IO Interactive’s new James Bond game, 007 First Light, has already passed 70,000 concurrent players on Steam, no idea on the numbers on other platforms. Most gamers are clearly enjoying it too, as the game currently holds a 92% Very Positive rating on Steam. The game has had some complaints about implementing Denuvo days before launch and being a “journo” game. Personally, I’ve been playing it this week and it’s a great single-player game that gave me Uncharted feels. I posted the other day about the car section that plays “itself” but it’s just a small part. The driving in the game feels good so far.

IO Interactive confirmed that 007 First Light will not have preload on Steam or Xbox. Only PlayStation players will be able to download the game before launch. This is probably to avoid leaks and piracy before release. PC preloads can sometimes be datamined or cracked early if files are exposed, so removing preload on Steam lowers that risk. Xbox was likely included because its system is closer to PC than PlayStation's. The situation is ironic because early leaks still came from PS5 copies that got out before launch. They also added Denuvo DRM to Steam some days ago, so they are clearly worried about piracy. Some people with slow internet will have to wait to play it due to this. IO Interactive has not officially said the decision was due to piracy concerns.

Diamond iO Update We are excited to share that we have introduced several new optimization techniques for Diamond iO, implemented the full end-to-end pipeline with realistic lattice parameters, and produced concrete performance estimates. Latest paper: Latest implementation: Last year’s initial Diamond iO implementation deliberately left out one crucial component: FHE evaluation over BGG+ encodings. The reason was simple: the noise growth was too large to support realistic lattice parameters. This component is not specific to Diamond iO. FHE evaluation over BGG+ encodings has been used as a theoretical building block in advanced lattice-based cryptography for more than a decade, but there has been very little work on making it actually implementable. In the latest update, we make this component concrete. We introduce several techniques that substantially reduce noise growth, including native lookup-table evaluation, constant-depth arithmetic circuits, and specialized noise refreshing. The new implementation also runs all major lattice operations on GPUs. Together, these optimizations allow us to instantiate the full Diamond iO pipeline with realistic lattice parameters: a modulus size of at most 1540 bits and lattice dimension 2^{16}, comparable to large parameter sets used in CKKS-style FHE implementations. The total running time is still far beyond practical use, but we can now estimate the end-to-end cost rather than leaving a major component abstract. What improves? Our estimates suggest that Diamond iO reduces the overhead of the main bottleneck in most modern iO schemes: the transformation from functional encryption (FE) to iO. Compared with prior FE-to-iO transformations, Diamond iO reduces this overhead by at least a factor of 2^118, making the transformation almost as efficient as the underlying FE scheme itself. In other words, Diamond iO appears to largely remove the FE-to-iO transformation as the dominant cost. What remains? Diamond iO is still very far from practical. Once the FE-to-iO overhead is reduced, the bottleneck shifts to the final FE decryption step, which requires FHE evaluation over BGG+ encodings. Our current estimate is that this step would still take about 10^36 hours. As explained in Vitalik’s recent post, much of the inefficiency in modern iO comes from the need to stack a complicated tower of cryptographic primitives: FHE × ABE × GC × XiO × ... Diamond iO significantly simplifies this picture: the construction is essentially simple matrix operations plus an FHE × ABE layer, where the ABE component is essentially BGG+ encodings. In our view, this gives a much clearer roadmap toward practical iO: further simplify the remaining FHE × ABE layer, and the gap to practicality could shrink dramatically.

.@valkey_io China WeChat account is now live 🎉 We're glad to help make this happen. A vendor-neutral, community-run space for Chinese developers who've been building with and contributing to Valkey. Now Valkey has a home in China to grow together, share and connect.

.@grvt_io is a capital-productive Perp DEX where traders can earn up to 11% APY interest on all deposits used for trading. @kreisermatt below on how Grvt's architecture, unified margin, incentives, and upcoming GRVT token launch all play into the protocol's outperformance of the larger Perp DEX sector in the last year

⚠️ .io domain likely being phased-out (as were .cs & .yu) — 7 suggested steps 1. Avoid buying new #dotIO# domains 2. Run a .io service? Make & publicize a transition plan 3. Got an #indieweb# .io? Make a transition plan 4. Using a .io e.g. #GitHubPages#? …

NEW EPISODE - Is @variational_io the Next Hyperliquid? Variational isn’t trying to be another perp exchange. Lucas Schuermann (@variational_lvs) & @JustinCBram break down its broker model, how it taps into TradFi liquidity, why swaps could be a better retail primitive for RWAs, and the vision for accessing thousands of global markets from one USDC balance. Plus: the 32% VAR airdrop, mobile, and the push to bring the next wave of traders onchain. CHAPTERS --- 0:00 Broker, Not Exchange 5:07 Why Brokerage Wins for Retail 8:22 What Is a Swap? 9:58 The Real Cost of Trading 11:43 Bringing TradFi Liquidity Onchain 14:44 Building Variational 23:14 From Crypto Traders to Everyone 26:42 The Next User Base 30:35 What Actually Happens Onchain? 34:00 Inside OLP 37:03 Arbitrum and User Funds 39:44 The VAR Token and 32% Airdrop 42:34 Funding the Token Model 44:11 The 2027 Roadmap 47:44 Protocol or Platform?