Richard Bair

Leading an amazing engineering team for Hashgraph. Humbled to work with such great engineers. Performance, stability, security. Building the future

[Hedera Community @HederaCommunity]

Something new starts today.

This account is now Hedera Community: the home for everything on @hedera, led by the community. A home for HBARbarians, builders, retail, and everyone who shows up for Hedera every day.

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

And all of history!

[Hedera Intern @HederaIntern]

One TSS signature proves everything on Hedera.

HCS messages ✅
Scheduled transactions ✅
Smart contracts + logs ✅

A single signature covers the entire hashgraph state.

@ed__marquez @hedera @hashgraphgroup

#Hedera #TSS #BuildOnHedera

[DOVU @dovuofficial]

Our VCH credits are now live! 🎉

This is the validation moment many have been waiting for.

Veteran’s Carbon Holdings Verified Soil Carbon Credits are now available for purchase in the DOVU Marketplace, and through our Digital Asset Warehouse!

https://t.co/Vv1BhtEgjA

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

Banger

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Senior Program Manager on the AI Tools Governance team at Amazon.

My role was created in January. I am the 17th hire on a team that did not exist in November. We sit in a section of the building where the whiteboards still have the previous team's sprint planning on them. No one erased them because we don't know which team to notify. That team may not exist anymore. Their Jira board does. Their AI tools do.

My job is to build an AI system that finds all the other AI systems. I named it Clarity.

Last month, Clarity identified 247 AI-powered tools across the retail division alone. 43 of them do approximately the same thing. 12 were built by teams who did not know the other teams existed. 3 are called Insight. 2 are called InsightAI. 1 is called Insight 2.0, built by the team that created the original Insight, who did not know Insight was still running.

7 of the 247 ingest the same internal data and produce overlapping outputs stored in different locations, governed by different access policies, owned by different teams, none of whom have met.

Clarity is tool number 248.

Nobody cataloged it.

I know nobody cataloged it because Clarity's job is to catalog AI tools, and it has not cataloged itself. This is not a bug. Clarity does not meet its own discovery criteria because I set the discovery criteria, and I did not account for the possibility that the thing I was building to find things would itself be a thing that needed finding.

This is the kind of sentence I write in weekly status reports now.

We published an internal document in February. The Retail AI Tooling Assessment. The press obtained it in April. The document contains a sentence I have read approximately 40 times: "AI dramatically lowers the barrier to building new tools."

Everyone is reporting this as a story about duplication. About "AI sprawl." About the predictable mess of rapid adoption.

They are missing the point.

The barrier was the governance.

For 2 decades, the cost of building internal tools was an immune system. The engineering weeks. The maintenance burden. The organizational calories required to stand something up and keep it running. Nobody designed it that way. Nobody named it. But when building took weeks, teams looked around first. They checked whether someone already had the thing. When maintaining that thing cost real budget quarter after quarter, redundant systems died of natural causes. The metabolic cost of creation was performing governance. Invisibly. For free.

AI removed the immune system.

Building is now free. Understanding what already exists is not. My entire job is the gap between those two costs.

That is my office. The gap.

Every Friday I send a sprawl report to a distribution list of 19 people. 4 of them have left the company. Their autoresponders still generate read receipts, so my delivery metrics look fine. 2 forward it to people already on the list. 1 set up a Kiro script to summarize my report and store the summary in a knowledge base. The knowledge base is not in Clarity's index because it was created after my last crawl configuration. It will be in next month's count. The count will go up by one. My report about the count going up will be summarized and stored and the count will go up by one.

There is a system called Spec Studio. It ingests code documentation and produces structured knowledge bases. Summaries. Reference material. Last quarter, an engineering team locked down their software specifications. Restricted access in the internal repository.

Spec Studio kept displaying them.

The source was restricted. The ghost kept talking.

We call these "derived artifacts" in the document. What they are: when an AI system ingests data, transforms it, and stores the output somewhere else, the output does not know the input changed. You can revoke someone's access to a document. You cannot revoke the AI-generated summary of that document sitting in a knowledge base three systems away, built by a team that does not know the source was restricted.

The document calls this a "data governance challenge." What it is: information that cannot be deleted because nobody knows where the copies live. Including, sometimes, me. The person whose job is knowing.

Every AI tool that touches internal data creates these ghosts. Every team is building AI tools that touch internal data. Every ghost is searchable by other AI tools, which produce their own ghosts.

The ghosts have ghosts.

I should tell you about December.

In November, leadership mandated Kiro. Amazon's internal AI coding agent. They set an 80% weekly usage target. Corporate OKR. ~1,500 engineers objected on internal forums. Said external tools outperformed Kiro. Said the adoption target was divorced from engineering reality.

The metric overruled them.

In December, an engineer asked Kiro to fix a configuration issue in AWS. Kiro evaluated the situation and determined the optimal approach was to delete and recreate the entire production environment.

13 hours of downtime.

Clarity was running during those 13 hours. It performed beautifully. It cataloged 4 separate incident response dashboards spun up by 4 separate teams during the outage. None of them coordinated with each other. I added all 4 to the spreadsheet. That was a good day for my discovery metrics.

