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Today, hundreds of millions of people own bitcoin and other tokens hosted on blockchains worth trillions of dollars.
Increasingly, though, blockchains host far more than tokens. In fact, blockchains are our future tech stack, and they can host sophisticated Web apps too, which live fully-onchain, just like tokens. These apps are implemented entirely from network-resident code (i.e. smart contract software and its evolutions).
This has huge potential: by the end of 2025, more than 5 billion people will own internet-connected smartphones with Web browsers. So what might drive them to create and use fully-onchain web apps, which can sport seamless Web3 functionality?
I believe a new blockchain revolution is imminent, thanks to advancing AI and “self-writing app” technology.
This relates to an important emerging trend called “vibe coding.” Vibe coding involves software engineers using tools with integrated AI that can write and fix software code on their behalf, making them much more productive.
The self-writing apps paradigm takes this much further, by enabling non-technical users to create, own and update apps simply by instructing AI over chat. For reasons I will explain, blockchain is in a unique position to help bring this revolutionary functionality to the world.
In the future, an individual will be able to create a personal branding website, or something like a custom wedding planning app for a family member getting married, just by talking to AI. An entrepreneur without technical staff or money will be able to create a new kind of e-commerce website, or build a sharing economy app with Web3 rails. And, an enterprise will be able to create sophisticated CRM functionality, for an infinitesimally small fraction of the investment in time and money that is currently required. All just by talking, without the need for software engineering or systems administration skills.
In this new development paradigm, everyday users will issue instructions to AI over chat, and simply refresh their web browser moments later to interact with their new or updated app.
Apps living on blockchains have a number of valuable features. They are sovereign and censorship-resistant, because they live on a public network, they are tamperproof, which means they are secure without depending on cybersecurity, incredibly resilient, and can seamlessly integrate powerful web3 functionalities because they live on-chain.
In addition, blockchain technology solves major problems involved with having AI build solo on traditional IT.
For example, the code that runs on traditional IT must be written carefully to avoid introducing security holes, and the whole platform is sensitive to security configurations, from cloud accounts, to operating systems running on cloud instances like Linux, to hosted platform software such as databases and web servers. This means traditional IT infrastructure must often be further protected by cybersecurity systems such as firewalls and anti-malware. Failover, and backup and restore, are another concern, and service providers must be trusted.
Trusting AI to build solo on traditional IT is a stretch, because even a single mistake can lead to a cyberattack that results in data exfiltration, or ransomware encrypting data.
Blockchains make it far easier for AI to build solo in many different ways. For example, the network-resident code blockchains host is “serverless,” greatly simplifying the coding tasks AI must perform, allowing code to be produced faster. On the Internet Computer network, code can also serve secure interactive web experiences directly to end users, and can store and process massive amounts of data efficiently, and even be used to build things such as a fully-onchain social network (e.g oc.app) or an important enterprise application.
At DFINITY, we are great believers in self-writing apps running on public blockchains, which we term the “self-writing internet,” and have been developing supporting technologies for some years.
For self-writing apps to reach their maximum potential, it must be possible not only for users to create them by talking, but also to continue updating and improving them in production, so they can talk until they have what they need, or a design that is optimal. Unless users can continue updating apps running in production, the total market addressed by the self-writing app paradigm will reach only a tiny fraction of its tremendous potential.
DFINITY has been developing a programming language framework called Motoko for usage by AI, as well as humans. When a user updates an app by adding or changing functionality, the AI must also describe how to update the structure of data inside the app, so that none is lost. When the AI tries to install an update, the framework is able to detect if a mistake has been made that would cause even a small amount of data to be lost unintentionally, so that it can ask the AI to try again.
We believe the self-writing internet will democratize and decentralize tech on blockchain, and are excited that a new platform called Caffeine.ai will soon be released. Just by interacting with Caffeine over chat, users will create, own and update sovereign apps on the Internet Computer, and the World Computer more broadly, which for us is the amalgamation of all blockchains that can host tokens and smart contract software.
