Maelstrom has announced that Ron, known online as “MacGyver13,” is the fourth recipient of the Maelstrom Bitcoin Grant program, in accordance with a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine. Ron is working on silent payments as proposed in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 352.

“We are thrilled to support Ron financially on his mission to integrate silent payments into his Bitcoin wallet,” said CFO of Maelstrom Arthur Hayes. “Many merchants and users want to provide/display a single static address that is not altered. This is an important, valid and simple use case. With silent payments, this is still done, but reuse of on-chain addresses is avoided. Reuse of addresses is the Goldmine of the monitoring organization.

In September 2023, a silent payment was proposed by Josie Baker and Reuben Somsen. This creates a single static address for people to post tips without sharing with friends, using them for donations, or sacrificing privacy. This eliminates address reuse, an important method used by surveillance companies to track user behavior on blockchain.

“There are a lot of software projects, and perhaps with Bitcoin, taking an idea from a proposal to a fully adopted solution is the most difficult part,” Josie said. “We are excited by the progress we have made in the short time we’ve been working with Ron and are thrilled to help us adopt silent payments with the aim of protecting our users’ financial privacy while creating an intuitive and seamless user experience.”

Bitcoin privacy depends on using new addresses. This often requires a sender to the recipient interaction. Existing static address methods use notifications that increase costs and leak metadata. Silent payments avoid both interaction and notifications, but you need a wallet to scan the blockchain. The use of multi-party inputs has not yet been proven to be safe.

Silent Payment is aimed at implementing it.

• Zero Transaction Cost Overhead
• There is no possibility of a link between payment and a static address
• No sender required to receiver interaction
• Privacy tools and compatibility with the latest wallet features

“My main focus is coordinating development and testing efforts within a growing community dedicated to integrating silent payments into desktop and mobile Bitcoin wallets,” says the new grantee of Maelstrom Ron. “By proceeding with silent payments along with Bolt12 and BIP-353, we aim to enhance privacy, simplify the user experience and host ways to adopt Bitcoin more broadly as a payment solution.”

The following is a guest post by Yannik Schrade, CEO and Co-founder of Arcium.

Warnings about artificial intelligence have been fed to the public by worried experts for years, a constant alarm of looming danger. The past decade has seen near-exponential growth for anything AI-related, with a 37% compound annual growth rate predicted through 2030, and the volume of data mined (and regularly exploited) to fuel this rapid development has raised serious concerns about the erosion of privacy, intellectual property, and data protection.

We’re entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era fueled by breakthroughs in quantum computing, robotics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. But as AI rapidly advances, so does the need for systems that ensure transparency, security, and trust. Blockchain offers decentralized, verifiable systems that enhance the integrity of AI models, which often appear to be black boxes operating without visibility into how they arrive at their outcomes.

The current state of AI

The conversation around AI was turned on its head with the launch of DeepSeek. Its ties to China immediately raised red flags, with it quickly becoming clear that the model’s built-in censorship blocked users from asking questions about sensitive Chinese political issues. However, DeepSeek is open source, which means users can run it locally on their own devices. Although running DeepSeek locally gives users full control over their data, few possess the technical or computational resources to manage this process effectively.  Such complexity deters most people from attempting local deployments, despite the inherent privacy benefits. 

DeepSeek’s privacy policy is murky. That aside, its open-source nature has brought AI’s privacy conundrum to the fore. With more than 1.7 billion breach notices issued in the US alone last year, integrating AI and blockchain is the logical next step, but are the nodes enough to protect our data?

Rise of the AI Agent

Blockchain’s potential to reshape AI is unfolding before our eyes. Significant developments are driving this contortion, including innovations in decentralized data storage, LLM advancements, and web3 market maturity and evolution. These breakthroughs are giving rise to new applications and benefits of AI in tandem with blockchain, but recent focus is aimed squarely at AI agents.

Agents like ElizaOS, which operates as a decentralized AI venture capital DAO, show the potential of what AI agents will mean for Web3. The possibilities feel endless: trading agents that optimize trading strategies and yield farming, AI-driven NPCs and dynamic gaming economies, and agents that can facilitate decentralized marketplaces all demonstrate the potential wave of change and innovation coming for the industry.

