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Are improved AI agents the bullish development crypto has been waiting for? Today's Issue ⬇️ - ☀️ Need to Know: Block Gets Slashed
Jack Dorsey is going all-in on AI engineering. - 🗣️ Analysis: Starkzap's Crypto App Gateway
StarkWare's latest release is dev- and agent-friendly. - 🎧 Early Access Pod: Crypto's Missing Piece?
Premium members get to listen before anyone else!
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. . . NEED TO KNOW Block Gets Slashed - 🪓 Jack Dorsey's Block Slashes 40% of Workforce, Credits AI Efficiency. XYZ rallied as much as 20% overnight in anticipation of Block's agentic-powered productivity future.
- 🏦 Morgan Stanley Applies for Digital Asset Banking Charter. A Morgan Stanley subsidiary applied earlier this month to the OCC for a national trust banking charter.
- 🎒 ZKsync Lite Scheduled for Full Deprecation on May 4. Users should withdraw all funds from ZKsync Lite ahead of the deadline as the ecosystem moves to consolidate around Era.
📸 Daily Market Snapshot: A 5% drop took ETH negative on the week yet again, with the top 20 tokens now down nearly 30% on average this month with ETH's drop leading the way. | Prices as of 6pm ET | 24hr | 7d |  | Crypto $2.26T | ↘ 3.0% | ↘ 2.8% |  | BTC $65,786 | ↘ 2.6% | ↘ 3.4% |  | ETH $1,926 | ↘ 5.0% | ↘ 2.2% |
. . . ANALYSIS Starkzap Brings Crypto Powers to Any App In 2025, I played through Season 1 of Realms: Eternum on Starknet. It was a blast, largely because it just felt like playing a solid mainstream strategy game. The onchain elements were abstracted away. You could sign into the game with a social login like Discord, avoid transaction deluges via session keys, and make trades for free through a paymaster. Not bad! Really good, in fact. This UX flow was an obvious blueprint for other consumer apps to make their way onto crypto rails. So, what if you packaged the pillars that made Eternum S1 so slick with even more utility, and put it all into a single developer kit so that any app could use it for streamlined, plug-and-go crypto powers? Well, you'd get Starkzap, which is fortunately now open for anyone to use. What is Starkzap?Starkzap is an open-source TypeScript SDK that StarkWare launched this week so developers can easily embed onchain capabilities into their apps. One command is all it takes to dive in: npm install starkzap. From there, all of the architecture is modular, so builders can opt for whatever configurations they need. On the wallet side, Starkzap supports three authentication backends: - Privy, which handles social and email login with server-side key management so users never touch a seed phrase.
- Cartridge Controller, which is tuned for gaming and lets users sign in with Google, Twitter, or biometrics.
- Plus, Ready and Braavos account templates, which are good for teams that want more traditional wallet setups.
As for transactions, Starkzap supports both AVNU and Cartridge paymaster tech for sponsored gas. This way, apps can offer fee-less experiences without having to build any payments plumbing themselves. On the DeFi side of things, the SDK also ships with modules for ERC-20 operations (transfers, balance checks, approvals), staking across STRK, BTC, and USDC, and a transaction builder for handling batching and fee estimations. And this is all just Starkzap as it stands out of the gate. In the future, look for more modules and integrations to arrive, like support for bridging via Near Intents or lending via Vesu. Build, BrotherRight now, if an app wanted to deploy even a basic crypto feature, it'd entail manually wiring up wallet management, fee logic, DeFi protocols, etc. That whole process could take many weeks. In contrast, Starkzap flattens that work into a single SDK, so that wiring process only has to take days, hours, or minutes. This resource can be huge for human builders who want to expand their consumer apps into the onchain frontier. But also note in the context of vibe coding or autonomous onchain agents how Starkzap can serve as an execution layer so AI can bypass infra building. Ultimately, Starkzap is a bet that eliminating developer friction as a bottleneck will lead to a bloom of onchain consumer apps. Starknet is already home to rising hits like Loot Survivor 2 and Focus Tree. What happens when there are dozens of apps like these on the L2? We'll have to wait and see, but this is the future that Starkzap is pointing to. What made Eternum S1 feel like a real game was good infra that was thoughtfully composed – Starkzap takes the same legos, adds more goodies, and pre-packages it all for anyone to deploy. This has the potential to become a considerable catalyst in the Starknet ecosystem going forward, so keep it on your radar. FRIEND & SPONSOR: READY (FORMERLY ARGENT) Ready makes going bankless simple. Pay with USDC worldwide with zero FX fees and earn up to 3% cashback. Start spending instantly with a virtual card and choose between a free or paid plan. Keep control of your assets. Bankless readers get 20% off Metal with code BANKLESS20 . . . EARLY ACCESS Crypto's Missing Piece? Crypto still feels like a minefield for humans: address poisoning, blind signing, stale approvals, phishing domains—the “foot-guns” never really went away.
Haseeb Qureshi argues that’s a clue, not a bug: blockchains and smart contracts are machine-readable systems that AI agents can parse, simulate, and execute far more reliably than people, shifting crypto’s core user from humans clicking through wallets to agents acting on our behalf.
We also dig into the two-track future of agent commerce (safe, human-approved flows vs. the wild-west frontier), why major AI labs have avoided crypto training so far (liability), how agent-driven discovery could rewrite DeFi competition, and what this means for Dragonfly’s investing playbook. Tune into the full episode 👇 | 
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