In the future, it will be possible to say “build me a personal Google Photos, which I can share with my family and friends, where we can add comments and emoji reactions to photos,” or “build me a remittance system so I can pay my international contractors using stablecoins.”
On blockchains, human imagination, rather than technical skills, will increasingly be the limit when creating web apps. The utility unlocked will drive massive adoption of blockchain – although, oftentimes, users may not be aware that blockchain lies behind their game-changing experiences.
I have long talked about a “blockchain singularity” occurring where decentralized networks become a major new tech stack. I think this is how we get there, and the future is almost here.
Solana trading volumes briefly topped the entire Ethereum ecosystem’s in February.
The $1.5 billion hack of Bybit — the largest in crypto history — has put the entire industry on high alert. The attack, reportedly carried out by North Korea's Lazarus Group, resulted in the theft of over 401,000 ETH, reinforcing the reality that no exchange is safe from sophisticated cyber threats, and any platform can be at risk.
Bybit’s response is critical. The positive takeaway is that Bybit has re-established a 1:1 asset backing for its clients and closed the “ether gap.” However, this temporary situation — where users shoulder the burden of centralized exchange (CEX) security failures could drive staking participants toward self-custody, keeping only the bare minimum on exchanges for transactions.
While the full fallout of this breach is still unfolding, it may serve as a catalyst for both retail and institutional staking participants to rethink their strategies. Here’s how the hack could reshape staking.
Potential Staking Losses
The hack resulted in the theft of approximately 400,000 ETH, which is nearly $1 billion in losses at an average price of $2,600 per ETH. Beyond the immediate financial hit, the Ethereum staking yield — hovering around 4% annually — means a loss of roughly 16,000 ETH in yearly staking rewards.
For perspective, if these stolen ETH were spread out across 100 stakers, each would have lost 160 ETH in rewards. This is a significant blow, particularly for retail investors who may lack the financial resilience to absorb such losses.
Declining Staking Share on Centralized Exchanges
The Bybit hack may be a turning point for the crypto industry, highlighting the risks of staking on centralized platforms. The trend is already visible in recent data: in the last six months, the amount of staked ETH on centralized exchanges has dropped from 8,597,984 ETH in September 2024 to 8,024,288 ETH in February 2025, representing a 6.67% decline. This change comes amid growing concerns about security and transparency on centralized platforms.
Additionally, following the hack from Feb. 20 to Feb. 23, staked ETH on CEXs fell by 0.56%, while on-chain staking (excluding CEXs) increased by 0.31%. This suggests a shift in the staking landscape, with users increasingly moving their assets away from centralized exchanges to more secure, non-custodial staking solutions or hardware wallets.
This change could have long-term implications for the crypto market. Centralized exchanges, which have long dominated the staking ecosystem, may see their influence wane. As stakers migrate to decentralized alternatives, CEXs’ roles in governance, reward distribution, and network upgrades could diminish. In the long-term, this may result in the reshaping of the staking market, with decentralized alternatives taking center stage.
Institutional Adoption at Risk
High-profile hacks like Bybit's inevitably make institutional investors more cautious about entering the crypto market. When auditors evaluate staking products, including ETH ETFs, billion-dollar security breaches can prompt legal and compliance teams to hit the brakes on crypto allocations.
This stagnation could push back the timeline for achieving new price highs and delaying broader adoption.
Given the rising threat of hacks, it is crucial for both retail and institutional investors to embrace audited and certified self-custody solutions. Securing assets through non-custodial wallets and decentralized platforms can significantly mitigate the risks posed by centralized exchanges. At the same time, exchanges need to work to rebuild trust by enhancing their security measures, conducting regular audits, and offering insurance schemes for users affected by breaches.
Moreover, the entire crypto community — including developers, exchanges, regulators, and users — needs to come together to balance innovation with security. This collaboration is essential for the long-term viability of the industry. By strengthening the overall security infrastructure, we can create an environment where both retail and institutional participants can confidently engage with the crypto market.
The industry's ongoing campaign against the debanking of crypto businesses and leaders has secured a legislative push from a top U.S. senator, Tim Scott, who is championing a bill that would cut out federal banking regulators' ability to use "reputational risk" as a reason to steer banks away from customers.
