In 2022, ChatGPT emerged, showcasing the immense potential of AI technology in the Web2 world. This wave quickly swept into the Web3 world, with developers exploring the value of AI in Web3 applications. In 2024, the Web3+AI narrative experienced explosive growth, with concepts such as decentralized AI computing power markets, decentralized AI inference networks, AI payment protocols, and AI-native blockchains emerging, gradually filling the gaps in various sub-sectors of Web3+AI infrastructure. So, why does Web3 need AI, and why does AI need Web3 technology? Firstly, for Web3, the intelligent characteristics of AI can help users complete many complex operations in an "abstract" way, which aligns perfectly with the "abstracted" solutions advocated by Web3. Furthermore, AI agents can simulate user thought processes, automatically performing certain operations in place of humans, and providing predictive capabilities based on broader data. Secondly, for AI technology, the reasoning process of Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by traditional Web2 companies is a "black box" for users. Users find it difficult to verify whether the model performed the inference as required, whether their chosen model was used to complete the inference task, and whether the final result provided by the LLM was manipulated. Therefore, the transparency, traceability, and distributed nature of Web3 can provide solutions to these problems. (The above content is excerpted from Web3Caff Research's "Web3+AI Track 2025 Q4 15,000-Word Research Report: When AI Goes On-Chain, Has the Era of Trustworthy and Autonomous Ecosystems Quietly and Fully Begun? A Panoramic Analysis of Its Development History, Integration Strategies, Ecosystem Status, Advantages, Disadvantages, Risks, and Future Challenges") Click to view the full version 👇

In December 2024, two events occurred almost simultaneously: Nike announced the closure of its virtual sneaker studio, RTFKT, in January 2025; Adidas officially launched its ALTS digital avatar series, three years in the making. The two largest global sportswear brands made drastically different choices at the same time. Similar divergences have spread throughout the industry. Over the past four years, almost all leading consumer brands have experimented with Web3: Starbucks launched the NFT membership program Odyssey, which closed after approximately 22 months; Louis Vuitton released the €39,000 digital collectible VIA Treasure Trunk, which continues to operate and expand its product line; Gucci opened a virtual store at Roblox; H&M experimented with a metaverse showroom; and LVMH even used a metaverse approach to present content at its 2023 shareholders' meeting. Both are leading brands, both have made significant investments, and both claim to be optimistic about the long-term value of Web3—why such drastically different outcomes? Before discussing specific cases, it's necessary to return to a fundamental question: Why are traditional brands venturing into Web3? During the 2021 boom, many brands entered the field citing reasons like "everyone else is doing it" or "it seems innovative." This lack of clear objectives inherently creates uncertainty—when brands haven't clearly defined the specific problems they want to solve, such technological attempts often resemble a high-cost demonstration rather than building long-term capabilities. The above content is excerpted from Web3Caff Research's "Traditional Brands' Web3 Practice: A 10,000-Word Research Report: Exploring Long-Term Value Differentiation in Web3—A Road to Hell or a Discovery of Opportunities? A Panoramic Analysis of its Development Background, Typical Cases, Business Models, Compliance Paths, and Future Prospects" Click to view the full version 👇

[Web3Caff Research Weekly Member Report No. 145: Ethereum infrastructure giant Consensys's 10,000-word research report, ERC-8004 to be launched on the Ethereum mainnet soon, Warden launches on-chain AI economic coordination and verification layer…] What were the key market developments in the Web3 field over the past week? A quick overview of this week's in-depth commentary.

