DeFi Drew

Playing short term games while playing long term games

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

O(baby)

[Ryan Williams @rrwilliams.bsky.social @rrwilliams]

An internal model at OpenAI has produced a claimed refutation of ETH! Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi, and I have been asked to help organize an open and independent examination of this claim. 1/4

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Love this

Putting institutional assets into DeFi, mainly aave, is a game changer

[Chainlink @chainlink]

Introducing Chainlink CustodySync, a new solution that lets qualified custodians give their institutional clients access to DeFi lending markets, all while assets remain securely in custody.

With @Anchorage as the official launch partner, together we’re establishing a new standard for institutional DeFi.

CustodySync keeps custody and lending systems in sync across the full lifecycle of a loan:

→ For custodians: faster time to market and lower operational overhead, with custodian-managed controls
→ For lending markets: independent, verifiable data and a consistent risk framework
→ For institutions: passive capital becomes productive capital

More than $80 billion sits in DeFi lending markets. Meanwhile, the roughly $700 billion in digital assets under custody is less than 0.5% of all $250 trillion in traditional assets under custody. The opportunity to connect traditional institutional capital to onchain finance remains vast.

Large institutions have lacked a secure way of accessing these markets. Regulations require many of them to keep their digital assets with a qualified custodian, a firm that meets specific requirements for holding assets on behalf of clients, and custody systems were never built for DeFi. Even when custody and lending systems are connected, inconsistent loan valuations can trigger premature liquidation or delayed liquidations, exposing borrowers and lenders to significant financial risk.

@Anchorage, home to the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the U.S., is the first qualified custodian to adopt CustodySync, connecting its institutional clients to DeFi lending markets while their assets remain in regulated custody.

Institutional capital no longer has to choose between the security of custody and the liquidity of DeFi.

With Chainlink, it gets both.

[Tomer Weller @tomerweller]

The US repo market accounts for more than $12 trillions in average daily exposures.

This is bigger than you think.

And it's happening on Stellar.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Good thing for me I love talking

[Doug Colkitt @0xdoug]

Humans should still absolutely review software. But the way they should do it is by simply having a conversation with the LLM about the software.

We are social apes, and our brains are terrible at reasoning in math/code. The native protocol of the human mind is natural language

Modern LLMs are much *much* less likely to make a mistake “uplifting” code to/from language, than a human is directly“lowering” its semantic reasoning into code.

The age of humans directly working with math or code, even to “review” it, is largely over. Your job is to reason and communicate in the substrate your mind was evolved for: natural language.

[Cobie @cobie]

@MarathonFusion they cant turn mercury into bitcoins boys

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

New bar for product demos

[Tesla @Tesla]

Real life, baby

[Everett Stern @EverettStern1]

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,

My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.

The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.

I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.

I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.

Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.

Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.

A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.

This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.

There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.

Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.

I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.

This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.

Three things would change the math overnight.

Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.

End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.

Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.

I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.

Respectfully,

Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

@zack_overflow You must not work with data

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

@_weidai It’s way less taxing to be in the car monitoring FSD than actually driving

Can think more too, pay more attention to music/books/phone calls etc

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

@Kiryu_0x Not saying it’s bad, if anything it’s good it’s not a bunch of microcaps that are unproven ideas with no traction

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

This is the ai x crypto portfolio?

Just looks like DeFi and picks and shovels picks to me but I guess calling it agentic is sexier

[zoomer @zoomerfied]

[ ZOOMER ]

CITRINI RESEARCH PUBLISHES ARTICLE ON INTERSECTION BETWEEN AGENTIC AI AND CRYPTO, ALONGSIDE THEIR INVESTMENT BASKET: BLOG

[qw @QwQiao]

over the next 5yrs, the probability of a us debt crisis and the probability of any individual tech company getting existentially disrupted by ai are materially higher than the probability of ai/quantum breaking crypto

so sell ur btc, but sell it into what? cash and bonds that are going to 0? or tech companies facing existing threats while also in a giant reflexive bubble? or yet something else that u did 2hrs of “due diligence” and convinced urself u understand?

the point is, if u r spooked by the ai/quantum risk and sold ur coins, u r almost certainly misjudging magnitude of this risk vs the risks of other assets u r sold ur coins into.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Citrini has my respect

[Andy @andyyy]

NEW: Citrini laid out 'The Investable RWA Stack' which answers the, "How do you express the tokenization supercycle thesis in markets today? question.

Trillions are coming.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

This is the kind of autism I want to invest in

[Jeff Holden @jeffholden]

After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Whoa

[jfab @josefabregab]

One of @Chainlink's tokenization customers is becoming a pretty serious asset manager.

When Spiko adopted CCIP as its preferred interoperability infrastructure for EUTBL and USTBL in July 2025, it had $380M+ in regulated onchain money market funds.

Yesterday, @Spiko_finance announced a $90M Series B and disclosed $2.7B in total AUM, 10,000+ users across 25+ jurisdictions and more than 5x AUM growth over the last year.

Spiko's Chainlink stack is also worth looking at:

> SmartData → real-time NAV reporting
> CCIP → compliant cross-chain distribution
> SAFO → Chainlink-powered NAV reporting + interoperability for the tokenized fund launched with Amundi

This is the type of Chainlink adoption I find more interesting than another integration announcement. The customer adopted the infrastructure, launched additional products and then materially scaled the underlying business.

This is what we call the Chainlink effect.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Interesting point that no cryptography results were shared

Those could be purposefully held back

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.

Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).

Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.

IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).

Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.

Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?

Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)

Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.

Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.

I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).

Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.

Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.

The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

DeFi has to compete with tradfi

But tradfi isn’t technology

Think about that

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

maybe Trump isn't the crypto president?

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Amazing.

These researchers found that there's a spike in Bitcoin activity around the time foreign aid money goes out.

Somewhere between 2 and 6 cents of every dollar of World Bank foreign aid disbursements got siphoned off into crypto wallets:

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Can confirm my muse has been on it

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Every firm's customer service agents are about to be overwhelmed with Dots & Muses & etc. negotiating for better deals using voice/chat. Stories of people delegating this sort of work to their agents & saving money as a result are popping up and are going to only go more viral.

[DeFi Drew @DefiDrew]

Looks like chainlink is expanding where they play

[CoinDesk @CoinDesk]

NEW: @Chainlink launches Fulcrum, a cross-chain collateral and financing platform connecting banks, asset managers and sovereign wealth funds to onchain markets, enabling 24/7 collateral mobilization and intraday financing across public and private blockchains.