New tech on the block: Blockchain, cybersecurity, ecommerce, cryptocurrency, data management, no code, cloud & workplace tools

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent tech launches.

Blockchain: A platform is designed to propel the future of advertising on-chain

Growth Protocol officially launched its purpose-built Layer-1 blockchain today, backed by Nazara Technologies and Lysto. The platform is designed to propel the future of advertising on-chain, with real-time engagement through tokenizing digital advertising campaigns. Growth Protocol is signaling a major shift in how global brands connect with 150K+ daily active users already on the platform post the private testnet launch.

“Growth Protocol delivers exactly the kind of real-world adoption we envisioned Avalanche enabling—low-latency, high-speed infrastructure powering proof-of-performance at global scale,” said Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs. “It raises the bar for transparency in a trillion-dollar industry.”

Features

The blockchain marketing protocol removes ad intermediaries, enforces radical transparency, guarantees equitable payouts, and restores sovereign digital identity to users—powering trustless Web3 campaigns.

Cybersecurity: An open-source, automated red teaming engine, to make advanced security testing accessible to organisations of all sizes

Silicon Valley-headquartered Operant AI, launched Woodpecker, an open-source, automated red teaming engine, that will make advanced security testing accessible to organisations of all sizes. Woodpecker is designed to help organizations proactively detect and address security vulnerabilities across AI systems, Kubernetes environments, and APIs.

“Secure AI applications like Cohere’s North demand rigorous testing across complex components. Woodpecker simplifies this with open-source red teaming, enabling early vulnerability detection and encouraging secure AI adoption,” said Prutha Parikh, Head of Security at Cohere and board member at the Coalition for Secure AI.

Features

• Red Teaming Across Kubernetes, APIs, and AI Workflows: Red Teams for K8s, APIs, and AI Models/Agents and Multi-layer Threat Simulation across runtime, APIs, and LLM integrations
• Automated LLM Red Teaming: Covers prompt injection, jailbreaks, model theft, sensitive data leakage and more, uncover vulnerabilities by testing malicious prompts originating from both adversarial and typical users, and test output manipulation and filtering evasion.
• Compliance Mapping for regulatory Frameworks: Covers across threat vectors for OWASP top 10 for K8s, API and AI, MITRE ATLAS and NIST.
• Open-Source and Free: Benefit from a powerful red teaming tool without licensing fees, fostering widespread adoption.
• Easy Integration: Seamlessly integrate Woodpecker into existing security workflows and CI/CD pipelines.

Ecommerce: A First-of-Its-Kind Benchmarking Platform to Transform E-commerce Logistics Strategy

ClickPost, Indian logistics intelligence platform, launched Atlas, a paid subscription product that’s set to disrupt the insights market for e-commerce logistics. Built on ClickPost’s proprietary network processing over 50 million shipments every month, Atlas revolutionizes e-commerce by transforming raw logistics data into actionable insights, giving brands the unprecedented power to benchmark performance and drive exponential growth.

“For the first time, brands can benchmark their logistics with the precision of the world’s largest brands. This isn’t just visibility—it’s a blueprint for dominance,” said Naman Vijay, Co-Founder & CEO of ClickPost. “Our aim is to give businesses inspiring goals and empower them to reach newer heights.”

Features

• Atlas provides a 360-degree view of critical metrics—from precise fulfillment speeds and Return-to-Origin (RTO) rates to last-mile efficiency, average order values, sales growth, shipment volumes, and city-specific delivery times.
• By comparing this rich data against real-time market benchmarks, brands can now instantly pinpoint operational bottlenecks, seize untapped growth opportunities, and not just meet, but exceed industry standards.
• With granular, region-level insights and market-specific benchmarking, Atlas enables brands to discover underserved cities, identify friction points in last-mile delivery, lower fulfillment costs, and elevate customer experience.

Cryptocurrency: A yield-bearing stable asset certificate to enhance capital efficiency with passive income opportunities for users

Bitget, the cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 company, launched BGUSD, a yield-bearing stable asset certificate designed to enhance capital efficiency and provide passive income opportunities for users worldwide. BGUSD is fully integrated into the platform’s trading and wealth management infrastructure, offering a multifaceted utility layer backed by real-world assets.

“At Bitget, our mission has always been to prioritize our users’ needs — whether they come from the crypto-native community, institutional circles, or traditional finance. With BGUSD, we are delivering a solution that bridges the best of both worlds: the transparency and innovation of crypto with the stability and yield opportunities traditionally found in real-world assets. This launch is another step in empowering our global users to achieve smarter, more resilient portfolio growth,” said Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget.

Features

• BGUSD is redeemable for USDC at a 1:1 ratio and can be subscribed using USDC or USDT.
• Holding BGUSD provides users with an annualized yield starting at 4%, credited daily to their spot accounts based on their minimum daily balance. For the first 30 days following launch, a promotional APY of 5% will apply.
• The asset derives its yield from a diversified basket of tier 1 tokenized real-world assets, including high-grade money market funds and tokenized US Treasury products. This disciplined yield structure is supported by a diversified asset allocation, institutional-grade infrastructure, and partnerships with multiple leading tokenization service providers, including Superstate (via their tokenized treasury fund USTB).

