x402 has gone live on the XRP Ledger, enabling AI agents to pay for services directly in XRP and RLUSD without using API keys or traditional accounts. Payments are handled per request using the x402 HTTP 402 "Payment Required" standard, with settlement occurring on-chain. Separately, phase two of Dubai's Real Estate Tokenization Project on the XRP Ledger has started, adding controlled secondary market trading for tokenized properties.

On February 19, 2026, Chainalysis outlined how on‑chain cryptocurrency flows linked to darknet markets and fentanyl precursor suppliers can anticipate overdose trends by three to six months. The firm reported that darknet market inflows neared $2.6 billion in 2025, while mid‑2023 saw a sharp drop in payments to fentanyl precursor suppliers that aligned with declining opioid deaths in the U.S. and Canada. Larger crypto transfers above $500 also showed a strong relationship with stimulant‑related hospitalizations in Canada, underscoring blockchain’s dual role as both a facilitator of illicit activity and a tool for public health forecasting and law enforcement.

Vitalik Buterin set 2026 as a target to reclaim computing self-sovereignty, detailing moves to privacy tools and trials of running language models on a personal laptop. The article argues local-only hosting cannot meet training and persistent inference needs at scale, and instead points to decentralized compute networks as a way to combine independence with elastic capacity.

OpenAI plans to establish new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru while CEO Sam Altman is in New Delhi for the AI Impact Summit. The company aims to deepen its engagement with India's developer ecosystem, enterprises, and policymakers as the country becomes one of its fastest-growing markets. Bengaluru will focus on talent and startups, while Mumbai will position OpenAI closer to major financial and media clients.

Kite AI (KITE) is redefining the Agentic Internet, reaching an all-time high of $0.246 in mid-February 2026 after a 55% weekly surge. With $33M in funding from PayPal Ventures and Coinbase Ventures, and a mainnet launch slated for Q1 2026, analysts are forecasting a potential rally toward $0.70.

Developers are deploying AI agents to monitor and secure smart contracts after crypto platforms lost over $3.4 billion to hacks in 2025. OpenAI's EVMbench now tests whether these systems can detect, fix, or even exploit live blockchain vulnerabilities. Early findings show AI is more effective at exploitation than safe remediation, raising concerns it could empower both defenders and attackers across decentralized finance.

OpenAI launched EVMbench to benchmark how AI agents detect, patch, and exploit security issues in crypto smart contracts. On Wednesday, the firm published a paper with Paradigm and OtterSec covering 120 vulnerabilities, where Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 led with a $37,824 detect award, ahead of OC-GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro.

On February 15, 2026, DeFi lending protocol Moonwell discovered a critical oracle misconfiguration on its cbETH Core Market on Base, which it linked to Solidity code partially authored by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. The bug priced cbETH at about $1.12 instead of nearly $2,200, enabling liquidations and abnormal borrowing that left users facing an estimated $1.78 million in losses across cbETH, WETH, and USDC positions. The incident, which followed Bithumb's multi-billion-dollar reward misassignment on February 6, has intensified debate around AI-assisted "vibe coding" and the limits of human oversight.