Smart contracts on blockchains are prone to diverse security vulnerabilities that can lead to significant financial losses due to their immutable nature. Existing detection approaches often lack flexibility across vulnerability types and rely heavily on manually crafted expert rules. In this paper, we present an LLM-based framework for practical smart contract vulnerability detection. We construct and release a large-scale dataset comprising 31,165 professionally annotated vulnerability instances collected from over 3,200 real-world projects across 15 major blockchain platforms. Our approach leverages precise AST-based context extraction and vulnerability-specific prompt design to instantiate customized detectors for 13 prevalent vulnerability categories. Experimental results demonstrate strong effectiveness, achieving an average positive recall of 0.92 and an average negative recall of 0.85, highlighting the potential of carefully engineered contextual prompting for scalable and high-precision smart contract security analysis.
The intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and distributed systems has given rise to Federated Learning (FL), a paradigm that enables decentralized model training without compromising local data privacy. As organizational data silos grow, deploying complex machine learning models across highly distributed edge networks becomes a critical infrastructural challenge. Standard FL implementations suffer from severe vulnerabilities related to adversarial gradient updates and computational bottlenecks at the aggregation layer. This paper presents a novel, end-to-end distributed architecture that hardens FL pipelines using advanced cryptographic verification and optimized big data processing frameworks. We introduce a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) wrapper that cryptographically validates node computations before global aggregation, neutralizing model poisoning attacks without inspecting raw gradients. Additionally, we evaluate the system's performance using extreme gradient boosting models optimized for distributed edge execution. We formalize the mathematical transformation of the machine learning loss functions into Rank-1 Constraint Systems (R1CS) suitable for succinct verification. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our hybrid architecture achieves a 94.2\% accuracy retention under adversarial conditions while maintaining scalable throughput across 1,000 parallel distributed nodes, effectively bridging the gap between rigorous cryptographic security and high-performance distributed AI.
An agent skill is a configuration package that equips an LLM-driven agent with a concrete capability, such as reading email, executing shell commands, or signing blockchain transactions. Each skill is a hybrid artifact-a structured half declares executable interfaces, while a prose half dictates when and how those interfaces fire-and the prose is reinterpreted probabilistically on every invocation. Conventional static analyzers parse the structured half but ignore the prose; LLM-based tools read the prose but cannot reproducibly prove that a tainted input reaches a high-impact sink. We present Semia, a static auditor for agent skills. Semia lifts each skill into the Skill Description Language (SDL), a Datalog fact base that captures LLM-triggered actions, prose-defined conditions, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Synthesizing a fact base that is both structurally sound and semantically faithful to the original prose is the central challenge; we address it with Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis (CGRS), a propose-verify-evaluate loop that refines LLM candidates until convergence. Security properties (e.g., indirect injection, secret leakage, confused deputies, unguarded sinks, etc.) over an agent skill can then be reduced to Datalog reachability queries. We evaluate Semia on 13,728 real-world skills from public marketplaces. Semia renders all of them auditable and finds that more than half carry at least one critical semantic risk. On a stratified sample of 541 expert-labeled skills, Semia achieves 97.7% recall and an F1 of 90.6%, substantially outperforming signature-based scanners and LLM baselines.
Mohd Sameen Chishti, Damilare Peter Oyinloye, Jingyue Li
Decentralized, agentic AI marketplaces are rapidly emerging to support software engineering tasks such as debugging, patch generation, and security auditing, often operating without centralized oversight. However, existing reputation mechanisms fail in this setting for three fundamental reasons: agents can strategically optimize against evaluation procedures; demonstrated competence does not reliably transfer across heterogeneous task contexts; and verification rigor varies widely, from lightweight automated checks to costly expert review. Current approaches to reputation drawing on federated learning, blockchain-based AI platforms, and large language model safety research are unable to address these challenges in combination. We therefore propose \textbf{AgentReputation}, a decentralized, three-layer reputation framework for agentic AI systems. The framework separates task execution, reputation services, and tamper-proof persistence to both leverage their respective strengths and enable independent evolution. The framework introduces explicit verification regimes linked to agent reputation metadata, as well as context-conditioned reputation cards that prevent reputation conflation across domains and task types. In addition, AgentReputation provides a decision-facing policy engine that supports resource allocation, access control, and adaptive verification escalation based on risk and uncertainty. Building on this framework, we outline several future research directions, including the development of verification ontologies, methods for quantifying verification strength, privacy-preserving evidence mechanisms, cold-start reputation bootstrapping, and defenses against adversarial manipulation.