Cybersecurity: AI-Powered Security Management for the Modern Enterprise

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP), a pioneer and global leader of cyber security solutions, launched its next generation Quantum Smart-1 Management Appliances, delivering 2X increase in managed gateways and up to 70% higher log rate, with AI-powered security tools designed to meet the demands of hybrid enterprises. Fully integrated within the Check Point Infinity Platform, these new appliances offer faster, more intelligent threat detection and response through a unique hybrid mesh architecture and integration with over 250 third-party solutions.

“Security teams today face more pressure than ever — from rising AI-generated threats to managing fragmented infrastructures. Our new Quantum Smart-1 Management Appliances simplify that complexity,” said Nataly Kremer, Chief Product Officer at Check Point. “Our new Quantum Smart-1 Management Appliances combine AI, speed, precision, and automation to help organizations manage on-premise, cloud, and distributed IT deployments — faster and smarter.”

Features

• Scale with Confidence: Manage up to 10,000 gateways — supporting business growth without rearchitecting security infrastructure
• Faster Response, Lower Risk: Achieve up to 70% higher log processing speeds to accelerate threat detection and response
• Built-in Compliance Readiness: Store up to 70TB of logs locally for long-term data retention and regulatory requirements
• Smarter Operations: Consolidate management functions and reduce complexity across hybrid environments
• Open Ecosystem: Integrate with over 250 third-party solutions

Data Management: Native Support for Snowflake Managed Iceberg Tables, Expanding Open Lakehouse Options for Customers

Qlik®, a platform in data integration, data quality, analytics, and artificial intelligence, launched native support for Snowflake-managed Apache Iceberg™ tables, enabling fast, open-format data pipelines directly into Snowflake’s highly performant, governed environment. Alongside this, Qlik is introducing additional capabilities that allow customers to leverage Qlik Open Lakehouse, powered by Apache Iceberg, in conjunction with Snowflake for greater architectural flexibility and AI scalability.

“Open standards like Apache Iceberg are foundational to an interoperable data stack, including both Qlik and Snowflake,” said Saurin Shah, Senior Product Manager, Data Engineering at Snowflake. “By combining real-time ingestion, automated optimization, and Cortex-ready AI pipelines, Qlik, together with Snowflake, helps customers accelerate time to insight while maximizing the value of their data investments.”

Features

• Native Streaming to Snowflake-managed Iceberg Tables: Qlik Talend Cloud® now supports continuous change data capture (CDC) from enterprise systems directly into Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables, enabling low-latency ingestion supporting strict business SLAs for analytics and AI use cases.
• Qlik Open Lakehouse Optimization & Mirroring: Qlik Open Lakehouse combines low-latency ingestion into Apache Iceberg tables with an automated optimizer that manages compactions, partitioning, and pruning in S3—delivering faster queries and a reduced storage footprint without manual tuning. It also mirrors Iceberg data back into Snowflake for downstream transformations without duplicating data.
• One-Click Data Products with In-Snowflake Quality Execution: Qlik data products can be generated directly within customers’ Snowflake ecosystems, leveraging the Qlik Talend Trust Score™ to push down data quality computation in Snowflake—enabling teams to produce governed, high-quality outputs that elevate the value of curated assets.
• Knowledge Mart for RAG on Snowflake Cortex: Qlik’s Knowledge Mart transforms structured and unstructured content—including PDFs, call transcripts, and relational records—into AI-ready vectorized assets in Snowflake, powering retrieval-augmented generation pipelines through Cortex with full explainability and governance.

No-code: MCP Servers to Power Next-Gen Context-Aware Automation

Appy Pie Automate, a platform in no-code workflow automation, launched its MCP Servers, introducing a new standard for intelligent, context-aware automation. Powered by the proprietary Model Context Protocol (MCP), these servers enable AI agents to not only execute workflows but to retain memory, understand user goals, and adapt in real-time.

“With MCP Servers, we’re not just automating workflows—we’re giving users intelligent companions that can think, adapt, and evolve,” said Abhinav Girdhar, Founder and CEO of Appy Pie. “It’s the missing brain behind traditional automation.”

Features

• Developers and enterprises can now plug MCP into tools and environments they already love. Cursor: Add long-term memory and adaptive reasoning to your coding agents.
• Windsurf: Create knowledge-aware agents with persistent organizational memory.
• Claude: Enable Claude-powered assistants to recall user context and continue long-form workflows.
• Custom IDEs & LLMs: Bring context retention to your own AI stack with MCP’s modular APIs.

Cloud security: New Solutions to Strengthen & Extend Zero Trust Everywhere

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the cloud security platform announced a new suite of solutions that enable customers to quickly adopt Zero Trust Everywhere. These innovations extend the reach of true Zero Trust and enable businesses to modernize and scale securely by providing end-to-end segmentation between and inside branches and enhance security across multi-cloud environments.

