carson

Core Eng @Sei_Labs & All-American 🏃🏻

[carson @codewithcarson]

If you could allow ChatGPT to do anything on Sei, what would that be?

[0xturbanurban @0xturbanurban]

If we can take a moment to be intellectually honest here:

1/ The CFTC action taken was for centralized registered actors, not fully permissionless non-KYC offshore venues.

2/ Hyperliquid can't just pull a regulated exchange rabbit out of a hat here. This requires a DCM registration/exemption, which introduces KYC/AML, FCM (for customer funds), trade surveillance, sanctions, etc. This isn't a retroactive "bolt-on" to buy legitimacy and wave a magic wand to forgive the lack of KYC and gray capital facilitation. Yes, you could consider the route where they buy a U.S. DCM, but this inherently bifurcates liquidity and undercuts the "house of all finance."

3/ Crypto perps fall under the CFTC's commodity-derivatives guidance, but equity-linked perps are a messier animal, and sit in the security-based swap world (dragging the SEC into the conversation). Pre-IPO/private equity perps raise a whole set of additional considerations (e.g. price manipulation with no underlying spot market). The moment a permissionless venue spins up a legal entity to hold a license, it becomes remarkably close to rebuilding a CEX.

4/ Hyperliquid is a meaningful infrastructure layer that found PMF in the wilderness of permissionless non-KYC offshore venues. Great. It has just over 1.2mm wallet addresses (not individuals): a relatively impressive, but, in aggregate, small market-share in the grand scheme of things. We're still so early in this game of market microstructure evolution, and it'll be exciting to see how it plays out.

[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.

[carson @codewithcarson]

@VangelisAndr @gakonst @alex_petkos @a_andronidis @zfountas @VangelisAndr is the best

[carson @codewithcarson]

@ArkivebyGrail DM me??

[carson @codewithcarson]

@123skely You just need the price feed, doesn’t even need to be tokenized.

[The Learning Pill 💊 @thelearningpill]

https://t.co/uULCLGd45i

[Jay @jayendra_jog]

There hasn't been major innovation in crypto for some time.

Everything is either based on outdated tech, or compromises on centralization because of bad design.

The only interesting things happening are Sei Giga and Solana Alpenglow + Constellation.

Giga is a complete re-architecture of @SeiNetwork, introducing multi-proposer consensus to the EVM for the first time, and a novel technology we call a private transaction dissemination layer.

Alpenglow strips Solana Consensus down to the simplest possible form, using a 5f+1 architecture, the latest in a long line of innovations in consensus. Constellation then introduces multi-proposer to Alpenglow.

Multi-proposer is the natural evolution of blockchain design. It unlocks massive new levels of throughput and allows for fundamentally better transaction ordering and market structure.

This is a big deal. It's the way Ethereum and every L1 launched for years should have gone.

In the coming months, in addition to the upcoming Giga upgrades, we'll be sharing a lot of new research papers, including V2 of the Giga whitepaper, alongside critical research for pushing blockchain design forward.

[Sei @SeiNetwork]

Introducing The Giga Roadmap.

The first public roadmap of the milestones leading to the Giga Upgrade.

Implementing the Giga Upgrade to the live network is an extraordinarily complex engineering task.

Follow every step from here to Giga: https://t.co/HrHWzi56e8

[carson @codewithcarson]

@RahmonHammed7 This isn’t even giga, we just have a cracked dev team improving the old stuff too. Giga is next level.

[carson @codewithcarson]

@All_Things_Mad Injective is ass, literally the most boring cosmos chain... It’s too slow and low throughput anyway for an orderbook and in protocol dexs have been tried many times. Cosmos is dead…

[carson @codewithcarson]

Everyone wants to talk about Sei Giga because it’s the first multi proposer chain with mind boggling stats.

But in the meantime Sei v2, is still the fastest truly general purpose L1 😅

Giga will be like swapping a Bugatti for a spaceship

[Jay @jayendra_jog]

Late Friday @Sei_Labs rolled out the v6.5.0 mainnet upgrade for @SeiNetwork.

p50 block times are already down to ~400ms. Huge improvement.

Bigger story is the next chart though.

[Sei @SeiNetwork]

Block time hit an all-time low of 0.36 seconds.

That's below the 400ms Doherty threshold for human perception.

For traders though, perception isn't the point. Latency is a statistical edge.

More from @TokenRelations on the road to Giga, on the blockchain for trading ↓

[Monaco @MonacoTrading]

If you see this post, you're early.

[carson @codewithcarson]

@opusluxofficial @SeiNetwork The research team is so legit

[carson @codewithcarson]

New https://t.co/NHW9tINGXQ site is pretty fresh 👀

[carson @codewithcarson]

@kaseemsei Yo

[Jay @jayendra_jog]

It's impossible for a chain to be fast while using Merkle Trees for state proofs. We have a solution for Sei Giga that fixes this.

[carson @codewithcarson]

@cnstrctncnsltnt @SeiNetwork What wallet app are you using? MetaMask?

[carson @codewithcarson]

@cnstrctncnsltnt @SeiNetwork Can you elaborate on the issues you’re facing with connection? What wallet, mobile or desktop, etc?