TUESDAY, JUL28
1. BIP-54 at 42%, 2. Open AI defense, 3. Freedom tech goes diplomatic, 4. Silent payments ship
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. bip54
Bitcoin Optech co-founder Mike Schmidt clarified that 42.2 percent of miners are now setting their coinbase locktime to be forward-compatible with BIP-54, the Consensus Cleanup proposal addressing four protocol vulnerabilities, according to his post on X. Schmidt was explicit that this is not formal signaling for activation — BIP-54 has no formal signaling mechanism — but rather miners voluntarily adopting a coinbase format compatible with a potential future soft fork. The four vulnerabilities BIP-54 addresses are the timewarp attack, worst-case block validation time, 64-byte transaction exploits, and duplicate coinbase txid prevention. David Bailey noted that BIP-54 already has 42 times more hashrate compatibility than BIP-110. For a protocol-minded audience, the 42.2 percent figure is significant context in a week dominated by BIP-110 activation debates: a different soft fork, one focused entirely on fixing known security vulnerabilities rather than filtering transaction types, is quietly gaining miner adoption through voluntary forward-compatible coinbase formatting while BIP-110 is still fighting for a vote.2. opensecure
NVIDIA has launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 35 companies including CrowdStrike, Hugging Face, Palantir, Microsoft, Cloudflare, IBM, Salesforce, SpaceX, Thinking Machines Lab, and the Linux Foundation, dedicated to building and sharing open AI tools for cybersecurity defense, according to the July 27 announcement. The alliance cites the Hugging Face security incident from earlier this week as its proof case: Hugging Face used the open-weight GLM 5.2 model on its own infrastructure to analyze more than 17,000 actions and contain an intrusion after closed AI tools blocked essential forensic analysis. NVIDIA is contributing open models, weights, and a new agent harness framework. For a freedom-tech audience, the Open Secure AI Alliance is the security-specific companion to the open-weights letter Jensen Huang’s coalition published Thursday: defenders who cannot inspect, adapt, and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure are constrained exactly when speed matters most. Open models are not a cybersecurity liability; they are the only path to a defense stack that no single vendor controls.3. ftep
The US State Department has launched the Freedom Tech Excellence Program, a talent-exchange initiative that embeds private-sector employees in diplomatic work focused on digital freedom, naming the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation as founding partners, according to The Block and Bitcoin Magazine. The program’s five priority areas include First Amendment protections, countering unlawful surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies including encryption and VPNs, responsible AI governance, and safeguarding children online. For a freedom-tech audience, FTEP is the most significant institutional signal yet that Washington treats Bitcoin and privacy tools as instruments of foreign policy rather than regulatory problems. BPI’s inclusion alongside Palantir and Anduril places bitcoin in a national security and diplomatic context: the same tools that protect dissidents from authoritarian surveillance are now part of how the State Department plans to advance American interests in the digital age. A Freedom Tech DC summit is scheduled for September 22-23, 2026.4. silent
Bitcoin Core contributor Sebastian, known as theStack, reported that after two and a half years, five PR attempts, 1,284 review comments, and one protocol change, the Silent Payments BIP-352 module has landed in libsecp256k1, according to his post on X. Maintainer Michael Ford confirmed the work is now in Bitcoin Core’s secp256k1 subtree, with Silent Payments continuing in PRs 35301 and 35302 and a Core 32.0 feature freeze targeted for August 20. Silent payments let receivers publish a single static address while every payment still lands on a unique on-chain output, cutting the reusable-address privacy failure mode without requiring a directory or interactive setup. For a payments-first audience, shipping the cryptographic primitive in libsecp256k1 is the hard dependency wallets and Bitcoin Core need before Silent Payments is real infrastructure rather than a specification. The two-and-a-half-year timeline and 1,284 review comments are a reminder of how carefully Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundations move: privacy features that arrive in libsecp256k1 are the ones that reach users across every wallet that inherits the library.Consider subscribing and sharing OP_Daily with your community.