Thursday, Feb 12, Aster Chain to Go Live in March

Vitalik’s ZK-first Ethereum+AI roadmap, AstaChain’s privacy-ready mainnet, and BlackRock’s Uniswap play spotlight privacy, institutional DeFi, and on-chain AI coordination.

Key Takeaways

Vitalik outlines a ZK-first vision: trustless privacy, local LLMs, ZK payments, and cryptographic AI interactions to make Ethereum the economic layer for agent-based markets and disputes.
AI-enabled governance could unlock prediction markets and quadratic voting by overcoming human attention limits, offering more scalable, verifiable collective decisions.
AstaChain (Aster) launches mainnet in March with testnet live—zero-knowledge proofs verify trades without exposing positions; privacy framed as crypto’s critical missing piece by CZ and Chamath.
Perpetuals volumes surge: PerpDecks hit $12T in 2025; Astor/Hyperliquid ranks second, processing $11.5B on Feb 5; mainnet improvements include fiat on-ramps, dev tooling, unified order book.
BlackRock listed the Biddle token via Uniswap X RFQ and market-bought UNI, boosting UNI ~20%; trades settle atomically on-chain while initial sales remain restricted to qualified buyers.
Market snapshot: Bitcoin ~ $67,000, Ether ~ $1,970, Solana ~ $81—institutional market-making activity signals renewed conviction in DeFi despite broader sentiment headwinds.

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