Have you ever imagined that robots and crypto would actually go hand in hand? The stellar advancements in AI technology are naturally accelerating the sector of robotics, but I'm here to tell you that blockchains will play a major role there too. The benefits they can bring to robots can actually involve several essential aspects:
Financial layer: enabling robots to own crypto wallets and transact autonomously, something traditional payment rails can't deliver.
Coordination: assigning tasks, verifying results, aligning incentives are also areas of expertise of blockchains.
Infrastructure to gather, monetize, and synchronize data: DePINs, a rich and super varied subdomain of crypto projects, have specialized in collecting environmental and mobility data to power all kinds of autonomous robots and vehicles. By incentivizing the crowdsourcing of data through crypto, they solved the decades-long challenge of lack of recurrent data with global coverage.
There are a number of crypto teams working at the Web3 + robotics intersection, like peaq, GEODNET, Auki Labs, Silencio, enabling robots to proceed spatial, GPS, and sound information. They represent a market cap amounting roughly to $404M, and poised to grow exponentially.
Now, Virtuals Protocol also enters that space, with a mission to expand the physical world in a way that intelligence gains presence and action becomes material.
Virtuals presents a vision of the coming “embodiment era”, where digital intelligence re-enters the physical world, completing the loop begun by the Industrial Revolution—ushering in a future where autonomous agents and humans jointly drive productivity, progress, and exploration.
AI, blockchain, and robotics are converging to create a new “closed circuit of autonomy,” where reasoning (AI), trustless coordination (blockchain), and physical execution (robotics) combine to produce a new form of economic output called agentic GDP (aGDP)—the total value generated by humans, digital agents, and machines working together.
Humanity's fascination with automata predates myths and bleed into history. From Hephaestus's golden handmaidens, who moved with living grace and voice to assist the limping god at his forge, to the Han-dynasty musical puppets troupes, the urge to animate matter has always mirrored our desire to externalize thought.
Sunscreen has announced that its paper on the FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) compiler Parasol was accepted by IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, one of the most prestigious cryptography and security conferences in the world. Check the full paper below.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a key technology to enable privacy-preserving computation. While optimized FHE implementations already exist, the inner workings of FHE are technically complex. This makes it challenging, especially for non-experts, to develop highly-efficient FHE programs that can exploit the advanced hardware of today.
Bluwhale, a start-up building an AI-powered financial platform on blockchain infrastructure, has raised $10M to deal with the massive generational wealth transfer (estimated at US $84T over the next 30 years) and to serve younger digital-native investors without relying on legacy advisory models.
The funding round was backed by both traditional financial institutions and blockchain ecosystem investors, including Sublime Ventures, Sui Foundation, Tezos, Cardano Foundation, Arbitrum, and Movement Labs.
Bluwhale’s tech involves a “Layer 3” network that connects data, storage and compute across blockchains to power hundreds of AI agents that deliver personalized financial-health scores, asset recommendations and transaction execution.
Funding round led by major banks underscores growing confidence in blockchain-based financial planning
The following article is not directly related to the Web3 + AI space, but it's still a must-read for everyone interacting with AI. Decentralization Research Center's Shaan Jain asks one crucial question: what happens when a company owns your digital memory?
Search was once open, messy, and plural. Then PageRank turned discovery into a single chokepoint, and Google became the gatekeeper of the web. Social media promised connection, then collaborative filtering concentrated our attention on a handful of feeds optimized for outrage and compulsion. Both became monopolies, both rewrote society. Now, AI brings a new frontier: memory, the structured record of our lives.
In a world of fierce competition between dominant AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google AI, there's no trump card more powerful than personalization. And to really know you, models need to remember everything about you.
Every prompt, click, and handoff becomes fuel for an agent’s memory of you: dietary restrictions from grocery orders, meeting rhythms from your calendar, tone and templates from your emails, and even spending patterns from receipts. At its best, that memory makes help feel effortless: it writes recipes to avoid your allergens, drafts messages for you, and can help schedule your life. But the same memory also tightens your ties to a particular product.
In such a situation, though, switching between AI products would most certainly result in workflow breakage, losing access to accumulated answers, and generally a deterioration in the quality of service.
Thus, with the ever-expanding role AI plays in our daily lives and work, it's high time we tackled the matter of data portability. The article highlights two initiatives attempting to set up a memory layer for AI apps, namely Human Context Protocol and Mem0. Check out the full story to learn more about their approach and benefits.
To prevent the future of one company monopolizing our digital memory, there must be built a switchable, interoperable layer that ensures that the people who create their memories get to keep them.
The first-ever BUIDL AI Hackathon in Europe, a 48-hour sprint dedicated to creating AI agents and real-world AI use cases, is coming to Lisbon in January 2026. Organized by Erica Kang and Hackbox, it will bring together developers, researchers, founders, and dreamers to design the next wave of tools powered by intelligent automation. Learn more and join.
BUIDL AI Hackathon 2026 January 9-11, 2026 | Lisbon + Hybrid | Hosted at The Nest Presented by KryptoPlanet What's Happening! Join us for the first-ever BUIDL...
Thank you for reading! The next edition is coming next week!
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I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow Crypto x AI enthusiasts, so don't hesitate to reach out to me on social media.
Disclaimer: None of this should or could be considered financial advice. You should not take my words for granted, rather, do your own research (DYOR) and share your thoughts to create a fruitful discussion.
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Albena Kostova-Nikolova
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