Michael J. Casey

Chairman @aai_society, Co-Author: Our Biggest Fight (2024),The Age of Cryptocurrency (2015), +others. Ex- @CoinDesk, @MediaLab, - @WSJ

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

https://t.co/1bROrF7RT7

[Real-World Asset Summit @rwasummit]

In 2008, the failure to deliver collateral cascaded into everything else. The unwind took more than a decade.

Our Chief Content Officer, @mikejcasey, sat down with Dan Doney, MD, CTO, Digital Assets at @The_DTCC, last week, ahead of Dan taking the stage in Brooklyn this September.

His case: Blockchain's killer use is preventing the systemic risk that nearly brought down global markets by making collateral portable and automatic. It's the same force behind "the other RWA," the risk-weighted assets that drive most of the $5 quadrillion DTCC settles a year.

"If you're a bank and you're not engaged in the efficient movement of collateral, thanks to blockchain, you're gonna be at a serious competitive disadvantage to those who are."

Catch Doney live at the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026.

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@laurnorman But to be clear, Argentina gave us a daughter. So, ergo, our hearts today are with La selección.

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

When I try to explain to people why this match is a big deal, my go-to story is how it was literally impossible for you to be in the AP Buenos Aires office during thr 2006 World Cup when England was playing, God knows the torment you would have faced if England actually had to play Argentina that yeat.

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@readDanwrite Yes, which makes on-chain prediction markets the truthiest of all machines!

[Propy @PropyInc]

May = momentum. 🚀

- Last month @NataliePropy joined @CNBC to discuss how AI is reshaping real estate.
- We announced the Propy × @milocredit partnership.
- We continued advancing AI-powered real estate transactions
- We hosted industry events and educational courses, bringing professionals together to learn, connect, and prepare for the future of real estate.

The future of real estate is happening now.

Read our May recap:
https://t.co/mxaOJe180I

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

Brilliant analysis of an historic moment in computer science - measured, recognizing the import of what just happened, but also offering a non-alarmist assessment of actions that can be taken. Bravo, @drakefjustin

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[The Rollup @therollupco]

A cocaine addict knows they're addicted.

@mikejcasey, chairman of @aai_society explains why the generation most comfortable with AI doesn't:

"Social media via a phone is like having a hypodermic needle in your pocket. A cocaine addict knows they're addicted. We think we're in control. That's the design."

"This generation grew up with algorithms built to manipulate their minds. LLMs were trained on that data — downstream of a distorted foundation."

"Being more comfortable trusting a black box built on incentives that have nothing to do with yours doesn't make you more advanced. Every one of us should understand what's at stake."

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@ItsSnibby @ccatalini @xianghui90 @wu_jane Yes indeed!

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

Wherein @ccatalini, @xianghui90 and @wu_jane give birth to an entirely new - and vitally important - field of economic inquiry: the cost of human verification.

As they compellingly demonstrate, this cost barrier is now the biggest and most fundamental constraint on AI scalability.

[Christian Catalini @ccatalini]

1/ Some Simple Economics of AGI—🔥🧵
Right now, there is a low-grade panic running through the economy. Everyone is asking the same anxious question: what exactly is AI going to automate, and what will be left for us?

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

People following our work to build awareness and activate market adoption of a new "Proof of Control" category of technologies, will understand the relevance of Christian's and his co-authors' work.

This is not just about the moral and ethical imperatives for keeping "humans in the loop" - I much prefer "humans in charge," btw - though that is also critical. It's about the economics of it.

By extension, the single most valuable thing you can be working on right now is the field of AI verification solutions.

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@BWarburg PROOF. OF. CONTROL

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

We. Need. PROOF. OF. CONTROL

@AAI_Society

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@DJohnstonEC Thanks for participating, David!

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@Cdempsey44 @MessariCrypto @robustus Fun piece, Connor. Thanks for the shoutout (lumping me in with some of my heroes, no less!)

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

"The things that make human societies costly and slow to build turn out to be the things that make them work. Coordination isn't free, and the gap between agents that interact and agents that form a collective may be far wider than the current multi-agent discourse assumes."

Spot on. Put another way, friction in human transactions - at least some amount of friction - is a feature, not a bug.

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

Apply to attend here: https://t.co/fqyJZ2Z6E9

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

Inspired by @steipete's big exit with @OpenAI:

As Agentic AI Acclerates, Let's Take a Stand for Human Agency

Come to #HumanAuthorized in Napa next week. See replies for link

https://t.co/Pfjqh39IHG via @LinkedIn

[Pascal Bornet @pascal_bornet]

This one actually made me pause.

Scientists built a robot made of liquid.
Not flexible.
Liquid.

It can split, merge, squeeze through tiny spaces, and then re-form.
When it breaks, it heals itself.

No motors.
No joints.
No rigid body.

I’ve spent years thinking about AI as the brain of machines.
This feels like the first glimpse of something else.

A body that does not have a fixed shape.

Today it’s millimeter-scale.
Tomorrow, it’s medicine moving through the body, or machines exploring places nothing solid can reach.

That thought excites me.
And honestly, it unsettles me too.

So here’s the question.
When machines no longer have a stable form, what does “control” even mean?

#AI #Robotics #SoftRobotics #Innovation #Technology #FutureOfWork

[Michael J. Casey @mikejcasey]

@rryssf Absolutely, which is why the biggest danger lies in humans mistakenly believing LLMs can reason.

We need to stop anthropomorphizing them.

Using language like "reasoning" or "thinking" fosters collective delusion, which leads to misallocated resources and reckless actions.