1/ 📖 Web3Caff Research Publishes "A 10,000-Word Research Report on Ethereum Infrastructure Company ConsenSys: Standing at the Crossroads of Commercialization and IPO Expectations, Can Compliance Challenges and Profitability Models Be Achieved Simultaneously?" Written by Web3Caff Research researcher @ShirleyLi, this report provides a comprehensive analysis of ConsenSys's development history, strategic logic, core products, potential risks, and future prospects. Read the full article below 👇 2/ 💡 Research Starting Point: From Ethereum Core Infrastructure to Commercialization Transformation As a crucial infrastructure company in the Ethereum ecosystem, ConsenSys's core products have gradually driven the rapid development of Ethereum technology and applications. With increasingly stringent global regulations, the company faces the challenge of balancing technological innovation with regulatory compliance, while simultaneously seeking greater commercial breakthroughs in the capital markets. 3/ 🧩 Technical Breakdown: ConsenSys's Core Products Facilitate Market Expansion ConsenSys's core competitiveness lies in its powerful product matrix, including MetaMask, Infura, and Linea. Through the synergy of these products, ConsenSys provides developers and users with integrated blockchain infrastructure support, driving ecosystem expansion and application implementation. 4/ ⚙️ Architectural Differences: How ConsenSys Adapts to Strategic Adjustment Faced with a rapidly changing market environment, ConsenSys underwent a strategic restructuring, driving its transformation from technology products to a fully commercialized product line. This strategic adjustment not only strengthened its competitiveness in the blockchain infrastructure field but also laid a solid foundation for the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem. 5/ 🔗 Challenges and Opportunities: Balancing Compliance and Centralization ConsenSys needs to address increasingly stringent global regulatory requirements, especially as its core products MetaMask and Infura face privacy compliance challenges. How the company finds a balance between technological innovation and regulatory compliance will determine its future market position. 6/ 📉 Road Convergence: ConsenSys' Strategic Focus and Future Development As its business continues to transform and optimize, ConsenSys has focused its resources on EVM compatibility and Layer 2 solutions through multiple strategic adjustments. This transformation aims to further enhance its leadership position in the global blockchain infrastructure market and prepare for a future IPO. 7/ 🔮 Stage Assessment: Dual Considerations of Commercialization and Regulation ✅ Observation: ConsenSys has driven business development to a certain extent based on core products such as MetaMask and Infura; ⚠️ Reminder: How it balances commercialization and regulatory compliance will determine its continued competitiveness in the market. This thread is an excerpt. The full report contains more strategic analysis and future outlook 👇 Read the full article:

A milestone moment! 🎉 A huge thank you to the @Aster_DEX team for leading $ARTX into this exciting new phase! 🚀

Over the past two years, a significant change has been underway: the speed at which public blockchain transparent ledgers are being linked to real-world identities has far exceeded industry expectations. On-chain analytics tools and compliance services have matured rapidly, with capabilities such as Travel Rule, on-chain risk control, address profiling, and entity association being deployed at scale, making it increasingly easy for on-chain behavior to be mapped to individuals, businesses, and institutions in the real world. Simultaneously, stablecoin cross-border settlements, RWA asset on-chaining, and institutional trials of on-chain clearing have elevated "who can see what, and under what conditions" from technical details to core issues within the compliance framework. Coupled with multiple trust crises and real-world security incidents triggered by transaction traceability, a previously overlooked fact is becoming clear: in the on-chain world, visibility itself is becoming a risk exposure. These changes all point to one fact: privacy is no longer a question of "whether it's needed," but rather "how to redesign the visibility structure while ensuring compliance and verifiability." At a deeper level, privacy is an individual's self-protection mechanism: it allows individuals to make decisions without having to subject every action to the immediate evaluation of others, institutions, or automated systems. Because when all actions are implicitly public, decision-making logic inevitably tilts towards "external visibility," forcing individuals and organizations to continuously optimize "how others interpret my behavior," thereby weakening the stability and autonomy of long-term goals. This structural pressure is significantly amplified in scenarios such as on-chain finance, DAO governance, and enterprise-level on-chain decision-making. When fund flows, voting behavior, and strategy adjustments are all continuously trackable and analyzable, transparency itself can, in turn, alter participants' behavioral patterns, thus affecting the overall efficiency of the system and the outcome of the game. It is worth noting that the Web3 industry has not always prioritized privacy. On the contrary, for a considerable period, privacy was underestimated: before the maturity of technologies like ZK-SNARK, strong privacy under decentralized conditions was almost impossible to achieve, and the industry narrative naturally gave way to more "deliverable" goals, such as scalability, decentralization, governance, and composability. However, this avoidance strategy began to fail in 2024–2025. On the one hand, AI is pushing the capabilities of "centralized data collection + high-intensity analysis" to unprecedented heights, even extending to user behavior patterns that haven't been actively disclosed. On the other hand, cryptography itself is evolving; zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation are becoming engineering feasible, making "programmable privacy" a real-world option and unlocking the value of data. The above content is excerpted from Web3Caff Research's "Privacy Infrastructure Track 26,000-Word Research Report: Under the Global Compliance Wave, How Is Privacy Reshaping the Web3 Underlying Paradigm? From the Four Generations of Privacy Technology Evolution, to the Divergence of ZK/FHE/TEE Routes, Compliance Architecture Choices, Ecosystem Status, and Future Evolution Trends in the Next Decade" Click to view the full version 👇

