The Chopping Block

Exploring today's crypto topics through the perspective of industry insiders @hosseeb, @rleshner, @tarunchitra & @tomhschmidt! 🤝 Streaming via @Unchained_pod

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"Ethereum is for boomers, but boomers hold the bag."

@trustlessstate and @maxreznik confess why they left, who's really running the show at the EF, and if ETH's just Microsoft.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:12 Why David Sold ETH
05:26 ETH Momentum and Value Capture
07:38 Ethereum Foundation Shakeups
10:18 Max on Tech and Identity Crisis
15:57 Talent Drain and New Blood
19:29 Strong vs Weak Crypto Debate
25:28 Ethereum as Microsoft
30:02 Second Foundation Idea
35:43 Microsoft Era Ethereum
38:20 EF Money Runs Out
42:02 Utility Asset Narrative
46:07 Etherealize Enterprise Push
48:04 Bitcoin Has Saylor
53:32 Ethereum Narrative Whiplash
55:51 Solana As The Yang
58:15 Post Quantum Solana Roadmap

🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod!

🎥 YouTube: https://t.co/XomArsvaIV
🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/0ilprLbily
🍎 Apple: https://t.co/jrnmstoLAN
🎙 Podcast Home: https://t.co/r6OZC52hUx

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

@lukN0rth And you’re still here 🙌

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

Iconic how Tom said this 4 years ago...

"Airdrops are kind of pointless anyway"

"I mean, what is the purpose of the airdrop? I don't really feel like I've ever gotten a good explanation of like what this is supposed to be for other than maybe creating a small float, creating some community goodwill, thanking people, but then people go out and like game it anyway"

"Try to draw some sort of correlation between the quality of the airdrop and the like the outcome for the product, there's probably zero correlation between the two"

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Airdrops as we know them are over.

Giving tokens away to build a holder base has mostly created sellers. Across the largest airdrops, between 78% and 94% of recipient wallets had sold off most of their allocation by day 90.

People cite Hyperliquid and Jito as proof airdrops can work, but neither succeeded because of the airdrop. Hyperliquid had over $1B in revenue funding buybacks that soaked up the selling from recipients. Jito’s eligible cohort was small enough to avoid industrial farming.

Token economics are starting to require real protocol performance. MegaETH locked 53% of its supply behind performance targets. Pendle routes roughly 80% of revenue into buybacks for stakers.

Token distribution is moving from handouts to performance.

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"Quantum is Justin Drake's last masterful gambit." – @MaxResnick

[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 Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

https://t.co/xN9SbVMo5z

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

Jeff built an empire with no KPIs, no team page, no VC deck.

This week, we pulled @chameleon_jeff out of the shadows!

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:51 Hyperliquid's Market Dominance
05:14 The Philosophy Behind Hyperliquid's Success
07:44 Challenges with Decentralized Exchanges
09:34 Metrics and Success in Hyperliquid
12:59 Addressing Market Dynamics and User Types
22:50 Competitive Pressures and System Resilience
25:28 Exploring Hyperliquid's Future and HIP 3
36:08 Complexity in Zero-Day Options
38:40 Perps vs. Options
41:24 The Role of User Interfaces in Trading
45:08 Crypto SPACs and Market Trends
57:21 The Genius Act and Market Reactions

🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod!

🎥 YouTube: https://t.co/mx60E4l2p3
🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/0ilprLbily
🍎 Apple: https://t.co/jrnmstoLAN
🎙 Podcast Home: https://t.co/r6OZC52hUx

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

Haseeb asked Jeff if he ever envies centralized exchange founders

One year later everyone envies Jeff and Hyperliquid

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

@tbpn @kylekuzma retail about to find out

[Tom Schmidt ＞|＜ @tomhschmidt]

Crazy way to come out of the closet

[Arjun @clipsofcrypto]

"The spiritual illness at the core of Ethereum is not that nothing's getting shipped. It's that the killer instinct, the competitive leadership, is what's missing"

Haseeb on what's actually wrong with Ethereum

"I actually don't know that the problem is Ethereum is not moving fast enough from a development perspective. Most of the problem is that the spiritual leadership, the business leadership, the competitive leadership is what's missing"

"That energy, that drive, that killer instinct doesn't appear to be valued within the Ethereum Foundation the same way it is among other competitive foundations. Tempo has that. Solana has that"

"The whole make America great again, we want to renegotiate these deals for America. It might be unwise, but the energy behind it is clearly valuable to holding onto your position. You need some of that. You can't have zero of it"

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

@DeFi_Dad @rleshner @SuperstateInc @edge_pod

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

@AdrianoFeria lmao you did us dirty

[Arjun @clipsofcrypto]

