drouyang

co-founder & ceo @snarkify_zkp | phd in operating systems | ex @Meta

[drouyang @drouyang]

@Fried_rice So sad

[raz @ryanzarick]

We believe developers should choose their own security configurations, but we made a mistake by allowing our DVN to act as a 1/1 DVN for high-value transactions. We didn't police what our DVN was securing, which created a risk we simply didn't see. We own that. Moving forward, LayerZero Labs will be more active in educating developers and monitoring how applications should build on the protocol to ensure they are configured safely.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

An update – and overdue apology.

[drouyang @drouyang]

DeFi composability is one of the most powerful things this industry has created, but it also means risk can compound across protocols in ways that are hard to detect until something breaks.

In my eight years in crypto, I’ve seen no shortage of infra projects pump a token, watch activity go to zero, and disappear. The LayerZero team is one of the rare groups of hardcore builders who genuinely care about the industry and hold themselves to a high standard. LayerZero has carried billions of dollars in crypto asset transfers and, because of that, has inevitably become a massive target.

What matters now is what the industry learns from this sophisticated hack, and how we take responsible action from here. Respect to Bryan and the LayerZero team for owning their part. We need more builders like the LayerZero team, not fewer.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

I’ve been asking myself why has it taken me so long to write this? Ultimately I still carry a huge amount of cognitive dissonance here. In my mind LayerZero the protocol was like Gnosis Safe and the application was setting their config, and who the )@(!$ would secure billions in TVL on a 1/1? I even tweeted about it, literally 0, I would have bet almost anything on that because almost every major application we helped setup their configs. Someone then going and manually changing that to a 1/1 was outside of the realm of possibility for me.

I was wrong.

It’s easy to sit back and say ‘it’s just a protocol we have no control over how people use it’ but we have the opportunity to be better.

There was a conversation this week speaking to a customer and they just… screamed at me, at the top of their lungs, and swore for a solid ~3-5 minutes straight. We had implemented additional security measures of forcing a more stringent RPC quorum and forcing every chain to provide multiple RPCs and we had done it without telling them and it !)@$d with their business, which frankly is a deadly sin. We had messed with their business and they said communication wise we were completely blowing this. They were completely right.

This is something I care about a ton, it is both the result of a huge portion of my life and something that I fundamentally believe in. I literally gifted a copy of Unreasonable Hospitality to every single manager in the company. The entire point of what we’ve built is to enable others to build on top of it, it is to provide a protocol and a platform for people to build on, and we’ve been failing some of our largest customers.

The past two weeks have been unbelievably miserable. I’m incredibly grateful for all of the applications who have worked with us over the past 2 weeks, for @zeroshadow_io who has spent endless cycles with us tracking and seizing millions in attacker funds which will be returned to the rsETH team, and for all of the parties who brought together DefiUnited. Particularly @aave for leading and @MikeSilagadze for pushing everyone to get their !@)($ together and sort things out as quickly as possible, and putting himself in the frontline of acquisition talks and everything else to try to get to a solution quickly.

@LayerZero_Core is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the industry, the LayerZero protocol has earned the trust of the largest and most important asset issuers in the space. We will do better and we will make the industry better for it.

My entire focus over the past 2 weeks has singularly been working with applications to harden their setup, building tooling to assist in tracking and freezing hacker funds, and the rsETH recovery efforts.

That is going to shift now to where LayerZero Labs spends it's time and effort. The only thing this company will spend time on is how we can better serve our asset issuers and the upcoming launch of Zero.

[drouyang @drouyang]

DeFi composability is one of the most powerful things this industry has created, but it also means risk can compound across protocols in ways that are hard to detect until something breaks.

In my eight years in crypto, I’ve seen no shortage of infra projects pump a token, watch activity go to zero, and disappear. The LayerZero team is one of the rare groups of hardcore builders who genuinely care about the industry and hold themselves to a high standard. LayerZero has carried billions of dollars in crypto asset transfers and, because of that, has inevitably become a massive target.

What matters now is what the industry learns from this sophisticated hack, and how we take responsible action from here. Respect to Bryan and the LayerZero team for owning their part. We need more builders like the LayerZero team, not fewer.

[Antigma @antigma_labs]

Local coding models may have crossed a threshold to be viable. We compared several 30B class open weight models on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and they are close to what frontier models were around ~6 months ago.

- For consumer hardware: MoE > dense when memory is the bottleneck.
- We expect this can be improved a lot with some prompt/harness/llama.cpp tuning

[drouyang @drouyang]

Deepseek V4 dropped

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models — DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) — both supporting a context length of one million tokens.

https://t.co/I867xPrEY5

[drouyang @drouyang]

Congrats to Anne and the @Standard_Kernel team!

The proposed Standard Kernel Rubric is a great contribution. It’s getting increasingly difficult to reason about what has and hasn’t actually been solved in GPU kernel code generation. There’s rarely a simple answer.

Many of the ZK kernels we’ve built still lack good GPU STOA implementations. Most published work reports speedups, but in production, what matters to us is performance against the speed-of-light limit — the theoretical peak.

