Rahul Pramod Jaguste

Ex-Dir. of Eng @kernelDAO & Stader ($2.7B TVL) | Now building post-quantum privacy-focused rails for institutions | Mentor 🚀

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Post-quantum is the Y2K bug of crypto.
Everyone knows it's coming. Almost no one is actually solving it.
I've spent 5 years building DeFi and restaking systems. I left that to work on this. Here's why. 🧵

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Post 9 is the one I'd underline: ZK as the replacement for classical primitives AND the privacy layer post-quantum. The bet I left DeFi to build on. Most PQ proof work (Flock, Binius, the lattice line) is aimed at scaling, not hiding. Where do you see PQ *privacy* actually coming from?

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

The "lying to themselves" part is the real indictment. Most "quantum-resistant" claims are a swapped signature on an otherwise-classical stack, which isn't quantum-safe, it just looks like it. Leading the charge means the whole stack: signatures, state, proofs, privacy. Building toward exactly that. Good to see this said with a platform behind it.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Correction: that's Executive Order 14412, not 14409. The substance and deadlines (key exchange 2030, signatures 2031) are unchanged.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Watch this and notice what it means.

The order being signed is real and it's right. The people enacting it are still catching up to the math behind it. That gap is the whole point.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump on an executive order he's about to sign that he clearly has no clue about: "Quantum ... cryptography. Does anybody know what that is?"

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Correction: that's Executive Order 14412, not 14409. The substance and deadlines (key exchange 2030, signatures 2031) are unchanged.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Two orders, same day. One funds the quantum computer that breaks today's cryptography. The other (EO 14409) orders a national migration off it: key exchange by 2030, signatures by 2031.

"When, not if" just got a deadline.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

@KaspaKii @Max143672 @RiscZero The replay test binding the proof to the exact input and output is the part most "PQ sig" demos skip. The thing I keep coming back to here is proof size: a STARK over ML-DSA or SLH-DSA isn't small, and it lands on-chain every spend. What's your lever there?

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

That last line is the whole thing. The key-hierarchy recovery is the easy part once you have CIP-1852 to lean on. The hard part is everything around it: proving liveness, handling users who don't have a clean parent key, doing it under incident pressure without opening a new attack path. Built enough systems moving real money to know the cryptography is rarely where these break, it's the operational edges.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

And the order covers signatures, not privacy. The privacy everyone's adding to chains runs on the same cryptography quantum breaks. Harvest now, decrypt later still applies.

Government validated the first force yesterday. The second is still sitting there.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

One catch worth saying: a migration is a retrofit. Right move for legacy systems too big to rebuild.

A chain you're building now shouldn't be retrofitted. You build it post-quantum from the foundation.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

So that's what I'm working on: a blockchain that's post-quantum from the ground up. Security and privacy built to outlast Q-day, not retrofitted before it.

I've been building toward it for a while. I'll be writing here about what I learn.

If you think about this stuff too, follow along.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

Post-quantum is the Y2K bug of crypto.
Everyone knows it's coming. Almost no one is actually solving it.
I've spent 5 years building DeFi and restaking systems. I left that to work on this. Here's why. 🧵

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

How I got here: I set out to solve privacy on public chains. Halfway in, I realised there was a bigger problem underneath. The whole cryptographic foundation has an expiry date.

I'm a problem solver at heart, so solving the one in front of me is the job. So this became the problem.

[Rahul Pramod Jaguste @RahulJaguste]

@EvanLuthra Jenson Huang already warned chip export controls helped Huawei flourish and forced Nvidia to concede China’s market. Doing the same with top US models will just drive the world to Chinese alternatives faster. Also bad for Anthropic’s IPO, losing intl market share right before listing.