shadd

privacy maximalist

[DefiLlama.com @DefiLlama]

LlamaSwap is now live on 22 chains.

Which chains would you like to see us add next?

[Justin Thaler @SuccinctJT]

1/ Today we're releasing Lattice Jolt: a post-quantum version of the Jolt zkVM, built on lattices instead of elliptic curves. It's _faster_ than curve-based Jolt and has the shortest proofs of any post-quantum zkVM — under 100 KB.

Post: https://t.co/VTgsdBlUTd

[Alexander John Lee (e/acc) @alexanderlee314]

The recent hash related news from the EF made me revisit the Solidity implementations of Poseidon and BLAKE3 (purely out of curiosity). Just by looking at the old unoptimized Solidity, you could tell in both implementations there was a lot of room for improvement.

In the previous Solidity implementations, Poseidon was doing dense matrix multiplication in the partial rounds and reducing modulo the field more often than it needed to. BLAKE3 was shuffling a large hashing state between library calls and doing 32 bit math through Solidity arrays.

So I pointed Codex 5.6-sol at both implementations to see what it could optimize:

Poseidon
T3: old version 21,064 → optimized 15,265 gas (-27.5%)
T4: old version 37,595 → optimized 19,380 gas (-48.5%)

BLAKE3
64 bytes: old version 879,238 → optimized 11,397 gas (-98.7%)
1 KiB: old version 4,849,482 → optimized 118,144 gas (-97.6%)

A 27% reduction in gas cost for Poseidon is already impressive. But a 98.7% reduction in gas cost for BLAKE3 is insane 🤯

I differentially fuzzed both optimized versions against the canonical Rust implementations, so I'm quite confident they're secure (more or less😅).

Super exciting time to be working on cryptography and low level engineering. So much software is about to get dramatically more efficient.

Check out the repos:

BLAKE3 Solidity repo: https://t.co/CdpoixcJFr
Poseidon Solidity repo: https://t.co/57Pr7aUAJd

BLAKE3 in solidity looks surprisingly simple and elegant imho

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Very welcome recent news from Signal: they are working on letting you register an account without a phone number.

https://t.co/3dTG4UD6cF

That said, an important counterpoint about what this would and would not accomplish.

The good #1: reducing dependence on phone numbers. Even aside from privacy benefits, reducing dependency on a highly oligopolistic system of chokepoints is good in itself.

The good #2: phone numbers are for many people not a good "root" of identity from an access control perspective. Phone numbers get sim swapped all the time.

The good #3: allowing phone-number-free accounts will make it harder for them in the future to discriminate against people by country - and so make it harder for governments to pressure them to block their own citizens.

Now, on privacy. Significantly better than status quo, so yes it is good #4, but...

In practice, in 2026, I believe that pseudonymity (a long-term persistent account that is not tied to your primary identity) is a dead concept. There are just too many channels by which we accidentally slowly leak data about who we are - timing of messages, the pattern of who we send messages to with what frequency, size, etc. And too many highly effective AI-based means (both using LLMs per-user, and LLMs helping every person and agency under the sun use math that we had all along) to uncover and piece together those hints.

As a trivial example, whatever server you interact with learns your IP address, but even if you hide *that* with a VPN or Tor, there are many other identity leakage vectors.

And so the only defensible form of privacy is *message-by-message unlinkability* - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are.

A natural taxonomy of privacy is the following 2x2:

* Sitting duck: adversary knows "X did Y"
* Confidentiality: adversary knows "X did ???" [E2E encryption provides this]
* Anonymity: adversary knows "??? did Y" [aka message-by-message unlinkability]
* Ideal: adversary knows "??? did ???"

Signal has already had confidentiality for a long time. (Note: in other contexts, "confidentiality" sometimes means "someone knows X did Y, and we trust that someone to not reveal it", ie. not true privacy. Here, by confidentiality we mean hiding contents from third parties)

This adds pseudonymity: in the above schema, adversary knows "0x8b512c... did Y", where they don't initially know who 0x8b512c... is, but may figure that out over time. The ideal is getting to message-by-message unlinkability.

Actually accomplishing that gets into territory that is currently being explored by mixnet projects as well as newer messengers, eg. @session_app and @SimpleXChat.

Once we get deeper into this territory, I suspect the primary frontier will be spam and DoS protection. Right now, much of the internet blocks all Tor exit nodes - not because they personally hate privacy, but because that's where DoS attacks come from. So we need ways for people to prove their non-spammer status while maintaining message-by-message unlinkability. See here https://t.co/C3tX5tOYJo for one direction (which complements https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg nicely).

So I hope that we appreciate the victory that is mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption, that we actually get Signal accounts without phone number dependency (it's a great thing even if it had zero privacy consequences), and then that we keep moving forward and pushing the frontier of data leakage minimization.

[DefiLlama.com @DefiLlama]

Introducing the DefiLlama Market Maker Performance Index Leaderboard, built with @Forgd_.

40+ institutional liquidity providers graded by:
→ Depth
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Traders and token issuers can access transparent data in the most comprehensive dashboard of its kind.

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

0/ Clear signing is now live.

An open standard to end blind signing, making human-readable transactions default.

This effort brings a major UX and Security upgrade to transaction signing on Ethereum.

[0xngmi @0xngmi]

We are now hiring new developers at DefiLlama!

- High impact & ownership
- No meetings, everything is async

Devs that joined us less than 3mo ago are now leading new core products, you won't get this anywhere else

Apply at https://t.co/MuOWStWBrW

[Sinnoh🌙 @sinnoh_CEO]

Pokémon Diamond & Pearl for DS was released on this day in North America, 19 years ago (2007)

[0xngmi @0xngmi]

https://t.co/Arl9NTutYX

[binji @binji_x]

i think ethereum’s privacy arc will be one of the most interesting times for it as it’s one of the final unlocks in getting major institutional adoption + building a better internet, and is one of the best nerdsnipes for smart people who want to work on hard problems.

[Aztec @aztecnetwork]

Simply put, privacy isn’t limited to individuals. It scales.

[William Huo @wmhuo168]

“BREAKING: Chinese quantum computer just cracked multiple SPN algorithms. This is way bigger than cracking the ENIGMA code. The future of encryption is at stake.”

https://t.co/ZhphtZIdjr

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

believe in somETHing

[Yano 🟪 @JasonYanowitz]

You're telling me that in one week:

1) Stripe launched stablecoins in 100+ countries
2) Ramp launched stablecoin cards
3) Superstate launched onchain equities
4) Robinhood is building their own crypto platform
5) Biggest deal in crypto history (Coinbase/Deribit)
6) Meta is back in the stablecoin game
7) Ethereum shipped a massive upgrade
8) Bitcoin ripped through $100k

Wake up fam!

Internet capital markets are being built in real time and it's pretty damn cool.

[shadd @0xshadowdev]

just finished tokenizing my socks, launching the presale in 5 minutes. who wants in?

[shadd @0xshadowdev]

@aviral10x @thenetworkstate gm!! all the best

[shadd @0xshadowdev]

hot take:

Acquiring funds on testnet is harder than on the mainnet.

[shadd @0xshadowdev]

You can’t predict the tides, but you can build the strongest ship.

Keep building.

[shadd @0xshadowdev]

ok, who uses xrp

[shadd @0xshadowdev]

Imagine your token is up 400% in a day, but you can’t even handle the numbers properly.

The real irony of crypto: mooning tokens, broken math.