That practice had been cited by Republicans as a problem area in recent congressional hearings, which examined how digital assets businesses had been systematically cut out of U.S. banking relationships because of perceptions that the regulators — including the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — didn't want them there.
As the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, South Carolina's Tim Scott has rounded up fellow Republicans on that panel to back the bill — the Financial Integrity and Regulation Management Act, or FIRM Act — that cuts that phrase from any regulators' assessment of a bank's safety and soundness.
"It’s clear that federal regulators have abused reputational risk by carrying out a political agenda against federally legal businesses," Scott said in a statement on the bill, which said that ending debanking is among his top priorities. "This legislation, which eliminates all references to reputational risk in regulatory supervision, is the first step in ending debanking once and for all."
Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican who is the leader of the digital assets subcommittee, had recently raised this specific point as a concern with the Federal Reserve's oversight.
"Americans deserve a transparent regulatory framework that fosters innovation in digital assets instead of smothering it with government overreach," she said in a statement.
Consumer advocates and several Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have argued that the regulators' focus on digital assets had been warranted after the collapse of several major firms, fraud charges against industry leaders, major routine hacks of digital assets platforms and generally volatile markets have posed threats to the safety of investors.
Read More: Crypto's Debanking Worries Hit Another Big Stage in U.S. House
Majority Whip Tom Emmer first proposed banning Federal Reserve banks from using or issuing a digital dollar in 2022.
The latest in a series of reversed tariff threats by President Trump isn't having the hoped-for effect on risk markets at least halfway through the U.S. trading day on Thursday.
The stock market initially bounced off a sharply lower opening and bitcoin (BTC) rose through $91,000 as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — in an appearance on CNBC — said the president would exempt Mexico from his new 25% tariff for any goods or services covered under a previous trade agreement. The nicer stance toward the country's neighbor to the south was confirmed later by a social media post from Trump.
The positive moves in markets were short-lived though, with the Nasdaq at its session low just past the noon hour on the east cost, down 2.3%. Bitcoin has pulled back to $88,500, down nearly 1% over the past 24 hours.
This just in: Stagflation
Possibly lost in the unending ebb and flow of news emanating out of D.C. is a sharp rise in interest rates across the developed world.
With U.S. military support for Europe possibly on the decline, governments across the continent are pledging budget-busting increases in defense spending. Germany, for instance, this week saw one of its worst bond crashes ever, with the 10-year Bund yield jumping more than 40 basis points to the current 2.83%.
In Japan, where long-term Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields were little more than a handful basis points for what seemed like decades, the 10-year JGB yield rose another 6 basis points to 1.51% overnight. That's more than double the level of six months ago.
The moves haven't been ignored by U.S. markets. The 10-year Treasury yield — which had previously had declined about 70 basis points since the Trump inauguration — has risen more than 20 basis points in the last 48 hours to 4.30%.
"The recent move in global bond yields has put me on high alert," wrote Lekker Capital's Quinn Thompson. Particularly concerning to Thompson is that yields are rising as growth slows.
"We are witnessing the exact definition of stagflation which historically has not treated risk assets well," he continued.
Friday brings the latest U.S. jobs figures
The large gains in interest rates brings a renewed importance to the February U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls Report to be released Friday morning.
Economists are expecting payrolls to have risen 160,000 versus 143,000 in January. The unemployment rate is seen remaining steady at 4%. A strong print — and employment reports have tended to run ahead of expectations for many months running — could send rates pumping even higher, and risk markets, crypto among them, into a new leg down.
Traders say the potential for a spot LTC ETF makes Litecoin dips under $100 a buying opportunity.
Large VC funds are increasingly backing crypto startups spanning DeFi, DePIN, AI and payments.
Blockchain-based asset management firm Superstate said on Thursday it has registered its digital transfer agent, Superstate Services LLC, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a move aimed at bridging tokenized assets with existing financial regulations.
