SATURDAY, AUG15
1. Antidote Safety Net hires, 2. Tether clears KPMG audit, 3. freedom philanthropy gap, 4. Core Scientific 440 MW, 5. Z.ai OpenVuln scanner, 6. X opens ranking code
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. safetynet
Antidote, the London bitcoin startup accelerator, is hiring a team for something it calls Project Safety Net, putting out an open call for developers, product managers and designers to email build@antidotebtc.com. The pitch is out on YouTube in an episode of Inside Antidote featuring Ben Cousens and Andy, and the recruitment post on X carries no product description beyond the name. “We are looking for a team to work on Project Safety Net” is the whole of the public brief. Antidote runs a six-month accelerator from a bitcoin-only co-working space in central London, launched with £2.5 million, and has concentrated on payments infrastructure, digital identity and data sovereignty. The name hints at custody recovery or inheritance tooling, though the company has not said so. The notable part is the shape of the bet: building a product in-house rather than writing a cheque to a portfolio company implies Antidote sees a gap in UK bitcoin infrastructure that no existing startup is filling.2. opinion
KPMG has issued an unqualified opinion on Tether’s 2025 financial statements, the first full audit in the company’s history and, per its own announcement, the largest inaugural audit ever completed. Auditors physically counted and inspected every gold bar Tether holds rather than accepting custodian reports, and tested the full balance sheet, income statement, equity changes and cash flows. Chief Financial Officer Simon McWilliams put audited reserves in excess of liabilities at $6.814 billion. “For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed,” said Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of the company. The issuer has published quarterly attestations by outside accountants for years, but an attestation is a limited-scope review and a financial statement audit is not — that distinction sat underneath nearly every serious criticism levelled at it. Tether says more than 650 million people across emerging markets hold USD₮ as savings or a payment rail. Dollar substitutes now carry roughly the accounting burden that dollar banks do.3. penny
Under one percent of global philanthropy funds democracy, civil liberties and freedom — roughly $3.4 billion against $900 billion given annually. Tim Reynolds, founder and chairman of The Reynolds Foundation, and Álvaro Salas-Castro, its president and chief executive, set out the arithmetic in the Journal of Democracy. Education draws about $88 billion, health $61 billion, and animal welfare outdraws civil liberties outright. “Less than one penny of every charitable dollar defends the conditions that make all other charitable work possible.” The timing is poor. Autocracies now outnumber democracies 91 to 88, roughly 6.1 billion people live under authoritarian rule, and the $3 billion in annual US democracy assistance has been frozen with no European replacement. The authors frame the shortfall as mispriced risk rather than moral failure, and name bitcoin and Nostr among the tools that route around debanking and asset freezes. Their proposed correction costs $5 billion a year, against family offices already managing $3.1 trillion.4. muskogee
Core Scientific has closed its purchase of Polaris DS, taking control of roughly 440 megawatts of in-service, grid-connected power in Oklahoma and converting it to high-density colocation, “a data center service that concentrates a large number of servers into a small physical footprint” requiring heavier power and cooling than conventional hosting. A Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows the final price at approximately $444.3 million in cash, some $23.3 million above the figure set when the deal was first agreed, with a further $40 million due if another 40 megawatts of firm capacity reaches Polaris. The 40-acre campus adjoins Core Scientific’s existing Muskogee site, which the company intends to scale to about 1.5 gigawatts gross. Chief executive Adam Sullivan said site acquisitions this year have added more than 600 megawatts of leasable power. Core Scientific mined 45 percent less bitcoin in the first quarter than a year earlier. Miners have signed more than $90 billion in AI infrastructure deals covering roughly 3.7 gigawatts.5. vulnhunter
Z.ai has released OpenVuln, a public vulnerability intelligence platform that scans open-source repositories with an automated engine and publishes aggregate security findings while holding the specifics back. According to the project’s launch post on X, a maintainer submits a public GitHub repository, an engine called VulnHunter scans it for weaknesses, and “VulnHunter AI engine scans for vulnerabilities ... detailed findings stay private for verified maintainers until disclosure” while aggregate insight goes public immediately. The design threads the standing problem in open-source security: publishing a flaw before a patch exists arms attackers, and keeping it quiet leaves downstream users unaware they are exposed. Bitcoin and freedom tech run almost entirely on volunteer-maintained open-source code carrying no security budget, and the projects least able to afford an audit are often the ones guarding the most value. An automated scanner with a disclosure gate replaces nothing a protocol-literate reviewer does, but it makes a first pass far cheaper.6. ranking
X has published the code that decides what surfaces in the For You timeline, alongside a tool letting users see visibility-limiting labels attached to their own account and posts. The company describes the two releases as deliberately paired: the code shows which labels suppress reach and by how much, the tool shows whether you carry any. “We want people to be able to answer for themselves whether a platform is limiting their reach.” A new Under the Hood page will surface labels applied over the prior month to accounts posting at least ten times, with the data downloadable, initially for a randomised test group of accounts at least a year old. The release adds model configuration, filter and core ranking detail to earlier open-source work, and outside recommender system researchers were given advance access to pressure-test it. Shadowbanning has been an accusation impossible to falsify from outside. Publishing the ranking code and the label data together turns it into something a user can check.Thanks for reading Tangents Daily, the front row for frontier tech.
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