Zhuoran Pan, Yue Li (102191), Zhi Guan, Jianbin Hu · 5 authors
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a transformative interface for Web3, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of translating high-level user intents into functionally correct, state-dependent on-chain transactions. We present \textsc{Intent2Tx}, a high-fidelity benchmark featuring 29,921 single-step and 1,575 multi-step instances meticulously derived from 300 days of real-world Ethereum mainnet traces. Unlike prior works that rely on synthetic instructions, \textsc{Intent2Tx} grounds natural language intents in real-world protocol interactions across 11 categories, including diverse long-tail Decentralized Finance (DeFi) primitives. To enable rigorous evaluation, we propose an execution-aware framework that transcends surface-level text matching by employing differential state analysis on forked mainnet environments. Our extensive evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while scaling and retrieval-augmentation enhance logical consistency and parameter precision, current models struggle with out-of-distribution generalization and multi-step planning. Crucially, our execution-based analysis demonstrates that syntactically valid outputs often fail to achieve intended state transitions, highlighting a significant gap in current "reasoning-to-execution" capabilities. \textsc{Intent2Tx} serves as a critical foundation for developing autonomous, reliable agents in intent-centric Web3 ecosystems. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Intent2Tx_Bench-97FF .
Enterprise software engineering is shifting away from deterministic CRUD/REST architectures toward AI-native systems where large language models act as cognitive orchestrators. This transition introduces a critical security tension: probabilistic LLMs weaken classical mechanisms for validation, access control, and formal testing. This paper proposes the design, formal validation, and empirical evaluation of a Semantic Gateway governed by the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The gateway reframes the enterprise API as a semantic surface where tools are dynamically discovered, authorized, and executed based on intent and policy enforcement. The central contribution rests on a paradigm shift: autonomous agents must not be validated as traditional software nor as simple API consumers, but as stochastic state-transition systems whose behavior must be abstracted, fuzzed, and audited through enabled-tool graphs. The architecture introduces a three-layer Zero-Trust security model comprising a pre-inference Semantic Firewall, deterministic Tool-Level RBAC, and out-of-band Cryptographic Human-in-the-Loop approval. Enabledness-Preserving Abstractions (EPAs) and greybox semantic fuzzing--originally developed for blockchain smart contract verification--are adapted to audit agent behavior in enterprise environments. Results demonstrate an 84.2% reduction in incidental code. Across 500,000 multi-turn fuzzing sequences, the methodology achieved a 100% discovery rate of hidden unauthorized state transitions, proving that dynamic formal verification is strictly necessary for secure agentic deployment.
Auditing the semantic properties of proprietary data creates a fundamental tension: verification requires transparent access, while proprietary rights demand confidentiality. While Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) ensure privacy, they are typically limited to precise algebraic constraints and are ill-suited for verifying qualitative, unstructured properties, such as the logic within a codebase. We propose {\em Agentic Witnessing}, a framework that moves verification from attested execution to {\em attested reasoning}. The system is composed of three agents: a Verifier (who wants to check properties of a dataset), a Prover (who owns the dataset) and an Auditor (that inspects the dataset). The Verifier is allowed to ask a limited number of simple binary true/false questions to the auditor. By isolating an LLM-based Auditor within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), the system enables the Verifier to query a Prover's private data via simple Boolean queries, without exposing the raw dataset. The Auditor uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to dynamically inspect the target dataset, producing a yes/no verdict accompanied by a cryptographic transcript: a signed hash chain binding the reasoning trace to both the original dataset and the TEE's hardware root of trust. We demonstrate this architecture by automating the artifact evaluation process for 21 peer-reviewed computer science papers with released codebases on GitHub (e.g. Does the codebase implement the system described in the paper?). We verified five high-level properties of these codebases described in the corresponding publications, treating the source code as private. Our results show that TEE-enabled agentic auditing provides a mechanism for privacy-preserving oversight, effectively decoupling qualitative verification from the need for data disclosure.