"Ethereum has become the Microsoft of crypto. I didn't mean it as an insult or a compliment. I meant it as a purely descriptive claim"

Haseeb on why Ethereum is old, enterprise beloved, kind of lame, and not going anywhere

"Like Microsoft, Ethereum is very old. It was the original progenitor of the whole space. It is now very enterprise beloved. It's baked into the bread of things. It's very difficult to remove it from a lot of these flows"

"It's very safe. It moves very slowly. It's kind of lame. It's not cool. It's not going to be the first to integrate your new fancy thing. But it's not going anywhere and it's really valuable"

"I think we are over indexing on the EF. The EF actually doesn't have that much explanatory power for the price of Ether. All this stuff has happened in the last week, EF defections, David selling his share, and Ethereum hasn't really moved that much"

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"If I were to redo the campaign for Ethereum, it would be Ethereum is for boomers"

"There's a lot of activity, but it's this kind of boring"

"The reason why people are so mad at the boomers is because they have all the fucking money"

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"You can see Vitalik writing an article saying 'I'm not in charge anymore' and then everyone's like
'Oh my God, such a great article. I can't wait for Vitalik to write something next.'"

"It's a trap."

"It's hard to stop being Jesus, I guess."

"Yeah. Jesus is Jesus, dude."

– @TrustlessState

[Max Resnick @MaxResnick]

just to be clear I do think the plan works for some definition of "works" its just not performant at all. To make these things performant you generally want a single machine to be able to generate the certificates not to have several machines passing partial certificates around and aggregating those.

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"Quantum is Justin Drake's last masterful gambit. He's sacking the queen."

"It just doesn't make any sense what he's saying."

"They've been working on it for five years and you look at the thing —"

"Were you high when you came up with this?"

– @MaxResnick

[Arjun @clipsofcrypto]

"The EF went from 8.3% of ETH supply down to 16 basis points. The EF is just going to die. Which was always the plan"

Haseeb on why Ethereum's renaissance starts when the Foundation runs out of money

"They're a little bit of a socialist utopia over there. Almost by necessity they have to start cutting. The whole Doge thing is happening out of necessity at the EF"

"The equivalent to the EF has to get reconstituted through private funds, private organizations just coming together and saying the EF no longer has the muscle. It's not happening anymore"

"In the same way the Steve Ballmer generation eventually died, they ran out of energy, they all retired. And then Satya Nadella realized oh fuck, we fumbled mobile, we fumbled web, but let's pick up cloud because there's still a lot of game left to be played"

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"Strong crypto is DeFi, NFTs, crypto culture, the cypherpunk rebels... Fuck Wall Street crypto."

"Weak crypto is blockchain technology as a back-end efficiency upgrade."

"Weak crypto is doing really well right now. Strong crypto, not so well."

"When was ETH the most money it ever was? When everyone was stuck inside during COVID."

– @TrustlessState

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

@miaferrariii @TrustlessState @MaxReznik sorry but Tom was busy witnessing "history" https://t.co/Odz7ID6saI

[Tom Schmidt ＞|＜ @tomhschmidt]

Anyone have any PED recs?

[The Chopping Block @_choppingblock]

"Ethereum is for boomers, but boomers hold the bag."

@trustlessstate and @maxreznik confess why they left, who's really running the show at the EF, and if ETH's just Microsoft.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:12 Why David Sold ETH
05:26 ETH Momentum and Value Capture
07:38 Ethereum Foundation Shakeups
10:18 Max on Tech and Identity Crisis
15:57 Talent Drain and New Blood
19:29 Strong vs Weak Crypto Debate
25:28 Ethereum as Microsoft
30:02 Second Foundation Idea
35:43 Microsoft Era Ethereum
38:20 EF Money Runs Out
42:02 Utility Asset Narrative
46:07 Etherealize Enterprise Push
48:04 Bitcoin Has Saylor
53:32 Ethereum Narrative Whiplash
55:51 Solana As The Yang
58:15 Post Quantum Solana Roadmap

🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod!

🎥 YouTube: https://t.co/XomArsvaIV
🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/0ilprLbily
🍎 Apple: https://t.co/jrnmstoLAN
🎙 Podcast Home: https://t.co/r6OZC52hUx

[Max Resnick @MaxResnick]

You can't tell me this shit is real.

[Haseeb ＞|＜ @hosseeb]

Every religion must deal with apostates. This week we brought on @trustlessstate and @MaxResnick to explain their newfound Ethereum atheism.

David: ETH the asset will neither grow nor shrink from here.

Max: Ethereum has cast out the "go fast" technologists, and only the "go slow" people are left.

Me: I guess I'm now the Satya Nadella of ETH 🤓