wuldr.eth

Programmer. Anarchist. Cypherpunk. Loves Pizza, Sci-Fi, and board games. Please donate to the Tor project

[Rain @raincards]

https://t.co/k3ao5MKpfU

[Julian @_julianma]

Honestly crazy. This is why people choose Ethereum

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Goodbye, Poseidon!

An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.

Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.

In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.

The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.

We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.

With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.

Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.

As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.

On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.

Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)

Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.

Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.

Believe in something. Believe in hashes.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( https://t.co/I35mrXutP2 ).

In general, a lot of overlap, but:

* Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized)
* Some things deprioritized (eg. VDFs; many EVM improvements)
* Some things replaced with superior constructions (eg. Verkle -> unified BT -> PBT; state expiry -> new state types)

What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all. These reflect changing priorities.

Notably:

* First-class attention to strong privacy. This covers: keyed nonces and recent roots, aspects of FOCIL, lean privacy pool & wormholes
* Aggressive scaling in the context of post-quantum. This covers: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, zkzk frames (see https://t.co/ibrOpMxMfO )
* Lean-ification of the spec, to assist in formal verification (full FV of everything is only possible because of modern AI)
* Blob and gas futures (this idea just didn't exist back in 2023)
* Native rollups (SNARKs were nowhere near mature enough to even consider this back in 2023)
* A more open design space for the "future of the EVM". zkzk frames already implies that the protocol will expose to users some ISA that's not the EVM - current leading candidates are leanISA and RISC-V. These ISAs are more simple, modern and efficient than the EVM. Once they're there, why not expose them to developers everywhere? (And then, why not turn the EVM into being an IR on top of that ISA, instead of an enshrined feature massively complicating the base protocol?) Though much of the deeper exploration here is too early even for the strawmap.
* New state types are not just a replacement for expiry, they're a fundamentally different paradigm to how Ethereum does scaling

A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale ALL ethereum activity, we try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols).

The other common theme is treating STARKs and AI-accelerated FV as first-class objects, that we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on. There are recursive STARKs in many layers of the protocol, one particular primitive (the "aggregate to union verified dependencies" primitive) is expected to be used in *three* places in the protocol: EL, CL and DL. This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools.

In general, many steps forward in maturity. And a huge amount of hard work by many dozens of Ethereum researchers and developers on all of these features.

Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.

[wuldr.eth @Wulder]

@corymassimino I sometimes phrase it as de jure vs de facto liberty. Some libertarians get hung up on the technicalities of has the NAP been breached.

No harm no foul. But we aspire to more than that. We seek genuine opportunity for all to flourish.

[Peter Van Valkenburgh @valkenburgh]

Something has shifted in the last few years...

Digital rights groups have become very shy about cryptocurrency work even where regulation of those technologies directly impacts principles like code as speech and warrantless surveillance online.

Crypto groups have become increasingly focused on institutional and financial markets questions and a bit less dedicated to the original mission: replacing government and corporate infrastructure with free and open peer-to-peer systems.

We want to talk more about the peer-to-peer part and maybe earn some stronger alliances with the larger freedom tech movement.

As a small first step, we're launching a new space to talk about tech authoritarianism and the peer-to-peer alternatives: Peer-to-Peer from Coin Center.

Please subscribe and share.

[terence @terencechain]

Glamsterdam devnet-7 is live. More progress on the road to testnet 🚢

On the CL side:
- EIP-7688 progressive containers
- Updated payload deadlines and builder lifecycle parameters

On the EL side:
- EIP-2780 and 8037 → state-dependent charges moved from intrinsic gas to runtime, with updated account-creation and calldata-floor accounting
- EIP-7928 and 8038 → BAL and SSTORE access-ordering fixes
- EIP-8282 → finalized builder deposit and exit contracts, limits, fees, and disable controls

Onward.

[Lightning News @LightningNewsX]

BREAKING: 🇪🇺 EU plans to require passport for internet access 🚨

Agenda: block VPNs to enforce it.

"The new age verification system cannot be bypassed via VPN."

A digital passport. For the internet.

Enforced by blocking the tools that protect your privacy.

This is what the trajectory looks like.

Cash banned above €10,000.

Bitcoin requires ID above €1,000.

MICA, DAC8 and travel rule for mass surveillance.

[Blockdaemon 😈 @BlockdaemonHQ]

.@kubimensah offers a sharper framing of MEV for institutions: blockspace is an ordinal commodity, where value depends not just on how much you consume but on where in the block you execute.

A new kind of market, with exactly the infrastructure needs Blockdaemon supports.

https://t.co/GSvf8PvwtK

[Lukasz Olejnik @lukOlejnik]

This is a fundamental way to how internet works. The mechanics create a second-order effect: age-gating requires verification of every user. Age verification is also (the double effect) a potential new anti-disinformation infrastructure. Every user of a gated service must enter an identity-backed system. Once that layer exists, posting can be limited to verified or identifiable users under the banner of fighting bots, foreign influence, and disinformation. The same infrastructure can be used to restrict also specific posting (e.g. actions, topics, sharing) to verified or identifiable users. This will become technically possible and potentially politically viable.

[wuldr.eth @Wulder]

@Citrullin @kubimensah Rent seeking requires legal privilege. @kubimensah is arguing for a free and open market. I would argue that an intermediary that is good to it's users and adds value has yet to descend into enshittification and rent seeking. Read: https://t.co/fcEBS3cXvh

[Zakura @ZakuraZcash]

Announcing Zakura: a new Zcash node built for scale.

[mert @mert]

this is absolutely colossal news

zcash is now getting client diversity and a new core team led by two of the top 5 crypto people i know in the entire industry

they will be scaling zcash, driving core, security, cryptography and all else

insane how much progress on zcash

[wuldr.eth @Wulder]

@corymassimino So sad. What beautiful cat.

[Kubi Mensah @kubimensah]

https://t.co/8Vy5HsZO6p

[Fidias Panayiotou @Fidias0]

The EU Parliament REJECTED Chat Control, but now they are forcing us to vote it AGAIN to revive it. What kind of democracy is this if we're forced to vote on the same issue over and over until they get the result they want?

My colleague @MarketkaG explained the situation very well in plenary👇🏻

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Tachyon's Formal Verification project is on the verge of producing a mathematical proof that there are no undetectable counterfeiting bugs in the latest Zcash shielded pools.

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

I'm excited about @nym! Reasons: 1. Mixnets are a fundamental security upgrade for the Internet. 2. @harryhalpin and the Nym team are true cypherpunks and scientists. 3. The Shielded Labs engineers just told me they got our Crosslink prototype semi-working over Nym. :-)

[wuldr.eth @Wulder]

@corymassimino @worst_account Seems to be about half pay and half endorsement deals. But the only IP involved is a trademark. Trademarks have been around for thousands of years. Engravings on swords. Seals on wine bottles. The law protects the consumer from fraud and the producers reputation.