Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts:
* L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected
* L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026
Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.
First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum.
This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead.
We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs.
What would I do today if I were an L2?
* Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features
* Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets
* Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?)
From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug.
The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately).
This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: https://t.co/9jy6v1X6Fw and https://t.co/gZmu3YjebM ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add.
This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.
The Oct 11 Crypto Crash — What Really Happened
TL;DR:
Roughly $60–90M of $USDe was dumped on Binance, along with $wBETH and $BNSOL, exploiting a pricing flaw that valued collateral using Binance’s own order-book data instead of external oracles.
That localized depeg triggered $500M–$1B in forced liquidations, cascaded into $19B+ globally, and earned the attackers about $192M via $1.1B in BTC/ETH shorts opened on Hyperliquid hours earlier, but minutes before Trump tariff announcement.
It wasn’t a USDe failure!! It was Binance’s design flaw, timed with macro panic (Trump’s tariffs) for cover.
What looked like chaos was actually a coordinated exploitation of Binance’s internal pricing system, amplified by a macro shock and systemic leverage.
1️⃣ The Setup
Binance’s Unified Account let traders use assets like USDe, wBETH, and BNSOL as collateral.
Instead of oracle or redemption prices, Binance valued these using its own spot market - a major vulnerability.
On Oct 6, Binance announced a fix to move to oracle-based pricing, but rollout wasn’t until Oct 14, leaving an 8-day window.
2️⃣ The Exploit
During that window, sophisticated actors manipulated Binance’s order books, dumping ~$60–90M of USDe, driving it to $0.65 on Binance only (still ~$1 elsewhere).
Because the Unified Account marked collateral to internal prices, this instantly wiped margin value and triggered $500M–$1B in forced liquidations.
Then, Trump’s 100% China tariff headline hit, magnifying panic and liquidity stress.
3️⃣ The Profit Engine
The same day, fresh wallets on Hyperliquid opened $1.1B in BTC/ETH shorts, funded by $110M USDC from Arbitrum-linked sources.
As the Binance cascade unfolded, BTC and ETH cratered, those shorts netted $192M in profit before closing out at the bottom.
Timing, precision, and funding paths all suggest coordination.
4️⃣ The Contagion
Binance liquidations dumped BTC/ETH/ALTs into thin books.
Other exchanges mirrored the collapse through cross-market bots.
Market makers hedged across venues were forced to unwind everywhere.
Result: $19B+ global liquidations, with many alts down 50–70% intraday, all triggered by <$100M of manipulated collateral.
5️⃣ Who’s at fault?
Binance: design flaw + delay in oracle rollout = root cause.
Exploiters: executed and timed the manipulation, profited via external shorts.
Ethena (USDe): not at fault - protocol stayed 1:1 collateralized, redemptions normal, peg held everywhere else.
6️⃣ Aftermath
Binance admitted “platform-related issues,” promised compensation for affected margin/futures/loan users, and rolled out minimum price floors + oracle integration.
USDe remained operational, and the incident is now a case study in how exchange-side pricing errors can trigger system-wide liquidations.
Bottom line:
A ~$90M dump on Binance and a $1.1B leveraged short elsewhere sparked a $19B bloodbath.
Not a stablecoin failure, but a masterclass in exploiting flawed collateral valuation during peak macro stress.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇨🇳 President Trump says "don't worry about China, it will all be fine."
Xi Jinping "doesn't want a depression for his country, and neither do I."
You can be in the 1% of Bitcoin!
The Numbers:
⇒ Around 100 - 250k People understand Bitcoin deeply
⇒ Around 150M-350M People have exposure to Bitcoin
But more importantly: 98.4% of the population still has no clue!
Somewhere in the next 15 Years, we will live through the "suddenly" moment.
Don't be in the 99%, be the 1%:
🚨 BREAKING — we’re extremely excited to announce a partnership with @worldlibertyfi, a Donald J. Trump-inspired pioneering DeFi protocol, rooted in a shared vision for a more open and transparent financial world.
As part of this collaboration:
💥 WLFI will include SUI in their strategic token reserve designed to bolster leading Web3 projects
🤝 WLFI and Sui have begun exploring product development opportunities
GPT-4.5 is ready!
good news: it is the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person to me. i have had several moments where i've sat back in my chair and been astonished at getting actually good advice from an AI.
bad news: it is a giant, expensive model. we really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs. we will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then. (hundreds of thousands coming soon, and i'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up.)
this isn't how we want to operate, but it's hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages.
a heads up: this isn’t a reasoning model and won’t crush benchmarks. it’s a different kind of intelligence and there’s a magic to it i haven’t felt before. really excited for people to try it!
I usually try not to criticize other industry players, but I still do it once in a while. 😂
This update from Safe is not that great. It uses vague language to brush over the issues. I have more questions than answers after reading it.
1. What does "compromising a Safe {Wallet} developer machine" mean? How did they hack this particular machine? Was it social engineering, a virus, etc?
2. how did a developer machine have access to "an account operated by Bybit"? Some code got deployed from this developer machine straight to prod?
3. How did they fool the Ledger verification step at multiple signers? Was it blind signing? or did the signers not verify properly?
4. So, was $1.4 billion the largest address managed using Safe? How come they didn't target others?
5. What lessons can other "self-custody, multi-sig" wallet providers and users learn from this?
🤷♂️
1/ Beethoven X is a Fantom OG.
BEETS 2.0 will be a @SonicLabs Kingmaker.
Here's everything you need to know about Beets 2.0: Migration, refreshed branding, and its critical role as Sonic's flagship LST liquidity hub!
https://t.co/FeP9I3HKCu
TL;DR below 🧵