Monstream

Model launches, research, partnerships and funding from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta AI, Mistral and NVIDIA.

The week’s most important papers on large language models: reasoning, agents, evaluation and alignment — with real results, not position pieces.

Seed to Series B rounds led by a16z, Sequoia, Benchmark, Founders Fund, Accel, Index, Lightspeed, Greylock, Kleiner, General Catalyst or Thrive — who raised, how much, and what they build.

Everything around FHERMA, the FHE challenge platform by Fair Math: new challenges and prize pools, results and winners, solution write-ups, Polycircuit and OpenFHE-rs releases, partnerships and mentions.

Laws, rules and official guidance on artificial intelligence: the EU AI Act, US federal and state action, the UK and China.

New exhibitions, major acquisitions, openings and leadership changes at MoMA, the Met, Tate, the Louvre, Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim.

Roles building cryptography and privacy technology: applied cryptographers, ZK and FHE engineers, security engineers working on protocols.

Machine learning, research and inference engineering roles at AI labs and AI-heavy companies that pay $300,000 a year or more.

Every new release of the homomorphic encryption libraries, compilers and SDKs — TFHE-rs, Concrete, fhEVM, OpenFHE, SEAL, HEIR, Lattigo, Poulpy, CryptoLab HEaaN and enVector, Desilo, IBM HElayers, Apple Swift HE, TenSEAL and GPU libraries — with what changed.

New open-source frameworks and tools for building LLM agents, as they appear on GitHub and Hugging Face.

New open-weights language and multimodal models from the major labs, as they land on Hugging Face — with size, license and reported results.

Everything around OpenFHE: releases, notable GitHub issues and pull requests, papers and benchmarks that use it, applications built on it, talks, workshops and events, and what its maintainers and community are working on.

The state of startup funding each week: deal volume, valuations, round sizes and where the money is going — with the numbers.

Practical, tested advice for founders on fundraising, pricing, hiring, sales and finding product-market fit — from Lenny’s, YC, Elad Gil, SaaStr and Not Boring.

New Y Combinator companies as they launch: what they build, for whom, and the founders behind them.

Fires when Y Combinator, a16z speedrun, Sequoia Arc, Neo, South Park Commons or Entrepreneur First open applications or announce a deadline.

The week’s best writing from a16z, Sequoia, YC, Greylock, Founders Fund and the investors founders actually read: theses, frameworks and hard-won advice.

Changes in how ETH is staked: validator queues, staking protocols, restaking, distributed validators and the rules that affect stakers.

Fires when a notable artwork is reported stolen, or a stolen one is recovered — museums, churches and private collections.

Photography as an art: exhibitions, photobooks, prizes and photographers to know — light on gear reviews.

The shows worth a trip, opening this month in New York, London, Paris and Berlin — reviewed, not just announced.

Opportunities for artists: open calls, grants, prizes and residencies, with deadlines — so you hear about them while you can still apply.

Fires when a single artwork sells for $50 million or more, at auction or in a reported private sale.

What sold, for how much: notable lots and new artist records at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Bonhams.

The week in art in one issue: the exhibitions that matter, museum news, the market and the debates — from the art press, not press releases.

Senior Rust roles at companies that run Rust in production — infrastructure, networking, crypto and developer tools.

New C++ engineering roles that pay $300,000 a year or more — trading firms, AI labs and infrastructure teams — straight from their job boards.

Where the leading crypto funds put money and what they publish: new investments, funds raised and theses from a16z crypto, Paradigm, Multicoin, Dragonfly, Polychain and Electric Capital.

Startups building privacy-enhancing technology raising money: FHE, zero-knowledge, MPC, confidential computing and private AI.

Real vulnerabilities in cryptographic code and protocols — libraries, wallets, TLS, ZK circuits — with the affected versions and fixes.

New exoplanets and what we learn about them: discoveries, atmospheres and habitability, from JWST and the surveys.

Launch dates, scrubs, landings and contract awards from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin and ULA.

Fintech startups raising money — seed to growth rounds, with the amount, the investors and what the company builds.

Rate decisions, policy statements and leadership news from the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan — from the banks themselves.

Fires when a top venture firm closes a new fund of $500M or more — the money that will be looking for founders over the next years.

New funds, lead investments and partner moves at Benchmark, Founders Fund, Accel, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital.

Sequoia Capital’s moves: funds, the rounds it leads, partner changes and what it publishes — from its AI market maps to Arc for founders.

Everything Andreessen Horowitz does that a founder should know: new funds, investments it leads, theses and the big ideas its partners publish.

What the Ethereum Foundation announces: protocol priorities, grants and funding rounds, treasury policy and leadership changes.

Upgrades, launches and decentralization steps from the biggest rollups: Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, Starknet, Scroll and Linea.

The strongest posts on ethresear.ch and from the Ethereum Foundation: scaling, data availability, proposer-builder separation, MEV, cryptography and economics.

Fires when Ethereum mainnet has a serious incident: finality is lost, a client bug splits the chain, or a critical vulnerability needs an emergency upgrade.

Fires when core developers set the mainnet date for the next Ethereum network upgrade and the Ethereum Foundation announces it.

New versions of the execution and consensus clients — Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth, Lighthouse, Prysm, Teku, Nimbus and Lodestar — with what node operators must do.

New Ethereum Improvement Proposals as they are posted for discussion, with what each one would change and who proposed it.