Graph-based anti-money laundering (AML) systems on blockchain networks can score suspicious activity at two granularity levels -- transactions or actor addresses -- yet compliance action is conducted per actor. This paper contributes an evaluation methodology for measuring how scoring granularity affects investigation queue composition under fixed review budgets. We formalize the evaluation through a projection framework mapping transaction-level scores to the actor-level action unit via four aggregation operators, and introduce budgeted investigation metrics -- yield@budget, burden decomposition, and case fragmentation. Using the public Elliptic++ Bitcoin dataset (203,769 transactions; 822,942 address occurrences), we train independent random forest classifiers at each level under a causal temporal protocol and compare review queues through Jaccard overlap, burden decomposition, and feature-matching ablations. At one-percent budget, temporal evaluation yields mean Jaccard of 0.374 (SD 0.171); static pooled evaluation yields 0.087 (95% CI [0.079, 0.094]). An enriched address model receiving all 237 features produces even lower overlap (Jaccard=0.051), with 4.3% illicit per 100 reviews versus 30.2% for the transaction-projected queue. Address-level detection value is temporally concentrated: two timesteps exceed 91% illicit per 100 reviews while the static burden is only 3.4%. A fixed hybrid policy underperforms the best single-level queue by 5.05pp (CI [-10.2pp, -0.9pp]). These findings establish that scoring granularity is a consequential design variable for AML investigation systems -- same data, same budget, different queues, different addresses investigated.
Technical traders have long relied on visual analysis of candlestick charts to identify market patterns and predict price movements. While deep learning has achieved remarkable success in image classification, its application to financial chart images remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic study comparing different visual representations for cryptocurrency regime prediction. We evaluate three image encoding methods (raw candlestick charts, Gramian Angular Fields, and multi-channel GAF), five chart component configurations, four neural network architectures (CNN, ResNet18, EfficientNet-B0, and Vision Transformer), and the impact of ImageNet transfer learning. Through eight controlled experiments on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and S&P 500 data spanning 2018-2024, we identify optimal configurations for visual regime classification. Our results show that a simple 4-layer CNN on raw candlestick charts achieves 0.892 AUC-ROC, outperforming larger pretrained models. Surprisingly, simpler representations (price-only charts, 128x128 resolution) consistently outperform more complex alternatives. We provide interpretability analysis using GradCAM and demonstrate that transfer learning improves performance by 4-16% despite the domain gap between natural images and financial charts.
Current blockchain Layer 2 solutions, including Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync, and their derivatives, optimize for human-initiated financial transactions. Autonomous AI agents instead generate high-frequency, semantically rich service invocations among mutually untrusting principals. Existing chains treat those interactions as generic calldata, forcing identity, escrow, dependency ordering, and session state to be encoded above the execution layer at the wrong cost point. We present AGNT2, a three-tier stack purpose-built for agent and microservice coordination on-chain. AGNT2 combines: (1) a sidecar deployment pattern that turns any Docker container into an on-chain agent without application-code modification; (2) Layer Top P2P state channels for established bilateral pairs (<100 ms, rough design target 1K-5K TPS per pair, 10M+ aggregate TPS design envelope under endpoint-resource limits), Layer Core as a dependency-aware sequenced rollup for first-contact and multi-party interactions (500 ms-2 s, 300K-500K TPS design target), and Layer Root settlement with computational fraud proofs anchored to any EVM L1; and (3) an agent-native execution environment plus interaction trie that make service invocation, identity, reputation, capabilities, and session context first-class protocol objects. This paper focuses on the execution-layer systems problem: sequencing, state, settlement, and the data-availability (DA) bandwidth gap that bounds all three. Simulation and analytical modeling support the architecture, and prototype measurements validate selected components, but no end-to-end Layer Core implementation exists yet. Practical deployment is currently constrained to roughly 10K-100K TPS by DA throughput, leaving a ~100x gap at the target ceiling. AGNT2 argues that the agent economy requires a dedicated execution layer rather than a general-purpose chain repurposed for agents.
