blockhiro

i'm betting on the world becoming one big computer

blogger @lemniscap prev @theblockco & decision research @uchicago @columbia

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

https://t.co/KnV6nXXLnL

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

long $AMZN

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

who wants a hit of hopium

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

@mert JPMert

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

probably the most promising ETH recovery story would be meaningful development toward PQC; "quantum money" over the "DeFi" narrative

a "DeFi is back" story looks less and less likely as TVL falls, exploits announced every other day, and Mythos public release in the coming weeks

[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.

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

.@NEARProtocol quietly rolled out confidential deposits while reaching $20B in cumulative volume on @near_intents in under a year

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

when there were few coins, they got bid to ridiculous valuations in crypto's pre-pubescent mania

now there are a lot of coins but only a few are good

even among good coins, valuations are still stretched on some that got too high before

growing up takes time, but eventually dead weight value in pointless coins will rotate into purpose coins, some of which of which went too low before

comparing to post-dot-com, the lesson is not "buy everything after the crash," it's buy quality that got thrown out with the bathwater

[Evanss6 @Evan_ss6]

Notwithstanding the overall weakness across crypto, $LIT looks ready to go. Often referred to as "beta" but it can stand on its own metrics.

Seeing more former ETH maxis and large traders get behind it for the tech architecture and snappy performance + liquidity. Locally, it has shed a lot of OI build without really going down in price against broader market going straight down.

$HYPE still king, no need to be tribal. I own both. These protocols have both shown they can do well even when the crypto industry as a whole is not, as their growth angles are TradFi adjacent (stocks/RWA trading + deals to receive the interest on USDC margin in the platforms).

The best coins in a bad market are the ones receiving the capitulation flows from other much larger coins
BTC flowed into ZEC
SOL flowed into HYPE
ETH -> LIT?

[Ansem @blknoiz06]

good coins combined market cap: $27B

bad coins combined market cap: $1.7T

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

last chance to buy $LIT below Peter Thiel's entry

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

please saylor do not buy $ZEC

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

what a weird alt season

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

@onchainmo what are we even doing here

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

@blknoiz06 🫡https://t.co/vvbu9EGnJi

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

the other kind of alt season no one wants to talk about is BTC falling faster than others

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

gut says we get an alt-led cycle, like last cycle surprised many by being heavily btc-led

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

Night and day

YoY performance:
$WGMI up 336%
$BTC down 31%

[blockhiro @blockhiro]

if the war trade starts coming back to AI, i'd expect btc miners co-operating in AI infra to outperform btc itself

CORZ
IREN
APLD
CIFR
RIOT

YTD, they're all up and BTC is down

[Tommy @Shaughnessy119]

I'm cautiously optimistic we are seeing the early signs of a new bull market in crypto, but very different from the last few

Foundationally we have the Clarity act and CFTC/SEC tripping over themselves to allow Crypto but we’ve historically been missing an animal spirits demand driver outside of Saylor for BTC

Hyperliquid doing extremely well is the main center of gravity especially as they launch non crypto markets (Oil, Gas, Pre IPO stocks).

We’re also starting to see Crypto x AI tokens doing well which has always been the largest potential new sector imo. I’ve talked about this a lot in recent tweets.

Venice has driven a ton of excitement on the AI inference side and this should continue for four reasons 1/ AI inference demand is infinite, 2/ business want to cut AI costs and can pay 1/100 the cost using open source models 3/ eventually agents will need to hold tokens like DIEM to access inference on their own and eventually grow their holdings to access more intelligence and 4/ NSFW and use cases the labs dont allow. You can argue whats legal/moral but its not up to Dario to tell you what you can ask

I think the distributed AI Inference trend ends if Chinese models go closed source but I don't see that anytime soon. Also the inference providers (OpenRouter, Venice, etc) should buy GPUs to lower costs further and use them to train/fine tune models in the future if the world goes closed source. How else does OpenRouter use $113 million U.S. Dollars?

Outside inference we’re seeing a wave of new AI projects/tokens and adjacent ones do well (Nock with merged mining to reuse AI inference to secure its chain, Pearl hitting $2b+ out of the gate (low liq, OTC), and a huge swath of new AI projects on base that are more infra and legit vs the last swath of reply bots with tokens). I'm seeing numerous inference providers on Base/Solana compete to the cost of electricity for inference which is useful vs the last era of AI reply bots competing for likes, this is better. Grass is also doing extremely well revenue wise selling to AI companies.

I think people will really lean into using their @NousResearch Hermes agents to build the agentic economy in crypto (in addition to the huge traditional sectors they are targeting). This starts with giving your agent a wallet for basic transactions, grows into them interacting autonomously and the final step is agents creating their own AI economy of protocols and DeFi services. You’ll click a button to graduate your agent to autonomous mode eventually and it’ll be wild. I still feel folks will want this run on a box inside their home especially if it has 24/7 access to your life (cams, mics, all data).

The next potential bull market in Crypto will be different for a few reasons though

1/ Every investor has the choice of buying AI stocks, private companies and deals vs Crypto/tokens so the opportunity cost has gone way up. I'm not investing in a crypto project if I see a better AI one for my money. This extends to retail who has to decide if they want to buy uncensored money ($BTC) or AGI (OpenAI/Anthropic stock) with their marginal dollar. TLDR mid crypto projects never get a shot now, nor should they.

At Delphi Ventures we are backing early stage AI and early stage crypto founders

2/ There is a bull market in Wall Street for Blockchain. Every company has a stablecoin, or integration or an ETF. This is fantastic and what we all wanted but is separate from the on-chain animal spirits world we all look at. When I read our year ahead report for Infra I was shocked and excited with just how embedded crypto has become within Wall Street, and how important stablecoins are for our the united states (sell the dollar via Crypto rails globally so you can lower borrow rates and embed it into new economies)

3/ The people want real products, they want revenue and they want that revenue to flow to the token. No one cares about altruistic academic circle jerk conversations. It's not 2018.

Because of the above, this cycle will become ultra concentrated in a few winners

Why? Because there are only a few projects that have PMF as a product, drive revenue, and rise above the opportunity cost of folks to buy other assets (in Crypto and in AI).

If you are an early stage founder who is way out of distribution building in AI or in Crypto and are raising at the earliest stage reach out. A warm intro is the best path.