What was decided on All Core Devs and the other protocol calls: what goes into the next fork, testnet dates and open disagreements — one issue a week.

The week on Ethereum: protocol upgrades, core dev decisions, client releases, layer 2s and research — what changed on the network, not the price.

Research on how DeFi works and breaks: MEV, AMM design, lending risk, oracle security and mechanism design — papers and serious forum posts with real analysis.

Rules, enforcement and court decisions that touch DeFi and stablecoins: the SEC and CFTC, US stablecoin law, MiCA in the EU and actions against protocols.

Real-world assets coming onchain: tokenized Treasury funds, credit and equities from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Ondo and others — launches, sizes and integrations into DeFi.

What the largest stablecoin issuers announce: new chains and products, reserve reports, licences and partnerships from Tether, Circle, Sky, Ethena and PayPal.

Proposals that change how major protocols work — fees, risk parameters, treasury spending and upgrades — when they go to a vote, with what is at stake.

Upgrades, launches and big decisions from the protocols that hold most of DeFi: Aave, Uniswap, Lido, Sky, Morpho and EigenLayer.

Fires when a top stablecoin — USDT, USDC, USDS, USDe or another over $1B — trades more than 2% off its peg for a sustained period.

Fires when a DeFi protocol or bridge loses $10 million or more to an exploit, confirmed by the team or a security firm.

Every confirmed exploit of a DeFi protocol or bridge as it is reported: what was hit, how much was lost and how it happened.

The week in decentralized finance: protocol launches and upgrades, governance decisions, exploits, stablecoins and regulation — without price talk.

Resolutions adopted, vetoes cast and emergency meetings at the UN Security Council.

Fires when the US, the EU or the UK announces a new package of sanctions against a country, or sanctions on a major company.

Fires when a national government collapses, a head of government resigns or loses a confidence vote, or an early election is called.

Each month: national elections and referendums held, their results, and the ones coming up.

The week at Westminster: government decisions, legislation, votes and leadership — from the news, not the commentariat.

Decisions from the European Commission and the Council of the EU: proposals, adopted laws, sanctions and appointments.

Bills passed by Congress and signed into law, with what each one does.

Each Supreme Court opinion and major order as it is released, with what the Court decided and the vote.

What actually happened in Washington this week: bills that moved, executive actions, court rulings and votes — reported, not argued.

Fires when a world record is set in athletics, swimming or cycling and ratified or confirmed by the governing body.

The money side of sport: media rights, team sales and valuations, sponsorship deals, leagues and investors.

The four majors — Australian Open, Roland-Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open: champions, upsets of top seeds, prize money and schedule changes.

Every NBA trade, signing, extension and buyout as it is reported — with the terms.

Every Monday during the season: the race, the standings, upgrades that worked, penalties and the driver market — without the gossip.

Fires when a club confirms a transfer worth €80 million or more.

Done deals only: transfers and contract extensions that clubs have announced, with the fee where it is reported — no rumours.

The week in European football: the results that mattered, title and relegation races, injuries and the stories behind them.

The buildings, interiors and objects worth knowing about this week, from Dezeen, designboom and ArchDaily.

Digital, generative and AI art: new works and artists, exhibitions, tools, and the market for art made with code.

Fully remote senior and staff engineering roles from companies that state their pay.

Software and quant developer roles at the high-frequency and prop trading firms: Jane Street, Jump, Optiver, DRW, IMC, Tower and Virtu.

Fires when a web3 startup raises $50M or more in a single equity or strategic round.

Startups at the meeting of AI and crypto: decentralized compute, onchain agents, verifiable inference and data markets — funding, launches and research.

One issue a week for people building in web3: the rounds that closed, the launches that mattered and what the leading funds are writing about.

Protocols, apps and chains going live: mainnet launches, first products and notable upgrades from young teams.

Web3 startups raising money — pre-seed to Series B — with the amount, the lead investors and what they are building.

Trusted execution environments and confidential AI: GPU and CPU enclaves, attestation, attacks and real deployments.

Fires when a practical attack is published against a NIST-standardised post-quantum algorithm — ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA or FN-DSA — not just a side channel in one implementation.

Post-quantum cryptography standards as they move: NIST FIPS and drafts, IETF and CFRG documents, and deployment by browsers and cloud providers.

Product launches, funding, partnerships and research from the companies building privacy-enhancing technology: Zama, Duality, Enveil, Optalysys, Niobium, Fabric and Cornami.

Zero-knowledge proof systems and zkVMs: new SNARKs and STARKs, folding schemes, prover performance and deployments.

Research on training and running models without exposing data: differential privacy, federated learning, secure inference and multi-party computation for ML.

New fully homomorphic encryption research: schemes, bootstrapping, hardware acceleration and encrypted machine learning — with benchmarks, not just ideas.

Fires when a fusion experiment reports scientific energy gain above 1, confirmed by the lab or in a peer-reviewed paper.

Battery chemistry results with numbers: energy density, cycle life and cost — sodium-ion, solid-state and new cathodes.

Progress in quantum hardware and error correction — experiments on real devices, not just proposals.

CRISPR, base and prime editing: clinical trial readouts, regulatory decisions and the research that moves the field.

New quantitative finance research with out-of-sample results: trading, portfolio construction, risk and market microstructure.

Humanoid and general-purpose robot companies: launches, funding rounds and first real deployments.

New robotics papers with experiments on physical robots: manipulation, locomotion and robot learning.