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A collection of 105 posts

The Body Returns to the Network

The Body Returns to the Network

Human uniqueness after the user by Sasha Shilina In early September, AI agents moved deeper into ordinary financial infrastructure. Aave opened an MCP server through which AI assistants can inspect positions, simulate changes and prepare unsigned transactions. Mastercard introduced Agent Connect, allowing agents to exchange product data, assemble carts and

Vortex Needs You

Vortex Needs You

The Humanode project launched back in early 2020, with a small team of 5 people. Many years have passed; we have experienced a brief bull run and a long bear market, launched the first cryptobiometric blockchain, we created the foundational tools for a global egalitarian financial system, created tools for

Democracy Has an Uptime Problem

Democracy Has an Uptime Problem

Finite attention and the hidden inequality of decentralized governance “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” — William James, The Principles of Psychology Decentralized governance usually describes equality through the distribution of political weight. Proof-of-stake assigns influence through capital. Token voting translates ownership into power. Humanode begins

ENS Just Proved the Quiet Failure of Token Governance

ENS Just Proved the Quiet Failure of Token Governance

If you need a live, on-chain demo of why "decentralized governance" is often just a marketing term slapped on a plutocracy, watch one delegate with roughly 50% of the voting power veto a security council proposal and call it democracy. The whole thing looks like drama from

The human problem crypto kept deferring

The human problem crypto kept deferring

Crypto built the wallet and left the human question for later. Later is now a six-year-old unsolved problem with a graveyard of attempts behind it.

How a revolution got tamed, and what we have to build next

How a revolution got tamed, and what we have to build next

On January 3, 2009, the first block of Bitcoin went live with a sentence buried in its code: “The Times of London headline from that morning: Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that line into the Genesis Block by hand. A timestamp, technically. Also, a

AI agents needs a human verification layer. And Web3 hasn't built it yet.

AI agents needs a human verification layer. And Web3 hasn't built it yet.

Most people still think of AI as something you chat with. You ask a question, it answers, and sometimes it confidently says something stupid enough to cost you money. But that version of AI is already outdated. The newer version, called agentic AI, is much more capable but much harder

Humanode Foundational Charters

Humanode charters

Humanode Foundational Charters

Preamble We, the people of the Humanode Network, resolved to reaffirm the equal political worth of every person, and to advance freedom through decentralization rather than through the concentration of power, establish these Charters. Mindful that democracies—when mediated by unequal access, purchasable influence, mass coordination attacks, and unaccountable intermediaries—

Why PoBU is being proposed

Why PoBU is being proposed

In the last piece, we looked at what still needs to happen next for PoBU: clearer rules, safer summaries from the identity side, stronger privacy, broader issuer design, and better measurement. Now it makes sense to step back and ask the biggest question in the whole series: Why is PoBU

World still wants Democracy. It does not trust the delivery system

World still wants Democracy. It does not trust the delivery system

There is a funny ritual modern politics still performs with a straight face. People vote. Governments win. Flags stay raised. Parliaments open. Courts issue rulings, and the news anchors keep calling it a democracy. And yet across the world, more and more people are living through the same feeling: the

How PoBU gets stronger from here

How PoBU gets stronger from here

In the last piece, we talked about what the chain can show today, and what it still cannot show directly. That leads to a very normal question: If the paper already explains PoBU, what does it still want to improve? The paper answers that in its future work section. And

What we’ve covered in the PoBU theme series so far

What we’ve covered in the PoBU theme series so far

As you know, we’ve been breaking the nerdy version of the PoBU paper into small, easy parts. The goal is simple: help you understand PoBU without needing to read it like a researcher. So far, we have covered six themes. Here’s a smooth recap of that: 1) Decentralization

When AI Agents Become “Users,” Who Counts as a Person?

When AI Agents Become “Users,” Who Counts as a Person?