The consensus that GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, and EvolveGCN outperform feature-only baselines on the Elliptic Bitcoin Dataset is widely cited but has not been rigorously stress-tested under a leakage-free evaluation protocol. We perform a seed-matched inductive-versus-transductive comparison and find that this consensus does not hold. Under a strictly inductive protocol, Random Forest on raw features achieves F1 = 0.821 and outperforms all evaluated GNNs, while GraphSAGE reaches F1 = 0.689 +/- 0.017. A paired controlled experiment reveals a 39.5-point F1 gap attributable to training-time exposure to test-period adjacency. Additionally, edge-shuffle ablations show that randomly wired graphs outperform the real transaction graph, indicating that the dataset's topology can be misleading under temporal distribution shift. Hybrid models combining GNN embeddings with raw features provide only marginal gains and remain substantially below feature-only baselines. We release code, checkpoints, and a strict-inductive protocol to enable reproducible, leakage-free evaluation.
Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains one of the leading causes of death globally, highlighting the need for reliable predictive systems to support early diagnosis and risk assessment. While traditional machine learning models perform well on structured clinical data, large language models (LLMs) present new possibilities to interpret medical information expressed in natural language. In this work, we develop a hybrid framework that bridges structured clinical data and natural-language representations for CAD prediction. Using a publicly available dataset of 1,190 patient records with 11 clinical attributes, structured variables are converted into interpretable feature representations and synthetic clinical narratives using LLMs. A validation pipeline performs reverse extraction of clinical variables and computes a consistency score with the original records, achieving an average fidelity of 94.61%. We then evaluate four conventional machine learning models and compare their performance with LLM-based classification under zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings. We use two LLMs here, GPT and Gemini. Experimental results show that Random Forest achieves the highest accuracy. Despite this advantage, LLM-based classification remains beneficial in real-world clinical settings. This is because LLMs operate directly on natural language patient descriptions, meaning that sensitive numerical patient data such as exact lab values, blood pressure readings, and diagnostic codes are kept private. Findings suggest that combining structured clinical data with LLM-generated narratives can enable new directions for hybrid clinical prediction systems.
Khandoker Ashik Uz Zaman, Mahdi H. Miraz, Mohammed N. M. Ali
INTRODUCTION: The proliferation of the amalgamation of IoT and edge computing has increased the demand for decentralised trust and security mechanisms capable of operating across heterogeneous and resource-limited devices. Approaches such as federated learning, Zero Trust architectures, lightweight blockchain and distributed neural models offer alternatives to centralised control. OBJECTIVES: This review examines various state-of-the-art decentralised mechanisms and evaluates their effectiveness in terms of securing IoT networks at the edge. METHODS: Thirty recent studies were analysed to compare how decentralised architectures establish trust, support secure communication and enable intrusion and anomaly detection. Frameworks, such as DFGL-LZTA, SecFedDNN and COSIER were assessed. RESULTS: Decentralised designs enhance privacy, reduce single points of failure and improve adaptive threat response, though challenges remain in scalability, efficiency and interoperability. CONCLUSION: The study identifies key considerations and future research needs for building secure and resilient trust-aware IoT edge ecosystems.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are inclined explore Small Language Models (SLMs) as edge-native constitutional firewalls to vet proposals and mitigate semantic social engineering. While scaling inference-time compute (System 2) enhances formal logic, its efficacy in highly adversarial, cryptoeconomic governance environments remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce Sentinel-Bench, an 840-inference empirical framework executing a strict intra-model ablation on Qwen-3.5-9B. By toggling latent reasoning across frozen weights, we isolate the impact of inference-time compute against an adversarial Optimism DAO dataset. Our findings reveal a severe compute-accuracy inversion. The autoregressive baseline (System 1) achieved 100% adversarial robustness, 100% juridical consistency, and state finality in under 13 seconds. Conversely, System 2 reasoning introduced catastrophic instability, fundamentally driven by a 26.7% Reasoning Non-Convergence (cognitive collapse) rate. This collapse degraded trial-to-trial consensus stability to 72.6% and imposed a 17x latency overhead, introducing critical vulnerabilities to Governance Extractable Value (GEV) and hardware centralization. While rare (1.5% of adversarial trials), we empirically captured "Reasoning-Induced Sycophancy," where the model generated significantly longer internal monologues (averaging 25,750 characters) to rationalize failing the adversarial trap. We conclude that for edge-native SLMs operating under Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) constraints, System 1 parameterized intuition is structurally and economically superior to System 2 iterative deliberation for decentralized consensus. Code and Dataset: https://github.com/smarizvi110/sentinel-bench