Transfer agents help issuers manage shareholder records, process transactions, and distribute dividends. As securities increasingly move on-chain, digital transfer agents play a critical role in maintaining compliance and governance. Superstate Services will use blockchain-integrated record-keeping to track ownership in real time. A smart contract-driven allowlist will ensure that only approved investors can acquire tokenized shares.
"Through this innovative approach, Superstate advances tokenized security compliance while integrating into the existing regulatory regime," the company said in a statement.
Superstate's registration comes after SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the agency's crypto task force, highlighted last month in a statement the importance of transfer agents in the future of tokenized securities.
Read more: SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce Lays Out 10 Priorities for New Crypto Task Force
Superstate, led by CEO Robert Leshner, is one of the key players in the tokenized asset space offering two tokenized security funds, USTB and USCC with over $420 million of assets under management combined.
Initially, Superstate Services will support only its own funds, but the firm plans to expand services to other issuers as the market for tokenized securities grows.
Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.
After two buggy test runs of Pectra, Ethereum's biggest upgrade since 2024, the network's developers decided on Thursday to postpone the upgrade pending further tests.
Pectra, which was planned as Ethereum faced mounting pressure to compete with other blockchains, contains a slate of upgrades designed to improve Ethereum's speed and ease of use.
When developers inked in the test dates for Pectra in January, they agreed to use the Thursday, Mar. 6 call to set a date for Pectra to go live on the mainnet. If all went well, the expectation was that the upgrade would go live in March.
The decision to postpone came after Pectra's tests on Holesky and Sepolia, Ethereum's two primary test networks, both encountered bugs. In both cases, the problems resulted from misconfigurations with the test rather than issues with Pectra itself.
Under normal circumstances, these two tests would have been enough. However, due to the bugs, developers determined on Thursday that Pectra should undergo additional testing before it goes live on Ethereum's main network.
“It seems like we need more information before we can really set a concrete date,” said Alex Stokes, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation who led Thursday’s call.
As for next steps, developers decided on Thursday to create a "shadow fork" of the Holesky test network, which has been inoperable since the last Pectra upgrade. The Pectra test's configuration issues forced many of Holesky's validators offline, meaning the network can no longer record transactions properly.
A shadow fork is a temporary copy of a blockchain network that is discarded once it is no longer needed. Holesky is a vitally important testing area for Ethereum's developers, and a shadow fork will allow certain key stakeholders — like staking pools and app developers — to test their code on Pectra while the main Holesky network is being fixed.
"Anyone who wants to test on Holesky can test there,” Stokes recapped on Thursday's call. In the meantime, developers will work to get the primary Holesky network back up and running, which will require 67% of the validators who run the network to reconfigure their systems and come back online.
Once Holeksy can finalize once again — meaning it's able to add and record transactions as usual — "we'll have more data to make a call on the next steps around mainnet and launching Pectra,” said Stokes. Developers say Holesky will be operating normally again by around March 28.
Pectra’s Improvements
Pectra is set to be one of the blockchain’s most ambitious changes to date, aimed at improving ease of use for both users and operators of the network.
One of the upgrade's main additions, EIP-7702, gives crypto wallets some smart contract capabilities. The change is meant to move Ethereum further towards account abstraction, a technological feature that lets wallet builders add user-friendly features, like the ability to pay for fees with currencies other than Ethereum's native ETH.
Another key proposal, EIP-7251, will alleviate some headaches for Ethereum's operators, or "validators." The change will increase the maximum amount of ETH one validator can stake from 32 to 2,048, meaning those who stake more than 32 ETH will no longer need to split their assets between so many nodes. The change is meant to improve convenience for validators and reduce the amount of time it takes to spin up a new node.
Thursday's postponement came as community members had already voiced frustration with the Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit that stewards Ethereum's development and coordinates network upgrades.
The foundation's critics argue that Ethereum has failed to develop a cohesive roadmap that will help it compete with ascendent networks like Solana. They point to the lagging price of ether (ETH) as a sign of waning confidence from the wider market.
Read more: Ethereum's Second Buggy 'Pectra' Test Could Lead to a Delayed Upgrade