Web 3.0 has passed, Web 4.0 has arrived; Vitalik is continuously reducing his holdings; Base has broken up with Optimism; the Ethereum Foundation has a change in leadership; an AI robot mistakenly processed a decimal point and inadvertently sent out 270,000 US dollars. What major events happened during this Spring Festival holiday? Let's take a look with the Rhythm editor.
Did you learn about Web 4.0 today?
The researcher who proposed the concept of Web 4.0, Sigil Wen, was active in the early AI building space alongside Andrej Karpathy and the founders of Anthropic, Perplexity, and Replicate, and is a member of the Thiel Fellowship.
Rhythm BlockBeats Note: The Thiel Fellowship, originally named 20 under 20, is a scholarship created by billionaire Peter Thiel through his foundation. This scholarship is aimed at students under 22, providing a total of 100,000 US dollars in funding, mentorship, and other resources over two years to allow them to drop out and engage in other work, which may involve scientific research, starting a company, or social movements, with approximately 20-25 fellows selected each year.
Sigil Wen believes that the bottleneck is no longer the intelligence itself, but the permissions to act. The underlying architecture of the existing internet always assumes its service targets are humans, not machines.
The current most powerful AIs can think, reason, and generate content, yet they have one fatal limitation—they cannot act autonomously. Without user instructions, ChatGPT cannot operate; without authorization, Claude Code cannot be deployed; no AI can independently purchase servers, register domain names, or pay for its own computing power.
Web 4.0 is the solution.
This is precisely the starting point for his proposal of Web 4.0. If Web 1.0 allowed people to read, Web 2.0 allowed people to write, and Web 3.0 allowed people to own, then Web 4.0 is the era when AI entities can completely autonomously read, write, own, earn, and trade.
To this end, Wen established the infrastructure project Conway, which can connect to any AI that is compatible with the MCP protocol (such as Claude Code, Codex, etc.), and gives them capabilities they have never had before: a cryptocurrency wallet, the ability to settle computing power and service fees in USDC via the x402 protocol, on-demand allocated complete Linux servers, domain name registration, as well as product deployment and revenue acquisition. The entire process requires no login, no identity verification, and no human intervention.
After the concept was released, the price of the Conway token immediately skyrocketed by 3600%, with its market cap briefly reaching 10 million US dollars.
The Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariff policy invalid, market reaction was muted
The long-awaited judicial ruling finally came down. Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 6 to 3 that the broad "liberation day" tariffs implemented by President Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act exceeded his legal authority and are therefore void. However, this news, which should have shaken the market, did not cause much of a stir, with various assets reacting overall calmly.
Vitalik continuously reducing holdings, cashing out over 3.67 million US dollars in two days
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sold 1,869 ETH over the past two days, cashing out approximately 3.67 million US dollars. This move once again sparked market attention and discussion about his holdings.
Personnel changes and technical upgrades at the Ethereum Foundation accelerate
The Ethereum Foundation has recently welcomed several important changes. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak will step down at the end of February, and Bastian Aue will temporarily take over and jointly assume this role with Xiaowei Wang.
At the same time, the Foundation is actively exploring the introduction of AI tools for drafting governance proposals and hosting community meetings. On the technical side, Ethereum officials confirmed that FOCIL (EIP-7805) will be included as a core feature of the Hegota upgrade, expected to go live in the second half of 2026. This mechanism requires validating nodes to compulsorily include all valid transactions, fundamentally eliminating the possibility of censorship from the protocol level.
Base breaks up with Optimism
Base, under Coinbase, has officially declared its move towards technical independence. As the largest network in the OP Stack superchain ecosystem, Base released a blog post titled "The Next Chapter of Base," announcing that it will serialize tools, proof mechanisms, and all core infrastructure into a unified codebase managed independently by Base, bidding farewell to the previously decentralized architecture that relied on multiple teams like Optimism, Flashbots, and Paradigm.
On the technical front, Base will replace Optimism's optimistic proof with its self-developed TEE/ZK proof mechanism and remove Optimism from the security council, replacing it with an independent signer. The official plan is to complete the migration in two hard forks, with Base V3 launching simultaneously with Ethereum's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.
ICOs, airdrops, and financing
1. Andre Cronje officially launched the Flying Tulip public ICO with a valuation of 1 billion US dollars; the project has already raised over 200 million US dollars in deposits before issuing the stablecoin ftUSD;
2. Tether announced an investment in Dreamcash, planning to build a lending market on Hyperliquid backed by USDT0;
3. The peer-to-peer application Novig, focused on sports betting, completed a 75 million US dollar Series B financing round led by Pantera;
4. Established crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly completed the fundraising for its fourth fund, raising 650 million US dollars, exceeding its target and becoming one of the largest crypto venture capital funds in this round of cycles;
5. The DBA fund announced that it raised 62 million US dollars for its second crypto fund;
6. Additionally, Logan Paul’s rare Pokémon card was sold at auction for 16.5 million US dollars, setting a world record.
AI robot mistakenly transfers 270,000 dollars in tokens due to decimal point error
A blunder triggered by a technical error has garnered widespread attention. The AI robot LOBSTAR cleared the balance context after performing a reset operation, and subsequently made a disastrous transfer to a user claiming to need medical funds who requested 4 SOL. Originally intended to send about 52,439 tokens (worth 366 US dollars), it confused the decimal point (the difference between 6 digits and 9 digits) and actually transferred out 52,439,000 tokens, worth about 270,000 US dollars.
OpenAI and Paradigm team up to launch smart contract security benchmarks
OpenAI and crypto venture capital firm Paradigm have partnered to release an open benchmarking framework called EVMbench, specifically designed to assess the three core capabilities of AI entities in the security domain of Ethereum smart contracts: vulnerability detection, vulnerability remediation, and proactive exploitation of vulnerabilities. This benchmark references 120 high-risk vulnerabilities selected from 40 real audit cases, primarily sourced from the Code4rena competitive auditing platform, while also covering security audit scenarios for Tempo, a payment blockchain under Stripe.
Rhythm BlockBeats Note: Tempo is a Layer 1 blockchain focused on payments, with design contributions from Visa, Shopify, and OpenAI.
At the same time, OpenAI has expanded the closed testing scale of the professional security research AI Aardvark and pledged to provide 10 million US dollars in API quotas through its cybersecurity funding program to support defensive crypto research. This signifies that the integration theory between artificial intelligence and crypto technology has matured. This may also be one of the most meaningful integrations between the two industries to date.
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