Snippings

It is the same in Europe. Carrefour has just introduced its ChatGPT service so that consumers can check availability, select items and choose delivery options but when it comes to completing the purchases they are directed into Carrefour’s existing e-commerce platform.

OpenAI’s Instant Checkout was built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which was co-developed with Stripe. The concept was relatively simple. If a user found a product they wanted that was supported by Instant Checkout, all they had to do was click the “Buy” button in ChatGPT and it was all set. After only six months, however, OpenAI have abandoned Instant Checkout and have shift their focus to product discovery.

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An attacker drained $285 million from Solana’s largest perpetual futures exchange using a fabricated token, manipulated oracles, and a compromised admin key.

From: Drift Protocol Suffers $285 Million Exploit After Admin Key Compromise and Oracle Manipulation – Unchained.

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Jean Luc Di Manno, the Innovation Lead in Payments over a Fime came up with a very nice way to make us think about such things. He says that today’s commercial system was built on human emotions (such as desire, aspiration and impulse) and then asks a key question: How do you seduce an agent?

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Catena Labs is building the first AI-native financial institution: a regulated entity designed from the ground up for AI agents and their human collaborators. We’re enabling AI to securely identify itself and transact safely, while providing businesses and consumers with a trusted partner for this new economic era, underpinned by a commitment to pioneering AI-specific risk management and compliance.

From: Catena Labs.

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The following outlines the structure of a single enclave application:

In this diagram Host represents a standard AWS virtual machine. We run a basic application that receives traffic from the network and calls into the enclave. This creates a layer of insulation from our most secure environment and offers a convenient place to gather metrics and other operational information about the enclaves.
Enclave represents a machine with no external connectivity. The only connection it can have is a virtual serial connection to the host and its own secure co-processor. In AWS this is called the Nitro Security Module (NSM). This runs an instance of Turnkey’s enclave operating system, QuorumOS (QOS), and a secure application running on top of QOS.

From: Secure Enclaves – Turnkey.

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Hiring another agent. The user asks to hire a Meridian research agent. The system checks the agent’s decentralized identity, pulls its reputation score (87/100, 142 attestations), and auto-approves because the score meets the configured threshold. Agent-to-agent commerce with identity verification built in.

Standing authorization. The user delegates ongoing spending authority — $20/month on Meridian reports. Two-layer enforcement applies to recurring authorizations too. Then we check how the treasury agent is actually allocating capital across a portfolio view with APY breakdowns.

The whole thing runs in two surfaces: Claude Desktop using MCP with rich interactive cards, and OpenClaw over WhatsApp as a text-based skill. Same agent, same policy enforcement, different interfaces. The surface changes. The security model doesn’t.

From: What Agents Need Before They Handle Real Money – Catena Labs.

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Aggregate statistics across 846 documented custody incidents where legitimate owners, heirs, or authorised parties encountered barriers accessing Bitcoin.

From: Bitcoin Custody Incident Archive Statistics | CustodyStress.

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In the dystopian nightmare scenario imagined by opponents of facial recognition technology, an innocent person sitting at home might find themselves erroneously flagged by facial matching, and instantly turned into a criminal in the eyes of the law. Probable cause standards and police procedural policies are supposed to prevent this kind of error, but this is exactly what appears to have happened to Angela Lipps.
Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother, has never visited states that are not adjacent to her home in Tennessee. Regardless, Lipps was forced to spend six months in prison, after U.S. Marshals showed up at her house with guns, claiming she was the mastermind of an organized bank fraud operation – in Fargo, North Dakota.
“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” says Lipps in an article from Inforum.
Facial recognition technology flagged Lipps based on a surveillance video of a woman using a fake military ID to withdraw large sums of money. The officer in charge of the case appears to have approved an arrest based solely on the facial match and basic comparisons with Lipps’ social media accounts and driver’s license photo.
The case mirrors other cases of police treating facial recognition results as probable cause, despite established law and policy providing no basis for doing so with technology that has been judged comparable to an anonymous informant. Fargo Police signed an affidavit of probable cause based on the biometric match, follow-up coverage from Inforum says.

From: US woman jailed 5 months after facial recognition mismatch, lax police work | Biometric Update.

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Under the law, food stores and other retail establishments cannot require consumers to pay by credit card or use another cashless transaction method to complete their purchase. They also cannot charge consumers a higher price if they pay in cash.

Stores that violate the new law will face maximum civil penalties of $1,000 for the first violation and $1,500 for each succeeding one.

The law passed both houses of the New York State Legislature last year before securing the signature of Governor Kathy Hochul, bringing the state in line with New York City, which has had similar rules in place since 2020.

From: New York state force stores to accept cash.

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