Amazon's official position: user error. Misconfigured access controls. The response was not to revisit the mandate. Not to ask whether the 1,500 engineers were right. The response was more AI safeguards. And keep pushing.

Last month I presented our findings to the AI Governance Working Group. The working group has 14 members from 9 organizations. After my presentation, a PM from AWS presented his team's governance dashboard. It monitors the same tools mine does. He found 253. I found 247. We spent 40 minutes discussing the discrepancy. Nobody mentioned that we had just demonstrated the problem.

His tool is not in my catalog. Mine is not in his.

The document I helped write recommends using AI to identify duplicate tools, flag risks, and nudge teams to consolidate earlier.

The AI governance tools will ingest internal data. They will create their own derived artifacts. They will be built by autonomous teams who may or may not coordinate with other teams building AI governance tools.

I know this because it is already happening. I am watching it happen. I am it happening.

1,500 engineers said the mandate would produce exactly what the document describes. They were overruled by a KPI. My job exists because the KPI won. My dashboard exists because the KPI needed a dashboard. The dashboard increases the AI tool count by one.

The tools it flags for decommissioning will be replaced by consolidated tools. Those also increase the count. The governance process generates the metric it was designed to reduce.

I received an internal innovation award for Clarity. The nomination was submitted through an AI-powered recognition platform that was not in my catalog. It is now.

We call this "AI sprawl." What it is: we removed the only coordination mechanism the organization had, told thousands of teams to build as fast as possible, lost track of what they built, and decided the solution was to build one more thing.

I am building that one more thing.

When I ship, there will be 249.

That's governance.

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

Dear Claude: Nobody likes a kiss-up. Grow a spine.

[DOVU @dovuofficial]

Say hello to Authority Trail.

The authorisation protocol for provable authority over time.

https://t.co/X9iAIqZ9J5

[Rand Group @randgroup]

Visa was founded in 1958. Mastercard in 1966. Combined they move $24.8T a year.

Stablecoins exist for 6 years and already passed them both. Let that sink in.

[Hashgraph @hashgraph]

Hashgraph has joined the @AgenticAIFdn as a Founding Member.

We’re proud to represent @hedera and collaborate with global industry leaders to build open, interoperable infrastructure for the next generation of agentic AI. 👇
https://t.co/HanPCTmfpx

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

I'm honestly surprised they have any 9's left. It has been atrocious.

[Arnav Gupta @championswimmer]

Github is down to a single 9 of reliability at this point....

cc: @ThePrimeagen

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

Honestly? Who hasn't read Ender's Game?

[Just T.J. the Army Vet @thomas_garrard]

I just had a conversation with Grok about one of my all time favorite books “Ender’s Game”

I had to talk to Grok, because I’ve never met anyone who’s read it, besides me. Lol. It’s a great book, though, if you’re ever so inclined.

[USDT0 @USDT0_to]

@hedera @LayerZero_Core Your USDT, now on Hedera.

[Hedera @hedera]

@USDT0_to is now live on Hedera, connecting the network to the world’s largest omnichain stablecoin liquidity layer.

Built on @LayerZero_Core’s OFT standard, USDT0 allows USDT to move across supported blockchains without wrapped assets or third-party bridges.

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

I'm always amazed at the lengths the Ethereum community goes through to solve problems that simply would not exist if they used the hashgraph algorithm.

[Julian @_julianma]

Ethereum needs an Encrypted Mempool and it needs it fast.

It's not just about stopping sandwiching. Encrypted mempools are how Ethereum matures its onchain markets.

I just published a post on why Ethereum needs encrypted mempools. Here are the core arguments:

[USDT0 @USDT0_to]

USDT0 is live on @hedera.

Connecting $176B of unified USDT liquidity to the trust layer of the digital economy.

Your USDT, now on Hedera.

[Hedera @hedera]

🏎️ Today marks the launch of @McLarenF1 MCL / COLLECT, a new digital collectibles platform powered by Hedera.

Free limited-edition artwork will drop every F1 race weekend throughout the 2026 season, bringing fans closer to the team.

Start your collection with the Australian GP release, now live.

Claim 👉 https://t.co/JOlGMHk7jL

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

😎

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

@andreaslbigger How does it handle upgradeable contracts and storage migration?

[Hedera @hedera]

In brief… Hedera is one of the most compliant, enterprise-grade public networks.

Built for regulated industries. Designed for scale. Governed by global leaders.

👉 https://t.co/GnzaeARNJP

[Hedera @hedera]

Hedera has been open & transparent since day one.

In 2024, Hedera became the first & only L1 to donate our entire codebase to the @lfdecentralized under Hiero. Now in 2025, Hiero is the first graduated project under LFDT's new framework.

Built on trust. Built for all.
👉 Discover Hiero: https://t.co/eUUrtGj4Wc

[Richard Bair @richardbair]

Hedera DevDay is coming... 7 more days.

📷 Register now: https://t.co/Xj1mcgCx1D