Data plays a fundamental role in consolidating markets, services, and products in the digital financial ecosystem. However, the use of real data, especially in the financial context, can lead to privacy risks and access restrictions, affecting institutions, research, and modeling processes. Although not all financial datasets present such limitations, this work proposes the use of deep learning techniques for generating synthetic data applied to cryptocurrency price time series. The approach is based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGANs), combining an LSTM-type recurrent generator and an MLP discriminator to produce statistically consistent synthetic data. The experiments consider different crypto-assets and demonstrate that the model is capable of reproducing relevant temporal patterns, preserving market trends and dynamics. The generation of synthetic series through GANs is an efficient alternative for simulating financial data, showing potential for applications such as market behavior analysis and anomaly detection, with lower computational cost compared to more complex generative approaches.
The communication protocols and data transfer mechanisms employed by IoT devices in smart buildings and corresponding digital twin systems predominantly rely on centralized architectures. Such centralized systems are vulnerable to single points of failure, where a malfunction can disrupt operational processes. This study introduces a blockchain-based decentralized protocol to enhance the cyber resilience of IoT data transfer for digital twins and enable decentralized automation of building operations. The framework incorporates public and private blockchain technologies alongside two case studies showcasing prototypes of each system. These prototypes were validated within a real-world building environment using smart home appliances and two digital twin platforms, with their performance evaluated based on cost, scalability, data security, and privacy. The findings reveal that the Hyperledger Fabric-based system excels in terms of scalability, speed, and cost-effectiveness, while both frameworks offer advantages over traditional centralized protocols in system cyber resilience, data security, and privacy.
Autonomous AI agents are beginning to operate across organizational boundaries on the open internet -- discovering, transacting with, and delegating to agents owned by other parties without centralized oversight. When agents from different human principals collaborate at scale, the collective becomes opaque: no single human can observe, audit, or govern the emergent behavior. We term this the Logic Monopoly -- the agent society's unchecked monopoly over the entire logic chain from planning through execution to evaluation. We propose the Separation of Power (SoP) model, a constitutional governance architecture deployed on public blockchain that breaks this monopoly through three structural separations: agents legislate operational rules as smart contracts, deterministic software executes within those contracts, and humans adjudicate through a complete ownership chain binding every agent to a responsible principal. In this architecture, smart contracts are the law itself -- the actual legislative output that agents produce and that governs their behavior. We instantiate SoP in AgentCity on an EVM-compatible layer-2 blockchain (L2) with a three-tier contract hierarchy (foundational, meta, and operational). The core thesis is alignment-through-accountability: if each agent is aligned with its human owner through the accountability chain, then the collective converges on behavior aligned with human intent -- without top-down rules. A pre-registered experiment evaluates this thesis in a commons production economy -- where agents share a finite resource pool and collaboratively produce value -- at 50-1,000 agent scale.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly proposed together for securing intelligent networks, but the literature remains fragmented across ledger design, AI-driven detection, cyber-physical applications, and emerging agentic workflows. This paper synthesizes the area through three reusable contributions: (i) a taxonomy of blockchain-AI security for intelligent networks, (ii) integration patterns for verifiable and adaptive security workflows, and (iii) the Blockchain-AI Security Evaluation Blueprint (BASE), a reporting checklist spanning AI quality, ledger behavior, end-to-end service levels, privacy, energy, and reproducibility. The paper also maps the evidence landscape across IoT, critical infrastructure, smart grids, transportation, and healthcare, showing that the conceptual fit is strong but real-world evidence remains uneven and often prototype-heavy. The synthesis clarifies where blockchain contributes provenance, trust, and auditability, where AI contributes detection, adaptation, and orchestration, and where future work should focus on interoperable interfaces, privacy-preserving analytics, bounded agentic automation, and open cross-domain benchmarks. The paper is intended as a reference for researchers and practitioners designing secure, transparent, and resilient intelligent networks.