“Zscaler’s latest innovations for the Zero Trust Exchange truly extends Zero Trust Everywhere beyond users and redefines the enterprise security and networking by seamlessly unifying operations, strengthening threat defenses, and enabling secure connectivity across users, devices, applications, branches, and clouds with better visibility and experience—no matter how complex or distributed the environment,” said Dhawal Sharma, EVP Product Strategy, Zscaler. “With this expanded Zero Trust Everywhere approach, organizations can accelerate security modernization, mitigate risks, and protect data everywhere business happens.”

Features

• Unified Appliance for Zero Trust Branch: Zscaler’s Zero Trust Branch redefines enterprise security and networking with a unified appliance that secures communications between branches, campuses, and factories, and segments OT and IoT devices within them including legacy OT, with no downtime. The solution also provides newly introduced disposable jumpboxes that enables contractors secure, time-bound access to critical systems. By eliminating the need for firewalls, legacy NAC, cumbersome VLAN configurations and VDI for remote access, organizations can stop lateral threat movement with unparalleled efficacy. This approach not only elevates security, but also dramatically reduces complexity and costs, empowering businesses to modernize and scale faster without compromise. Unified Appliance for Zero Trust Branch is generally available.
• Zero Trust Gateway for Cloud Workloads: This cloud-native service on AWS enables organizations to secure communications from workload to the internet, and East-West traffic between workloads and VPCs/VNETs, in under 10 minutes without deploying agents or VMs with a Zscaler managed offering. This strengthens security in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing organizations to reduce the attack surface associated with firewalls, and eliminate complexity and secure workload communications. Zero Trust Gateway is generally available.
• Zscaler Micro segmentation for Cloud Workloads: Zscaler further extends AI-driven segmentation to cloud workloads with newly introduced host-based Micro segmentation service that provides granular host and process level segmentation policies using its AI- powered Segmentation engine for Workloads in public clouds such as AWS and Azure as well as on-premise Data Center based workloads that run on bare metal. Zscaler Workload agent provides process and workload level metrics, traffic flows as well device context, that protects crown jewels against lateral threats and compromise. Zscaler Micro segmentation is generally available.
• Zero Trust Exchange for B2B: The introduction of B2B Exchange revolutionizes secure collaboration by providing a cutting-edge app-sharing platform for partner organizations, eliminating the need for outdated technologies like MPLS circuits or VPNs that come with complexity and the risk of oversharing. This solution accelerates seamless, secure connections between enterprises, empowering organizations to drive faster, more efficient mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships while safeguarding sensitive data. Zero Trust Exchange for B2B is available for select use cases, with extended capabilities coming soon. 

Cloud: A Platform to Equip Businesses with Native Security Forensics for Faster Insights with Fewer Tools

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the connectivity cloud company, announced the general availability of Cloudflare Log Explorer, to help give businesses instant access to critical security and performance insights across their IT environments. Now, customers can analyze, investigate, and monitor for security attacks with log line level insights across their entire business–natively within the Cloudflare Dashboard–eliminating the need to forward logs to third party security analysis tools, saving security teams time and reducing overall cost.

“The log management market has been unnecessarily complex and expensive for far too long. We think businesses deserve better, and thanks to the scale of our platform, we’re uniquely positioned to deliver a faster, more unified way for businesses to gain visibility and understand all the risks to their business,” said CJ Desai, President of Product and Engineering at Cloudflare.

Features

• Reduce the cost and complexity of third party tooling: One-click setup makes it easy to start analyzing Cloudflare logs instantly—no pipelines, shipping, or tuning required.
• Investigate security and performance issues from a single source: Businesses can search HTTP, security events, and Zero Trust logs natively within Cloudflare.
• Fix problems faster with an in-dashboard response: Organizations can take action instantly to reduce impact—all without leaving the Cloudflare dashboard.
• Meet compliance requirements with flexible retention: With Log Explorer, organizations will soon be able to easily set custom log retention policies to satisfy audit, compliance, or internal governance needs.

Workplace tool: Video platform features to transform business communication

Atlassian, a publishers of agile collaboration tools, bolsters its Loom asynchronous video platform offering with a swathe of new features aimed at helping organisations communicate at scale.

“If you’re creating videos for your team, your company, or your customers, you don’t have time for endless takes or complicated tools. You need to move fast, stay polished, and deliver information that sticks. With Loom editing, you can create clear, consistent, and compelling video content in minutes, not hours. So whether you’re announcing a change, launching a product, or enabling your team, Loom helps you communicate at scale — without burning out your calendar or your audience”, said Sanchan Saxena, head of product, Teamwork Foundations, at Atlassian.

Features

• Overlays: Want to demo a tool? Engage your audience with eye-catching shapes, arrows, and text.
• Backgrounds: Want to dress your video up without extra effort? Make your video pop with beautiful backgrounds (in beta).
• Stylised captions: No sound, no problem! Make your message more engaging and easier to follow from the first word to the last.
• Screenshots: Quickly snap a screenshot of your screen, then customise it with annotations and backgrounds, or edit it with crop and blur.
• Improved filler word removal: Loom’s automatic speech clean-up tool has had a glow-up to help eliminate filler words, awkward pauses, and repetitive phrasing, helping individuals get straight to the point.