Tanguy Girault 🇰🇷🇫🇷

@stacks | prev @verisventures Opinions are my own, Not Investment Advice

[Tanguy Girault 🇰🇷🇫🇷 @TangChan0x]

0/ In my latest report, I'm sharing why I believe @Stacks could present a $90 billion opportunity.

https://t.co/6nCgEwry7k

A big thank you to all the people who helped me build this out: @mcuevasm, @muneeb, @kyleellicott @zi0nn_eth, @cosmo_jiang, @gmchung94, @MohamedFFouda

[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.

[David Lawant @dlawant]

https://t.co/GyjWVbFYOt

[Tanguy Girault 🇰🇷🇫🇷 @TangChan0x]

@OndoFinance RIP 🙏

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Major areas where the financial system still needs an update:

1. Tokenization of real-world assets - Real estate, stocks, bonds, funds, etc. onchain for instant settlement, fractional ownership & massive distribution.

2. 24/7 Global trading - Pooled global liquidity, every asset, every person, with great leverage and capital efficiency.

3. Next-gen payments - Near-instant, low-cost global transfers using stablecoins, including for Agentic payments.

4. AI-powered risk, credit, compliance, and advice - Better decisions, less fraud, and broader access to capital. Everyone gets access to a great financial advisor.

5. Innovation friendly regulation - Move from one-size-fits-all to risk-based rules that encourage innovation and competition instead of stifling it.

6. Expanded access - Open protocols that reduce middlemen and self-custodial wallets to expand access to everyone with a smartphone.

7. Capital formation - Low cost and turnkey for anyone to raise money for a good idea, increasing the number of startups.

8. Sound money - A refuge from inflation, when discipline is lost in fiat money.

Jobs not done until we get these working for all.

Will require lots of tech innovation and policy work to get there.

[will depue @willdepue]

bro it isn’t generally intelligent bro its only read every book and paper ever written and just making connections between them bro. its only thinking for twenty hours bro it’s just brute force thinking bro. its only solving erdos problems bro it could never be an accountant bro

[Bilal Zuberi @bznotes]

I remind myself of this quite often.

[Tanguy Girault 🇰🇷🇫🇷 @TangChan0x]

@FourPillarsFP @PanteraCapital @further Congrats guys! Well deserved!

[The Market NZZ @TheMarket_CH]

Gut sechs Wochen nach Ausbruch des Kriegs am Persischen Golf zeigt sich eine Reihe fundamentaler Veränderungen in der Weltwirtschaft. @gave_vincent liefert eine umfassende Übersicht und zeigt, wie sich Investoren positionieren sollten.
https://t.co/epWSKq6kB2

[Will @WClemente]

https://t.co/mj9NTYKmDP

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

https://t.co/kJc3ewLW69

[Jeff Park @dgt10011]

https://t.co/2aS67tgO0o

[Avi @AviFelman]

When I was 7 years old I was asked by my father what went into the price of a sandwich. Considering it carefully, I answered.

The lettuce, the tomato, the bread and the meat.

I did not consider correctly. I was short quite a few costs as my father was eager to point out. I had forgot the labor of the worker, the rent of the land, the marketing costs of the chain. I wasn’t seeing the full picture.

Today we are all making a similar mistake with AI. We are not considering what cannot be considered. As foreign to the 7 year old as these excess charges were, so are the downstream affects of AI.

In 1850, if you had told a teamster that his horse and carriage would soon be obsolete, he would have envisioned a world of mass starvation for men of his skill. He could grasp the concept of a faster carriage, but he could not conceive of the interstate highway system, the suburban real estate market, or the roadside motel industry. These were not just new products; they were an entirely new social architecture.

We are currently in the teamster’s shoes. We see AI automating the ingredients of our current economy—the writing, the coding, the data entry—and we fear the void. But history shows that humanity doesn't fall into the void; it builds a floor over it.

Karl Marx looked at the dark satanic mills of the 19th century and saw a terminal point. He argued that as the means of production became more efficient, capital would consolidate and labor would become a worthless commodity. He believed capitalism would eventually eat itself because it would run out of things for people to do.

Marx was wrong because he viewed human utility as a fixed pie. He didn't understand that technology doesn't just subtract labor; it changes the nature of what we consider valuable.

When the mechanical loom made fabric cheap, we didn't stop buying clothes. Instead, we invented the fashion industry. We created brand management, retail psychology, and textile engineering.

We moved from a world where everyone owned two outfits to a world where millions of people are employed in the cycle of seasonal trends.

In the age of the steam engine, "handmade" was a sign of poverty. Today, it is a luxury. We are already seeing a shift where the human touch—the artisanal, the face-to-face, and the physically present—is becoming the high-margin sector of the economy.

Every time we automate a simple task, we move the human to a more complex one. We didn't stop needing accountants when Excel was invented... we simply started asking accountants to perform much more sophisticated financial modeling.

The 7-year-old misses the rent and the marketing because they are abstractions. Similarly, we struggle to see the jobs of 2040 because they rely on problems we haven't even encountered yet. We might see the rise of Personal Data Stewards, who manage the interaction between our private lives and public AI models, or Reality Architects, who ensure that the virtual spaces we inhabit are psychologically grounded.

The world works itself out because humans are fundamentally restless. We do not tolerate a vacuum of purpose, we seek higher function always.

[wishful_cynic @EvgenyGaevoy]

https://t.co/bxhHjJllOp

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Andrew Kang @Rewkang]

https://t.co/YU33t4yLWN

[Tanguy Girault 🇰🇷🇫🇷 @TangChan0x]

Best post on the future of DAT I've read so far this year

[Jeff Dorman @jdorman81]

https://t.co/RNeRry2dvg

[Jeff Dorman @jdorman81]

https://t.co/RNeRry2dvg

[Regan Bozman @reganbozman]

Excited to publish our 2025 report on the state of crypto venture

Based on 1000's of announced rounds; dig in more to see

-Which 5 companies raised 30% of all capital
-Which sector is down 96%

1/ A brief summary

[Tanguy Girault 🇰🇷🇫🇷 @TangChan0x]

@scopicview man of taste

[Spreek @spreekaway]

Been thinking about Saylor's current position all morning, here's a thread (just musings, not financial advice and may not all be entirely accurate):