New Year, New Signals: AI & Web3 at the Edge of 2026

A concise New Year briefing on frontier AI models, platform security, on-chain infrastructure upgrades, and institutional crypto trends—what changed in late 2025 and what leaders should watch next.

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Tesseract Academy
January 02, 2026

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New Year’s Eve + New Year — AI News

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2

positioned as the frontier model for professional work + long-running agents, with an updated

OpenAI on hardening ChatGPT Atlas vs prompt injection

frames injection as a permanent “web security” problem (like phishing), requiring continuous red-team + rapid patch loops

EU AI Act timeline refresher

key compliance milestones are already live for some obligations; the Act becomes fully applicable on 2 Aug 2026 (with specific exceptions).

Google’s December “Gemini Drop”

Gemini 3 Flash becomes the default upgrade, plus more “grounded” workflows (e.g., NotebookLM sources inside Gemini)

Gemini can verify AI-generated/edited videos via SynthID

upload a clip and it returns where the watermark is detected (audio/visual segments)

New Year’s Eve + New Year — Web3 News

Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade is live

Osaka (execution) + Fulu (consensus), aimed at scaling + UX improvements.

Firedancer goes live on Solana mainnet

big “client diversity” milestone after ~3 years of development.

Institutional tone:

family offices increased crypto exposure in 2025, but volatility remains the headline risk going into 2026.

Crypto M&A hits a record pace in 2025

FT reports $8.6B across 267 deals, with more expected in 2026.

Bitcoin’s year-end snapshot:

BTC ends 2025 around the high-$80Ks, down ~5–7% on the year and ~30% off the October peak (depending on the reference close).