Brazil’s state-owned postal service, Empresa Brasileira de Correios e Telégrafos, has launched a pre-selection process for companies and specialists in blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop solutions for its logistics and operational management.

The tender, published in the country’s official journal Diário Oficial da União on Friday, seeks proposals that support the digital transformation of the agency’s services. The initiative, called Licitação Seleção Prévia e Diálogo nº 25000001/2025 CS, is focused on finding advanced technological solutions to modernize business processes, operations, and internal supply management.

“We want to promote a collaborative and dynamic process to find artificial intelligence and blockchain solutions for our business, operations, and hiring challenges,” the company announced.

The organization did not specify the exact use cases it is targeting, but blockchain technology has been widely adopted for supply chain tracking, document authentication, and transaction security. The use of artificial intelligence is likely linked to logistics optimization and enhanced data analysis.

A $150 million theft targeting Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen has been traced back to a security lapse involving the password manager LastPass, according to a forfeiture complaint filed by U.S. law enforcement on March 6 flagged by blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.

ZachXBT shared that the complaint detailed how Larsen’s private keys — or code to access one’s token holdings — were stored in LastPass, the widely used password manager that suffered a major breach in 2022.

At the time, hackers stole source code and technical data by compromising a developer’s account. By November of that year, they used this access to infiltrate a cloud storage system, stealing encrypted customer password vaults and unencrypted metadata for an estimated 25 million users.

Although ‘vaults’ were encrypted, weak or reused master passwords could be brute-forced, exposing stored data.

Hackers exploited this vulnerability, accessing Larsen’s keys and siphoning off the XRP, valued at $150 million at the time of the theft and over $600 million as of Saturday’s prices.

“A forfeiture complaint filed yesterday by US law enforcement revealed the cause for the ~$150M (283M XRP) hack of Ripple co-founder, Chris Larsen’s wallet in Jan 2024 was the result of storing private keys in LastPass (password manager which was hacked in 2022),” ZachXBT wrote on his Telegram channel.

“Up to this point Chris Larsen had not publicly disclosed the cause of the theft,” he added.

Larsen confirmed the incident in January, where he clarified the hack affected only his personal accounts, not Ripple’s corporate wallets. He is yet to publicly comment on the forfeiture notice.

The fallout from the 2022 LastPass hack has been extensive and remain ongoing. In December, The Security Alliance (SEAL), a team of cybersecurity experts focused on the crypto market, estimated that crypto losses connected to the breach had touched at least $250 million as of May 2024.

The Ethereum Foundation (EF), the non-profit organization that supports the development and research of the Ethereum blockchain, shared in a blog post on Saturday that they have selected Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak as their new co-executive directors.

The news follows Tuesday’s announcement of Aya Miyaguchi leaving that role to become the EF’s new president. The leadership shake-up follows intense debate among the community about the EF’s role in the ecosystem, as some have blamed the organization and its leadership for the blockchain’s token ether (ETH) price lagging behind other cryptocurrencies, while the blockchain attracted for the first time less new developers than its competitor Solana.

Wang has been at the EF since 2017, where she helped do research on concepts like sharding, as well as contributed to Ethereum’s major overhaul known as “the Merge.” Stańczak founded Nerthermind, one of the largest software or clients that operate the Ethereum blockchain.

“Over the next few years, the Ethereum ecosystem needs to navigate the challenging transition from being an early-stage project serving a small number of enthusiasts to being a robust permissionless censorship-resistant base layer of the global finance and software stack,” the Foundation said in their blog post.

More shuffling

In addition to Wang and Stańczak assuming their new roles, ex-EF researcher Danny Ryan shared that he would be joining Etherealize, the new project aimed at bringing ETH to Wall Street. The firm was founded by former banker Vivek Raman, who shared previously with CoinDesk that one of the goals of Etherealize is to bridge the gap between Ethereum and the banks by educating institutions and marketing ETH as a serious crypto asset.

In a post shared on X, Ryan said that he intends “to build a new Ethereum institution with Real World Ethereum as its north star.”

“The world is ready to come on-chain, and we’re here to do the hard work necessary to make it happen,” Ryan added.

Read more: Ethereum Foundation’s Aya Miyaguchi Leaving Executive Director Role