By Sasha Shilina “No one can be replaced by anyone else.” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition Something subtle is shifting in the language of tech. Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, recently said he looks at AI agents as “users,” and described a future in which a digital worker could have

PoBU, measured on a running chain

PoBU, measured on a running chain

In the last piece, we covered the threat model. The paper lists the main ways a PoBU system can fail or be weakened in practice: issuer concentration, compromise/coercion, availability, and privacy/linkability. Now comes the part many readers care about most: What can we actually measure on a live

What can go wrong in PoBU? (Threat model)

What can go wrong in PoBU? (Threat model)

In the last piece, we covered why PoBU is probabilistic. It explained that the strength of the “one eligible account per human” rule depends on two things: biometric error rates and policy choices. Now comes the next natural question: Even if the rule is clearly defined, what can still go

Stop blaming AI for things people choose to do

Stop blaming AI for things people choose to do

A few weeks into 2026, timelines on X flooded with sexually explicit deepfake images. Many were AI-generated depictions of real people, sometimes without consent, sometimes involving minors, created using xAI’s Grok. The reaction wasn’t quiet. Regulators launched investigations. The California Attorney General issued a cease-and-desist

What prediction market builders are missing about Sybils

What prediction market builders are missing about Sybils

There was a day in late 2025 when the numbers on prediction markets stopped feeling like probabilities and started feeling like predictions without evidence. You’d watch a contract on a major election or a macro outcome barely trade, and before the underlying data had even begun to materialize, the

When Your Game Economy Starts Lying to You

Sybil resistance

When Your Game Economy Starts Lying to You

There’s a moment most game builders know but rarely talk about out loud. You launch an event, watch the economy tick up, and something feels off. Rewards get claimed too fast. Leaderboards look too clean, or worse, too strange. Your balance tweaks don’t move the needle the way

Opinion: Slaves by training: The Unacknowledged Shackles of the Modern Economy & Crypto Market

Opinion: Slaves by training: The Unacknowledged Shackles of the Modern Economy & Crypto Market

Shannon Higgins (Humanode Media Lead) If you are interested in making “big money”, slavery is one of the oldest tricks in the game. Enslave your “future workers” by removing them from their homes and putting them under your direct control. Entrap them so that they can’t run, use fear

Opinion Piece: The pitfall of centralized servers

Opinion Piece: The pitfall of centralized servers

For a few hours in November 2025, the internet reminded everyone how fragile it really is. X stopped loading. ChatGPT returned errors. Discord went quiet. Shopify checkouts stalled. Internal business tools failed. The most hilarious thing? Even outage trackers struggled to stay online. Around the same time, one of the

When decentralization stops growing, you have to look at what’s missing

True decentralization

When decentralization stops growing, you have to look at what’s missing

If you’ve been following crypto for a while, you’ve probably noticed that things look a little uneven these days. Not bad. Not broken. Just… uneven. We get new chains and new layers popping up every month, yet the base that’s supposed to keep all of this “decentralized”

The revolution that sold its soul

The revolution that sold its soul

When crypto first appeared, it carried the energy of a rebellion. People were tired of banks calling the shots, tired of Wall Street gambling with their savings, and tired of central banks deciding what their money was worth. The early cypherpunks said you could “be your own bank,” and for

Voting in 2035 - A human's account

Voting in 2035 - A human's account

This is just a fun look at how governance might work in 2035, written as if I’m living through it and cracking jokes while AI agents campaign harder than humans ever did. Let me share my experience from this beautiful morning in 2035. So… I just tried to vote

From Parliaments to Protocols - Why power keeps drifting upward

From Parliaments to Protocols - Why power keeps drifting upward

Some stories repeat themselves so reliably that they begin to feel less like history and more like gravity. Governance, whether practiced in parliaments or encoded into blockchains, is one of those stories. For most of the last century, democratic societies had believed they solved a hard problem: how to build

Proof of Life, Proof of Death: Cryptographic Immortality and the End of the Human Validator

Proof of Life, Proof of Death: Cryptographic Immortality and the End of the Human Validator

By Sasha Shilina “The earth belongs…to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789 I. The Missing Death in Protocol Space Blockchains are obsessed with beginnings.Genesis blocks. Fresh addresses. New epochs. “Go live.” What they are not very good at is endings.