Andy

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

Today is the day Chapter Twenty finally appears: https://t.co/jVDOQhpeVw

It is a series of benedictions, a simple and plain way into the world of peace.

Inspired by people as varied as @AyaMiyagotchi and @buchmanster to @jacobcollier, Bill Evans, Maharaji, SFH, and more.

[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.

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

Some further thoughts on what sanctuary really means for those interested in exploring the implications of "sanctuary technologies"

https://t.co/FwPWsk4IRv

@VitalikButerin @AyaMiyagotchi @mr_ligi

[Girum G @Girum_Giz]

Read this writeup on cNGN by @deriq_eth https://t.co/dPu1I5xVxb

Our data aligns with his take, but a few things stand out

[Farzam Ehsani @farzamehsani]

Let me put this into the universe:

One day @VALRdotcom will help the National Treasury of South Africa issue sovereign bonds directly on a blockchain and enable millions of people and institutions, domestically and internationally, to buy and trade them.

We will do this for governments across Africa as well as corporates and institutions.

Access will improve, costs will reduce, efficiency will increase.

The future is bright.

[s3unha @s3unha]

https://t.co/NLI4Y5QzNX

[Yoseph Ayele @yosephayele]

“Risk” is a permanent stamp on all emerging markets.

Often informed by disparate data points that smell more like a dog’s breakfast of information than sophisticated measurements, and fueled by ignorance that no amount of education can satisfy.

What if we can transparently and verifiably price risk?

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

@tszzl The last two paragraphs might take a different shape if you took a look at:

https://t.co/yFjGgjfd1L

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

Their approach is grounded in reality, and responds to actual market needs. They have already facilitated derivative contracts worth $48M - the demand is much much larger.

Read more here:

https://t.co/sMYTRzJLuq

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

Derivatives, the largest market in the world, are changing fast. Everyone must "adapt or die" in the face of perpetual swaps and other innovations disrupting the industry. Liquidity, leverage, and latency are driving the action in global infrastructure like @HyperliquidX.

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

“Risk” is not transparently priced in EM. It is a rough measure of ignorance more than a sophisticated metric embedded in the models of global market makers. No amount of education will solve this. But transparent prices and functional local markets do.

Ledig is creating both.

[ً @lightclients]

Happy 25,000,000 Ethereum 🥳
https://t.co/mHe17dR3sb

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

@0xfluid why did you ban me from your discord for writing this analysis?

https://t.co/AC31xMe5vY

I think (though it may be flawed) that it is good news for Lite Vault holders who are currently stuck?

[Yoseph Ayele @yosephayele]

a16z is right about the direction: stablecoins aren’t a crypto niche anymore — they’re becoming a settlement layer beneath global finance. The stack they map (issuance → connectivity → liquidity → apps → credit) is real.

But the map looks different from Africa. Not because the thesis is wrong — but because the constraints are different, and constraints shape markets.

Africa is where the hardest parts of the stack are already being stress-tested.

🧵Here are less explained dynamics of stablecoins in Africa:

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

I would like to offer some sincere feedback on the @ethereumfndn Mandate:

https://t.co/Sr4BneAyn5

Written after being asked by @yosephayele, with friends like @mr_ligi and @AyaMiyagotchi in mind.

I would be interested in @dimabuterin's take on this too.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is the new EF Mandate.

For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making.

Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total.

The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to.

There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role.

At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack.

We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum.

At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing.

But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time.

This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.

Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one.

I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

Local stablecoins in Africa.

Not the endgame, but nonetheless an interesting move to participate in 👌

[Machuche.eth @machuche1]

Ok so Tanzania is live onchain 🇹🇿. Bank transfers crawl. Mobile money stops at the border. And if you’re a business trying to pay suppliers in globally or receive funds navigating multiple FX hops, hidden fees, and zero visibility is inevitable.

We built @ntzs_co to fix this.
nTZS is the first fully compliant digital Tanzanian Shilling pegged 1:1 to TZS, fully backed by bank deposits and government T-bills. It moves instantly. It settles in minutes, not days and runs 24/7. And it connects directly to global corridors through a single, seamless infrastructure.

But here’s the real unlock: @ntzs_co is built for developers.
- Embed wallets directly into your app
- Enable instant payouts for drivers, workers, merchants and much more
- Interoperable with other virtual-pegged assets, send cross-border, cash out to mobile money/ bank directly 
- One API. Infinite use cases.

If you’re building in fintech, logistics, gig economy, remittances, or e-commerce, nTZS is your settlement layer.
Get started today at https://t.co/ZHwPMWjOTl
We’’ve opened up access for developers now.
🔗 https://t.co/4w2AVZjLCK
We’re already powering various usecases from local prediction markets to community financing to monetizing content for creators. Let’s build the future of money movement in Africa. Together.
PS: Make sure to follow the account for more updates! @ntzs_co

[Andy @cryptowanderer]

Timely

https://t.co/pm8qgmByGS