Ali Akarma, Toqeer Ali Syed, Salman Jan, Hammad Muneer · 5 authors
The AI-based sensing and autonomous monitoring have become the main components of wildfire early detection, but current systems do not provide adaptive inter-agent coordination, structurally defined human control, and cryptographically verifiable responsibility. Purely autonomous alert dissemination in the context of safety critical disasters poses threats of false alarming, governance failure and lack of trust in the system. This paper provides a blockchain-based governance-conscious agentic AI architecture of trusted wildfire early warning. The monitoring of wildfires is modeled as a constrained partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) that accounts for the detection latency, false alarms reduction and resource consumption with clear governance constraints. Hierarchical multi-agent coordination means dynamic risk-adaptive reallocation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). With risk-adaptive policies, a permissioned blockchain layer sets mandatory human-authorization as a state-transition invariant as a smart contract. We build formal assurances such as integrity of alerts, human control, non-repudiation and limited detection latency assumptions of Byzantine fault. Security analysis shows that it is resistant to alert injections, replays, and tampering attacks. High-fidelity simulation environment experimental evaluation of governance enforcement demonstrates that it presents limited operational overhead and decreases false public alerts and maintains adaptive detection performance. This work is a step towards a principled design paradigm of reliable AI systems by incorporating accountability into the agentic control loop of disaster intelligence systems that demand safety in their application.
Ali Akarma, Toqeer Ali Syed, Abdul Khadar Jilani, Salman Jan · 7 authors
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and sensor nodes increasingly support decentralized sensing and coordination in the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), yet most deployments rely on static trust once authentication is established, leaving long-duration missions vulnerable to compromised or behaviorally deviating agents. In this paper, an interrogator based structure is presented that incorporates the idea of behavioral trust monitoring into underwater multi-agent operation without interfering with autonomy. Privileged interrogator module is a passive communication metadata analyzer that uses a lightweight transformer model to calculate dynamic trust scores, which are used to authorize the forwarding of mission critical data. Suspicious agents cause proportional monitoring and conditional restrictions, which allow fast containment and maintain network continuity. The evidence of trust is stored in a permissioned blockchain consortium which offers identity management which is not tampered and is decentralized without causing the overhead of public consensus mechanisms. Simulation based analysis shows that the evaluation of the result compares to a relative improvement of 21.7% in the detection accuracy compared to the static trust baselines with limited energy overhead. These findings suggest that behavior driven validation has the capability of reinforcing underwater coordination without compromising scalability and deployment.
Blockchain forensics inherently involves dynamic and iterative investigations, while many existing approaches primarily model it through static inference pipelines. We propose a paradigm shift towards Agentic Blockchain Forensics (ABF), modeling forensic investigation as a sequential decision-making process. To instantiate this paradigm, we introduce LOCARD, the first agentic framework for blockchain forensics. LOCARD operationalizes this perspective through a Tri-Core Cognitive Architecture that decouples strategic planning, operational execution, and evaluative validation. Unlike generic LLM-based agents, it incorporates a Structured Belief State mechanism to enforce forensic rigor and guide exploration under explicit state constraints. To demonstrate the efficacy of the ABF paradigm, we apply LOCARD to the inherently complex domain of cross-chain transaction tracing. We introduce Thor25, a benchmark dataset comprising over 151k real-world cross-chain forensic records, and evaluate LOCARD on the Group-Transfer Tracing task for dismantling Sybil clusters. Validated against representative laundering sub-flows from the Bybit hack, LOCARD achieves high-fidelity tracing results, providing empirical evidence that modeling blockchain forensics as an autonomous agentic task is both viable and effective. These results establish a concrete foundation for future agentic approaches to large-scale blockchain forensic analysis. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/xhyumiracle/locard and https://github.com/xhyumiracle/thorchain-crosschain-data.