📌 Web3Caff Research Preview: Consensys, Ethereum Infrastructure Giant – A 10,000-Word Research Report: At the Crossroads of Commercialization and IPO Expectations, Can Compliance Challenges and Profitability Models Be Achieved Simultaneously? 🧩 As the Web3 industry enters a critical phase of compliance and commercialization, the balance between technological innovation and capital operations is becoming increasingly important for infrastructure companies. From blockchain node services to Layer 2 scaling, Consensys is driving the deep integration and commercialization of infrastructure, and its strategic layout and product progress are facing a new round of challenges and opportunities. This Web3Caff Research report will be released this Wednesday, providing a comprehensive analysis of its development history, strategic logic, strengths, risks, and future prospects. Preview below 👇

In just five years, BNB Chain has evolved from a single blockchain into one of the world's most powerful Web3 ecosystems. This wasn't an overnight success, but rather a gradual transformation from a challenger to Ethereum to an indispensable infrastructure-level presence in the Web3 field, achieved through keen insight into market demands and continuous breakthroughs in technological bottlenecks. Its development path clearly demonstrates a strategic transformation from a single high-performance chain to a modular, multi-layered ecosystem. With changes in the market environment and the rise of next-generation high-performance public chains like Solana and Avalanche, BSC faces increasing competitive pressure. Simultaneously, BNB Chain has gradually realized that relying solely on the narrative of "low gas + EVM compatibility" is insufficient to support its long-term growth. Against this backdrop, BNB Chain did not choose a simple performance race, but instead proposed a more long-term-oriented "One BNB" multi-chain ecosystem strategy through brand rebranding and architectural upgrades. "One BNB" is not simply a collection of multiple chains, but a systematic solution addressing the "blockchain trilemma." By modularly decomposing and collaboratively designing the execution layer (BSC), extension layer (opBNB), and data storage layer (BNB Greenfield), BNB Chain attempts to build a sustainable technological path that balances performance, cost, and scalability, providing customized infrastructure for Web3 applications of different sizes and types. A key turning point occurred in 2025. With the successive implementation of a series of core hard forks such as Pascal, Lorentz, and Maxwell, BNB Chain entered the sub-second block time stage at Layer 1, systematically improving transaction confirmation experience and network throughput. These upgrades significantly raised the performance ceiling of on-chain applications and are also influencing BNB Chain's competitive landscape in DeFi, AI, and RWA sectors. (The above content is excerpted from Web3Caff Research's "BNB Chain Ecosystem Track 25 Years Q4 13,000-Word Research Report: Five Years of Advancement, How is it Laying the Foundation for the Next 'Billion Users' Era?") A comprehensive analysis of its development system, technological iterations, ecosystem layout, competitive challenges, and future prospects. Click to view the full version 👇

[Web3Caff Research Weekly Report, Issue 144: 26,000-word research report on the privacy infrastructure sector; Can Mind Network address the privacy shortcomings of on-chain AI Agent economy? Can Project Eleven mitigate the quantum threat risk for blockchain?...] What were the key market developments in the Web3 field last week? A quick overview of this week's in-depth commentary.

Blockchain privacy technology has gradually evolved from "hiding observable relationships" to "changing the verification structure," and finally to a stage where "execution itself is invisible." The diagram below illustrates a technology map categorized by privacy levels to provide a unified understanding of the core problems addressed by different privacy solutions. The topmost observation and association layer weakens external analysis capabilities by obfuscating transaction paths or address relationships, but it doesn't change the system's execution and verification logic. Its privacy strength depends on the size of the anonymity set and user behavior, making it difficult to provide verifiable guarantees. Further down to the protocol rule layer, privacy is directly written into transaction and ledger rules, making anonymity a default attribute. This type of solution provides stable and enforced privacy protection, but often sacrifices composability, ecosystem scalability, and compliance flexibility. The verification structure layer reconstructs the system's trust mechanism through zero-knowledge proofs, allowing nodes to verify the correctness of state transitions without reproducing execution details, thus achieving, for the first time in a public system, the coexistence of "verifiability" and "detail hiding." The lowest-level execution layer privacy further challenges traditional computing premises: through FHE, MPC, or TEE, computation is completed without exposing plaintext, addressing the privacy issue of "data in use." This layer typically does not exist alone but is combined with ZK to form a complete private execution and verification system. This layered structure does not imply that technologies are mutually replaceable, but rather reveals the position and boundaries of different privacy solutions within the system stack. Real-world systems are often combinations of multiple technologies, rather than the result of a single privacy tool. The above content is excerpted from Web3Caff Research's "Privacy Infrastructure Track 26,000-Word Research Report: Under the Global Compliance Wave, How Is Privacy Reshaping the Web3 Underlying Paradigm? From the Evolution of Four Generations of Privacy Technologies, to the Differentiation of ZK/FHE/TEE Routes, Compliance Architecture Choices, Ecosystem Status, and Evolution Trends in the Next Decade" Click to view the full version 👇