Kyle Thornton

Software Engineer;
CTO @CowrieIO

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

1/
Been deep in the weeds this past year. Time to share a bit.

We’re moving from “open source software” to “open source infrastructure” and I’ve been focused on the invisible stuff - analytics, coordination primitives, and protocol-level introspection to support that shift.

[David Kerr @DKerr_Cowrie]

Very excited to transition from the past few years of advisory work at Cowrie LLC to Cowrie a WY based C Corp.  Cowrie LLC is dead, long live Cowrie!

It’s been an eventful time in my career and am truly excited to move forward with an expanded team.  Not only are they great friends, but they are also a collection of the best people I have ever worked with in my career and I am thrilled for the gang to be back together.

Below is a link to our updated website and Announcement about our expanded operations. 

Lot of amazing DUNA projects announcing over the next few months and am very much looking forward to those communities sharing their stories on building in the United States. 

https://t.co/rL2XjGGOXD

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@mudgen @andrewhong5297 @herd_eco @andrewhong5297 also I ended up reading your 2024 web3 guide and it’s uncanny how well you nailed the exact sequence of events in my blockchain data analysis journey. I feel seen

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@mudgen @andrewhong5297 @herd_eco @andrewhong5297 @herd_eco looks super useful, and I’m stoked to see that you’re visualizing the relationships between contracts as a system diagram. I’ve also converged on that being the most useful view for trying to digest a new protocol.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@eek637 @ScopeLift @wildmolasses @eas_eth I wonder if there’s a better meatspace solution for disseminating _which_ document is being referred to by the content hash? Posting it up publicly is good enough for now, but I can imagine in 30 years there will be some docs that got attested to which nobody can find.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

ok that would explain the "169 critical severity vulnerabilities" that suddenly showed up this morning.

I can see that the known-malicious packages have been taken down off of NPM, but a ton more still emitting warnings. What a pain for developers lol

[Charles Guillemet @P3b7_]

🚨 There’s a large-scale supply chain attack in progress: the NPM account of a reputable developer has been compromised. The affected packages have already been downloaded over 1 billion times, meaning the entire JavaScript ecosystem may be at risk.

The malicious payload works by silently swapping crypto addresses on the fly to steal funds.

If you use a hardware wallet, pay attention to every transaction before signing and you're safe.

If you don’t use a hardware wallet, refrain from making any on-chain transactions for now.

It’s still unclear whether the attacker is also stealing seeds from software wallets directly at this stage.

Excellent report here: https://t.co/5CtiZJHYsN

[David Kerr @DKerr_Cowrie]

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime.

What better place than here? What better time than now?

[Liz Harkavy @liz_harkavy]

Last week was a historic one for crypto and for the United States with the passage of stablecoin legislation, one of just a few pieces of major financial legislation signed into law in the past 25 years. It marks a meaningful step toward making the United States the home for crypto.

Today we are excited to announce our seed investment in @CowrieIO, a crypto native advisory firm based in Wyoming that specializes in domestic tax compliance and entity structuring. We believe the United States is on the path to enacting comprehensive crypto legislation, and @DKerr_Cowrie & Cowrie are well positioned to help DAOs and crypto projects meet their regulatory obligations.

Learn more about Cowrie and our vision for the future of crypto corporations and foundations below.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

There’s still a lot to do, but the scaffolding is getting solid.

Infra is maturing. Legal context is clearer. People are getting serious again.

Feels good to be building in this moment.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

3/
But the landscape is shifting.

We now have a viable path for groups—some anon, some not—to coordinate without centralized managers, without insider asymmetries, and without faking a corporate structure they don’t actually need.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

For that to work, you need visibility.

That’s been my focus:
- Mapping how value flows through protocols
- Understanding where control _actually_ sits
- Giving these orgs tools to make informed decisions from day one

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

2/
The industry’s had a broken incentive model for years:

- Build something decentralized and durable? Risky.
- Launch a pump-and-dump meme coin? No problem.

That’s led to a lot of noise and a lot of justified skepticism.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

1/
Been deep in the weeds this past year. Time to share a bit.

We’re moving from “open source software” to “open source infrastructure” and I’ve been focused on the invisible stuff - analytics, coordination primitives, and protocol-level introspection to support that shift.

[David Kerr @DKerr_Cowrie]

Very excited to transition from the past few years of advisory work at Cowrie LLC to Cowrie a WY based C Corp.  Cowrie LLC is dead, long live Cowrie!

It’s been an eventful time in my career and am truly excited to move forward with an expanded team.  Not only are they great friends, but they are also a collection of the best people I have ever worked with in my career and I am thrilled for the gang to be back together.

Below is a link to our updated website and Announcement about our expanded operations. 

Lot of amazing DUNA projects announcing over the next few months and am very much looking forward to those communities sharing their stories on building in the United States. 

https://t.co/rL2XjGGOXD

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@513 Whoa these are awesome! Just fyi you can do some clever things in the metadata for the Stax to add these kinds of images to other NFTs https://t.co/3CsKKcTj2G

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

I'm excited to be able to share my TEDx talk with the world!
https://t.co/ApS8OPb3yx

#TEDxPortland Year 11 will be a tough year to beat. Amazing speakers, coaches, staff, production... truly a world-class event.

#TEDxPDX #Confluence #ConfluencePDX

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@0xQuit Note to #Ledger owners, you already have a 2fa dongle right in front of you! Just install the app and off you go -> https://t.co/VaNNk1DAZH

[Charles Guillemet @P3b7_]

1/
I’ve read several misconceptions about how a wallet works. It seems some people thought there is some magic, let me explain how it works.

A thread 👇

[Revoke.cash @RevokeCash]

We know that it is hard to remember exactly what you signed or did when you were scammed on a phishing website. That is why we created this flowchart to help you diagnose what happened – and what to do about it.

This flowchart is now also available on https://t.co/GLbO2lJMYE

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@kevinrose I'd personally put my identity-linked assets (i.e. a PROOF pass or NFT that gives community membership) into the "warm" style wallet, that I'm careful signing things with but don't go full-abstinence. I would be extremely unlikely to ever set any approvals with this account.

[Kyle Thornton @_kylethornton_]

@kevinrose Hypothetically, which account in this system would you place a PROOF pass to sign into discord with? On one hand you'd probably want it to be in your cold wallet, but you'll need to sign a message with that account to log in, which may or may not violate your "cold" rules.