CIA's New Research Lab to Study Blockchain
CIA Labs will give officers an outlet to patent and profit from their tech inventions.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched a new research and develop laboratory on Monday that features blockchain technology among its focus areas.
- CIA Labs' webpagehttps://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/science-technology/cia-labs.html said the labs will research "distributed ledger/blockchain-enabled technologies" alongside other tech stacks: wireless telecommunications, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and data analytics, to name a few.
- Officers who develop tech inventions in the lab will be permitted to patent, disclose and partially profit from their work, according to MIT Technology Review.
- MIT's reporting notes the labs will give CIA a useful incentive to woo tech talent that might otherwise turn to Silicon Valley's giants.
- That the CIA, one of the U.S. intelligence community's two code-breaking hubs, would take an interest in researching a technology secured by cryptography should come as no surprise to observers.
- The Block first reported CIA Labs' blockchain focus.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.
Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.
Why it matters:
Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.
