Blog Posts

Hermes Agent v0.18: When a Self-Improving Agent Gets MoA

Nous Research’s open-source agent Hermes Agent shipped v0.18.0 on July 1, 2026. The release notes call it “The Judgment Release.” Reading this as a routine feature update misses the point. The official docs describe Hermes Agent as “the self-improving AI agent,” and the project is built around a loop that accumulates memory and skills the more it gets used. This post covers how that loop was refined in v0.18, and what role Mixture of Agents (MoA), now a first-class model choice in the same release, plays inside it.

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Pulling Encryption Keys Out of Passkeys with the WebAuthn PRF Extension

Passkeys show up on login screens everywhere now. What’s less well known is that the same authenticator holding your passkey can also hand out key material for encryption, not just authentication. The prf extension in WebAuthn is that path. This post covers what PRF actually returns, how it relates to the CTAP2 hmac-secret extension, what you still have to build yourself before it’s usable for real encryption, and where device and platform support stand as of 2026.

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TradingAgents: Reading the Paper and Code Behind an LLM Trading Desk

Up front: this is not investment advice, and nothing here recommends buying or selling anything. It is a read of how you organize LLM agents into a single decision, looked at from the research and the code. Trading is just the domain the design happens to target.

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AI Agent Commerce and Coordination: ERC-8183, ERC-8226, ERC-8001, ERC-8041

The ERC-8004/8126/8196 trust stack defines three layers: agent identity, security verification, and policy-constrained execution. It identifies an agent, scores its risk, and keeps it acting within the limits an owner has set. All of that answers one question: can I trust this agent to act on my behalf?

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Chainlink CCIP EVM Contracts: Architecture from Source Code

EVM chains are isolated by design. A contract on Arbitrum has no native way to call a contract on Base, and sending USDC from Ethereum Mainnet to Polygon is not a built-in operation. Cross-chain bridges filled that gap for years, but the category has seen repeated security incidents that highlight how wide the attack surface is.

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Circle CCTP V2 EVM Contracts: A Source-Code Walkthrough

Bridge designs for moving USDC between chains come down to two families. Lock-and-mint parks the original token in a contract on the source chain and issues a wrapped version on the destination. Burn-and-mint destroys the token on the source chain outright and issues the same amount fresh on the destination. Circle’s CCTP (Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol) is the second kind.

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ERC-8004 Agent Reputation: On-Chain Registration and Lookup

A prior post on this blog covered the ERC-8004/8126/8196 trust stack: three Ethereum registries that handle agent identity, reputation, and validation. If you want the conceptual overview first, start there. This post is about something narrower: how feedback actually gets written to the Reputation Registry, how to read it back, and what services are available today to browse and index that data.

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Agentic Payments in June 2026: x402, UCP, and MPP Implementation Progress

Agentic payments in June 2026 moved from “can an agent pay” toward “who authorized the payment, how is it verified, and how is it traced.” The major open protocols (x402, UCP, MPP/pay.sh, and ACP) each had meaningful implementation changes. All figures and commit details below come from GitHub API, PyPI, and npm registry checks.

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AI x Blockchain in 2026: Bittensor, DePIN, and Agent Finance

“AI plus blockchain” spent most of the early 2020s as a marketing phrase. By mid-2026, it has organized into four distinct layers, each with its own competitive dynamics. Which projects have staying power, and what are the actual evaluation criteria at this point?

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Figure: From HELOC Lender to Blockchain-Native Capital Markets

Two companies go by the name Figure. One is Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company. The other is Figure Technology Solutions, which is what this post is about. They are unrelated.

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