Private AI will secure the future of intelligence

Blockchains are public ledgers by their nature, which gives rise to many complications around privacy. Sensitive data exposure is the obvious issue, but further problems arise when considering specific use cases. Take using an AI agent to automate trading strategies: as things stand, there is massive scope for reverse engineering and potential manipulation. In many cases, AI agents require access to sensitive information, such as private keys, to execute trades on behalf of users.

This raises massive security and privacy concern, which is why Private AI is nonnegotiable. Private AI eradicates these issues. In a nutshell, it allows AI models to run on encrypted data. Combining privacy-preserving computation with AI allows us to tap into a new stream of use cases that need security, privacy, and trust.

Private AI unlocks immense potential for users and institutions alike, both on and off-chain. DeFAI is a term that will keep popping up, referring to the convergence of DeFi and AI. Privacy-powered AI agents would enable automated trading on someone’s behalf without fear of the complications noted above. Similarly, institutional trading can securely be implemented on-chain, where private AI can power on-chain dark pools, ensuring  trade strategies and order flows remain secure while leveraging the transparency of blockchain for trust. 

Off-chain, look to healthcare and personalized AI. Data protection is a major contributor to the slowdown of healthcare innovation, and for good reason. Private AI maintains confidentiality while facilitating innovation. AI models can process sensitive patient data in an encrypted state, enabling fully secure and decentralized healthcare applications and dramatically expanding the ability to diagnose or track important health trends. In the same way, personalized AI models can be trained without exposing sensitive data, enhancing people’s lives without the risk of data exploitation and manipulation.

There’s so much more to understand what private AI is fully capable of, and as its usage grows so too will its use cases. Privacy and innovation go hand in hand.

Solana price performance in recent times has been remarkable, surpassing Ripple and Binance Coin to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The SOL price breached the critical level of $100 for the first time since April 2022 over the weekend to imbue optimism among investors. However, the altcoin has corrected by 7%, suggesting that the market is overheated. At the time of writing, the ‘Ethereum killer’ was trading slightly lower at $111.60.

SOL Outlook

Solana price has made a significant recovery over the past few weeks, climbing above the psychological level of $100. The altcoin has been one of the best-performing assets this year, extending its year-to-date gains to more than 1,025%, with more gains recorded in the past month alone. However, even with such growth, analysts have noted that Solana has a bleak chance of topping its ATH of $260.

The reason behind this is the increase in supply relative to its value. In November 2021, when the Solana price hit its all-time high of $260, its total market capitalization was around $78 billion. Despite the value of the crypto asset being less than half of what it was at the top, its market cap is currently hovering near $50 billion.

This has been brought about by the increase in the Solana supply by more than 100 million SOL over the past two years. According to some analysts, for the altcoin to retest $260, its total market cap would have to be around $111 billion, which seems rather difficult with institutional investors pouring billions into the asset.

SOL’s recent surge has been on the back of substantial on-chain activity. The ongoing hype for the blockchain’s speedy transactions and cheap fees has buoyed SOL’s on-chain activity. Additionally, the crypto market has been in the green over the past few weeks, boosted by a weaker US dollar and the potential deadline for the first approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF on January 10, 2024.

Solana Price Outlook

Solana price has been on a strong bullish trajectory over the past few weeks, despite facing a strong rejection at the important resistance level of $120. The digital asset remains above the 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages and the 100-day and 200-day simple moving averages. Its Relative Strength Index (RSI) stands at 74, indicating that the asset is overbought due to its recent rally.

As such, the market would have to cool down before resuming its rally. Furthermore, its bullish momentum is waning right now, characterized by the receding green bars of the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator.

Therefore, Solana price could experience a correction to $100 or lower until the market cools down, after which it would gather the strength to resume its rally. On the other hand, if the bulls continue to charge the altcoin, Solana could flip the immediate resistance at $120, adding confidence to its current market position.

SOL Price Chart