assistants may become highly relevant to the arising social dynamics. With that in mind, it is plausible that there would be strong emerging preferences towards AI-driven negotiation proceeding at a higher and higher frequency, so as to broker the best deals for each user. One way to interpret this would be to think of this extra compute and energy as being directed towards preference alignment and consensus building. Should this come about, HFN may well become as important for future societies as HFT is today.

From: Virtual Agent Economies.

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On an iPhone, the first code that executes when the device powers on is the Boot ROM – a small block of immutable, read-only code etched into the Apple silicon during manufacturing. That Boot ROM contains the Apple Root CA public key, and its sole job is to cryptographically verify the signature on iBoot, the next stage of the boot process. iBoot, in turn, verifies the iOS kernel. The Secure Enclave – Apple’s dedicated security coprocessor – performs its own independent boot chain, verifying that sepOS (the Secure Enclave’s operating system) is signed by Apple. Each stage authenticates the next. If any link in the chain fails signature verification, the device refuses to boot normally.

On Android, the mechanism differs in implementation but follows the same principle. Hardware root-of-trust keys are burned into SoC fuses during manufacturing. Android Verified Boot (AVB) cryptographically verifies boot partitions and system images. Since Android 7.0, boot state is bound to the OS version and security patch level through hardware attestation – meaning a rollback to a vulnerable OS version can be detected and rejected.

From: The Cryptographic Iceberg Inside a Mobile Banking Transaction.

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Those assurances have not quieted broader concerns about the glasses. Privacy and civil liberties organizations have challenged Meta’s reported work to add facial recognition, warning that the technology could allow wearers to identify strangers without their knowledge or consent.
The proposed feature, known internally as “NameTag,” could allow wearers to identify people and receive information about them through Meta AI.

From: AI glasses reveal widening gap between Meta’s privacy safeguards and AI ambitions | Biometric Update.

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AI and the work of finance. Financial services companies thrive on customer inattention. Could AI agents, with their infinite attention spans, be their downfall?

From: Follow the Money – by Marc Rubinstein – Net Interest.

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There is another possibility for where all the unaccounted-for cash is hiding out.

A forensic look at the data behind the RBA’s estimates opens up the possibility that far more of it is being used in criminal enterprises.

From: The mystery of Australia’s missing cash – ABC News.

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Detailed analysis of on-chain transfers with identified sending and receiving countries in August 2026 showed domestic transfers were around two-thirds of all identifiable transactions and three-quarters were regional. As the time of writing, cross-border remittances are far from the dominant driver of stablecoin demand.