drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬

Product & backend dev (AI / blockchain / trading / Python), NFT artist (Moving Mondrians, Ethereum Merge Fractals), electronic musician, Christian (Romans 10:9)

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

My new NFT series, Moving Mondrians, is live on OP mainnet!

100,000 unique generative art NFTs, with animated SVG image generated fully onchain

50% of funds raised are donated to @ProtocolGuild to support Ethereum core development

NFT entered into @Optimism #welovetheart compo

[prestonvanloon.eth @preston_vanloon]

If you're into Bitcoin, it's time to rotate to Ethereum.

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@AleeeM1 welcome to Danang!

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@drakefjustin Good to know that at least one out of Bitcoin and Ethereum is working on post quantum migration by 2029

[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.

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@dayonefoundry is the 2nd batch in Danang too?

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@materkel adding useful accessory

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@LoganJastremski What if decentralisation is about managing long tail risks that people only care about 1 month in 24?

But that month the markets move more than the 3 years before?

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@ChifoiCristian Few

Articles are this clear

Bravo ser

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@chrissyinspace @HackerResidency Hai van pass is one of the best rides. Been over it several times since I got to Danang. Also going west to Ho Chi Minh highway is an amazing day trip

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@sonichNik if you book lunch, you can then spend the afternoon there 😉 otherwise it's $25 admission charge

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@sonichNik Book lunch at Citron restaurant at Intercontinental hotel, its one of my favourite places in Danang and really really nice

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@alexanderrX_ not a bad post mate

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@robj3d3 @alexcooldev add the herbs lightly shredded, then push to bottom of hot pho for a few minutes to make sure they're safe

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@Yogita_Khatri5 Solid linear model forecast here for BTC. Keep it simple

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@keoneHD How can crypto builders help trad fi come onchain? I for one am interested to know

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@allgarbled Share example of skill in use?

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@nicoypei @gauntlet_xyz @chaoslabs What kind of institutional defi and trading is your team working on?

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@qbuttonphd @sqrDAO @nftbutton @sqrdao_intern Welcome to Danang! See you at the event.

[drcoder.eth 🦇🔊🐬 @davidryan59]

@austincampbell Bull case for ETH is in fact that ETH is money, trustless collateral in DeFi

(BTC is collateral, but only on CEXes; WBTC is collateral, but requires to trust custodians)

Bitcoin needs to fix both security budget and quantum safety; Ethereum has fixed one and is fixing the other

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.

First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.

The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"

Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.

As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.

One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.

My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.

Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.

Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?

EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.

And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.

This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.

To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:

* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.

* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.

* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.

Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.

The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.