The Protocol: Bitcoin proposal that could freeze quantum-related coins

Network News BITCOIN PROPOSAL THAT COULD FREEZE QUANTUM-RELATED COINS: Bitcoin was built on a promise that no one can touch your coins without your private key. No government, no bank, nobody. That promise is now, for the first time in Bitcoin's 16-year history, being challenged by the developer community itself as part of measures to build defenses against future quantum computers that could compromise Bitcoin's blockchain and steal your coins.

Jameson Loop, one of the outspoken bitcoin contributors, and other cryptographers have proposed a move that could force bitcoin holders to migrate their coins to new quantum-resistant addresses or face having their coins frozen permanently by the network itself. In that scenario, holders would technically still “own” the coins, but lose the ability to move them.

It is called Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-361 and was updated in Bitcoin's official proposal repository with the title "Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset." This comes as a recently released Google report warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could require significantly less firepower to compromise the Bitcoin blockchain than initially estimated.

This prompted some observers to cite 2029 as the quantum deadline for bitcoin. — Omkar Goldbole Read more. AI AGENTS POWER CRYPTO PAYMENTS: The cryptocurrency industry is racing toward a future where AI agents handle everything from booking flights to executing trades and making payments, but new research suggests the infrastructure underpinning that shift may not be secure.

McKinsey recently projected that AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. The team found that so-called “LLM routers,” or services that sit between users and AI models, can serve as a powerful attack vector for malicious actors. These routers are designed to forward requests to models like OpenAI or Anthropic, but they also have full access to everything passing through them, including sensitive data.

“LLM agents have moved beyond conversational assistants into systems that book flights, execute code, and manage infrastructure on behalf of users,” the researchers wrote, highlighting how quickly these tools are taking on real-world financial and operational tasks. The LLM routers or attack points leave users extremely vulnerable as they assume they are interacting directly with a reputable AI model, such as OpenAI, Grok or otherwise, when in reality many requests pass through intermediary services that can see and modify that data, the researchers said.

— Olivier Acuna Read more. CoW SWAP SECURITY BREACH: CoW Swap, a decentralized trading interface, said Tuesday it temporarily halted its services after detecting a domain name system (DNS) hijacking incident affecting its website, underscoring ongoing security risks at the front-end layer of DeFi platforms.

In a post on X, the team said the attack occurred at 14:54 UTC and warned users to avoid interacting with its interface until further notice. While the protocol’s underlying infrastructure, including its backend and APIs, was not directly compromised, both were paused “as a precaution” as the team worked to resolve the issue.

DNS hijacking allows attackers to redirect users from a legitimate domain to a malicious lookalike site, often to drain crypto wallets or harvest private data. The attack vector has become a persistent weak point in decentralized finance, where users typically rely on web-based interfaces to access otherwise secure smart contracts.

CoW Swap operates as a decentralized exchange aggregator, sourcing liquidity across venues and using the “Coincidence of Wants” mechanism to match trades directly between users or batch them for more efficient execution. Orders are handled by competing “solvers” that optimize trade outcomes, a design intended to reduce slippage and limit exposure to maximal extractable value (MEV).