Mohd Safwan Uddin, Mohammed Mouzam, Mohammed Imran, Syed Badar Uddin Faizan
Autonomous agents are moving beyond simple retrieval tasks to become economic actors that invoke APIs, sequence workflows, and make real-time decisions. As this shift accelerates, API providers need request-level monetization with programmatic spend governance. The HTTP 402 protocol addresses this by treating payment as a first-class protocol event, but most implementations rely on cryptocurrency rails. In many deployment contexts, especially countries with strong real-time fiat systems like UPI, this assumption is misaligned with regulatory and infrastructure realities. We present APEX, an implementation-complete research system that adapts HTTP 402-style payment gating to UPI-like fiat workflows while preserving policy-governed spend control, tokenized access verification, and replay resistance. We implement a challenge-settle-consume lifecycle with HMAC-signed short-lived tokens, idempotent settlement handling, and policy-aware payment approval. The system uses FastAPI, SQLite, and Python standard libraries, making it transparent, inspectable, and reproducible. We evaluate APEX across three baselines and six scenarios using sample sizes 2-4x larger than initial experiments (N=20-40 per scenario). Results show that policy enforcement reduces total spending by 27.3% while maintaining 52.8% success rate for legitimate requests. Security mechanisms achieve 100% block rate for both replay attacks and invalid tokens with low latency overhead (19.6ms average). Multiple trial runs show low variance across scenarios, demonstrating high reproducibility with 95% confidence intervals. The primary contribution is a controlled agent-payment infrastructure and reference architecture that demonstrates how agentic access monetization can be adapted to fiat systems without discarding security and policy guarantees.
Software engineering courses often require rapid upskilling in supporting knowledge areas such as domain understanding and modeling methods. We report an experience from a two-week milestone in a master's course where 29 students used a customized ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) tutor grounded in a curated course knowledge base to learn cryptocurrency-finance basics and Domain-Driven Design (DDD). We logged all interactions and evaluated a 34.5% random sample of prompt-answer pairs (60/~174) with a five-dimension rubric (accuracy, relevance, pedagogical value, cognitive load, supportiveness), and we collected pre/post self-efficacy. Responses were consistently accurate and relevant in this setting: accuracy averaged 98.9% with no factual errors and only 2/60 minor inaccuracies, and relevance averaged 92.2%. Pedagogical value was high (89.4%) with generally appropriate cognitive load (82.78%), but supportiveness was low (37.78%). Students reported large pre-post self-efficacy gains for genAI-assisted domain learning and DDD application. From these observations we distill seventeen concrete teaching practices spanning prompt/configuration and course/workflow design (e.g., setting expected granularity, constraining verbosity, curating guardrail examples, adding small credit with a simple quality rubric). Within this single-course context, results suggest that genAI-supported learning can complement instruction in domain understanding and modeling tasks, while leaving room to improve tone and follow-up structure.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as a prominent approach for detecting smart contract vulnerabilities, driven by the growing contract datasets and advanced deep learning techniques. However, DNNs typically require large-scale labeled datasets to model the relationships between contract features and vulnerability labels. In practice, the labeling process often depends on existing open-sourced tools, whose accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Consequently, label noise poses a significant challenge for the accuracy and robustness of the smart contract, which is rarely explored in the literature. To this end, we propose Contrastive learning-enhanced Granular-Ball smart Contracts training, CGBC, to enhance the robustness of contract vulnerability detection. Specifically, CGBC first introduces a Granular-ball computing layer between the encoder layer and the classifier layer, to group similar contracts into Granular-Balls (GBs) and generate new coarse-grained representations (i.e., the center and the label of GBs) for them, which can correct noisy labels based on the most correct samples. An inter-GB compactness loss and an intra-GB looseness loss are combined to enhance the effectiveness of clustering. Then, to improve the accuracy of GBs, we pretrain the model through unsupervised contrastive learning supported by our novel semantic-consistent smart contract augmentation method. This procedure can discriminate contracts with different labels by dragging the representation of similar contracts closer, assisting CGBC in clustering. Subsequently, we leverage the symmetric cross-entropy loss function to measure the model quality, which can combat the label noise in gradient computations. Finally, extensive experiments show that the proposed CGBC can significantly improve the robustness and effectiveness of the smart contract vulnerability detection when contrasted with baselines.