Happy Monday! Let’s recap the most important AI and crypto news from last week.

On today’s menu:

• Google Introduces Gemini 3.5

• Echo Protocol Loses $816K

Today’s Big Stories:

Gemini 3.5 – is it good?

At Google I/O 2026 on May 19, Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash — and shipped it generally available the same day it was announced, making it the default model in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search worldwide.

If you opened Gemini that day, you were already running it before the keynote ended.

The headline stat is the one that made other AI labs nervous: 3.5 Flash beats Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks — including Terminal-Bench 2.1 at 76.2% — while running roughly 4x faster than comparable frontier models and at half the price.

A Flash model outperforming a Pro model is like a budget Tesla beating a sports car on the track. Crazy performance improvements.

Google also launched Gemini Omni — a new model that can create anything from any input, starting with video, representing a leap forward in multimodality and world understanding.

Gemini Spark, a persistent 24/7 personal AI agent, is rolling out to AI Ultra subscribers at $100/month — half the price of ChatGPT Pro — and Gemini 3.5 Pro is confirmed for next month.

Google’s secret weapon in all of this remains distribution: 3 billion active Android devices and native access to Gmail and Search data are advantages no standalone AI startup can replicate.

Hot off the back of a pretty successful Android 17 event, Google has been careful not to slip in a competitive AI race.

It’s firing on all cylinders: Waymo is expanding to 11 major US cities, parent company Alphabet reported stellar Q1 2026 earnings, and Gemini has 640 million active users.

But it’s far from over, and Google can’t say they’re the dominant player yet; just look at how OpenAI was the darling of Wall Street and tumbled in an instant.

Another DeFi Hack

Echo Protocol, a Bitcoin liquidity and yield aggregation platform, was hit on May 18 when an attacker compromised an admin key on its Monad deployment and minted 1,000 unauthorized eBTC tokens, carrying a paper value of $76.7 million.

The actual damage? A lot less.

Monad’s DeFi markets lacked the liquidity to absorb a fake $76M dump, so the attacker could only cash out roughly $816,000 — depositing 45 eBTC into lending protocol Curvance as collateral, borrowing wrapped Bitcoin, bridging to Ethereum, and sending 384 ETH straight into Tornado Cash.

Basically, shallow liquidity accidentally saved the protocol from a much uglier exploit.

Echo regained control of the admin keys, burned the remaining 955 eBTC still sitting in the attacker’s wallet, and paused all cross-chain functions tied to Monad while upgrading its bridge contracts and permission controls.

The more uncomfortable story is the pattern —as the crypto world becomes more institutionalized and regulated and accepted by the mainstream, its exploits and scams and failures like these that give the industry a bad rap.

What happened here? Someone lost control of a private key, and that single credential unlocked minting privileges across an entire chain deployment.

It’s the equivalent of leaving your master password on a sticky note. And it keeps happening.

May 2026 alone has already recorded at least 14 separate crypto hacks across protocols and bridges (the biggest one being the Kelp exploit we covered) — making it one of the busiest months for exploits this year.

Even if the technology is the most sophisticated it’s ever been, the humans behind it are the same, and are now the weak point these thugs are targeting.

Stay safe out there.

In other news

• Paradigm Open Sources Centaur: Multiplayer, Self-Hosted, Secure AI Agents for Slack (Paradigm)

• Zama Acquires TokenOps to Bring Confidential Token Distributions and Vesting Onchain (Zama)

• Wintermute Launches Armitage, A New Standard for Vault Curation (Wintermute)

• Everclear, the Crosschain Clearing & Settlement Protocol, Is Winding Down (Everclear)

• Telegram Introduces Secretary Mode, Let a Bot Read and Reply to Your Messages (Telegram)

• Kevin Warsh Officially Sworn In As Federal Reserve Chair (Sentdefender)