The fastest kernel >> a faster kernel

[Anne Ouyang @anneouyang]

Excited to share @Standard_Kernel's seed round and some reflections on what we’ve learned about kernel generation and what we believe is next. Grateful to our amazing team, supporters, and the broader community pushing this space forward.

[drouyang @drouyang]

@alpinesnow23 > We are moving from an economy of Attention to an economy of Execution.

> We know how to sell to people; we have yet to build the infrastructure to sell to machines.

Interesting thoughts!

[drouyang @drouyang]

ZPrize 2.0 😆I suggest having @apruden08 be the judge

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

Love the early skepticism it’s how you know you’re really pushing progress.

$1m wager open here! Happy to benchmark!

[a16z crypto @a16zcrypto]

https://t.co/aT37H26LMN

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

Zero introduces four 100x breakthroughs across storage (QMDB), compute (FAFO), networking (SVID), and zk proving (Jolt Pro).

It lives up to everything we stand for:
- Decentralized
- Permissionless
- Censorship-resistant

[drouyang @drouyang]

@RaeWrh @IrreducibleHW What??

[drouyang @drouyang]

Huge congratulations on stepping into the GP role @guywuolletjr! I’ve always appreciated how humble, friendly, and positive you’ve been over the years. Really happy to see this happen!

[Chris Dixon @cdixon]

Today we are excited to announce that we are promoting Guy Wuollet (@guywuolletjr) to General Partner.

We first met Guy in 2018 while he was studying computer science at Stanford, where he also rowed varsity crew. He initially joined the firm as an intern working on the enterprise go-to-market team, but it soon became clear he was most passionate about crypto.

We kept running into Guy: first when he joined our Crypto Startup Accelerator to build a decentralized ISP, then while doing research at Protocol Labs, and finally as a teaching assistant for our research partner @danboneh.

After joining us full-time in 2020, Guy began investing in infrastructure, DeFi, and DePIN. He has been a steady and creative force, making significant contributions to more than 20 investments, including Solana, LayerZero, Gensyn, EigenLayer, Daylight, and Morpho.

Based on insights from prior investments like Orchid, Nym, and Helium, Guy defined our thesis on what would become known as DePIN. He wrote one of the defining blogs on why DePIN matters and helped us invest in Gensyn. Next he wrote about decentralized energy and led our investment in Daylight. Guy also invested in decentralized transportation, robotics, and AI projects as he helped run our accelerator.

DeFi has always been central to Guy’s thesis, but his early investment in Morpho was driven above all by conviction in the founders. He recognized in @PaulFrambot and his team a rare combination of technical depth and clarity of vision. Since then, Morpho has grown to billions in total value locked and become one of the leading protocols in DeFi. Their V2 launch marked a major leap forward in efficiency and scale for on-chain lending.

Through his work with founders, Guy has shown a rare mix of deep technical expertise and thoughtful pragmatism. Founders often tell me how impressed they are that Guy systematically reads, understands, and provides useful feedback on protocol design and other hard technical topics. His writing and advice on token and protocol design have helped influence many projects in our portfolio.

Beyond his investing skills, Guy has been a calm and positive presence, with a wry sense of humor, both inside the firm and for founders. As the crypto team grew from a small group to more than 80 people, he helped recruit and mentor many of the talented investors, researchers, and operators who make the team what it is today.

Guy is an invaluable member of the team, and it has been great to see him grow and develop over the last five years.

Guy joins me, @alive_, and @AriannaSimpson as @a16zcrypto’s fourth General Partner.

[drouyang @drouyang]

Congrats!

[Yotta Labs @YottaLabs]

🚀 Yotta Labs wins 1st place at the AMD Developer Challenge 2025! 🏆

Our team developed high-performance implementations of three foundational distributed inference kernels for AMD MI300X:
🔹 All-to-All
🔹 GEMM-ReduceScatter
🔹 GEMM-AllGather

Through fine-grained per-token synchronization, kernel fusion, and hardware-aware tuning that fully exploit MI300X's 8 XCD architecture, we achieved substantial performance improvements via communication–computation overlap, reduced memory allocations, and ROCm-specific optimizations.

📖 Read the full tech report: https://t.co/uwQ9xC1GLU
💻 Source code: https://t.co/PjOT47qpPW

At Yotta Labs, we're building the unified elastic fabric for high-performance AI — spanning multi-silicon, multi-cluster, and multi-cloud infrastructure.

#AMD #ROCm #Inference #GPUComputing #AIInfra #PerformanceEngineering #DeAI #AIInteroperability #MultiSilicon #YottaLabs

[drouyang @drouyang]

@henrythe9ths FUNDRAISE

[drouyang @drouyang]

@kivanarpeev Thank you for your contributions to Snarkify! Best wishes to your future endeavors, Ivan!

[drouyang @drouyang]

@TziokasV Get well soon, @TziokasV !

[Uma Roy @pumatheuma]

Snarkify wrote an SP1 GPU prover from SCRATCH to brrrrrrr on real-time proving.

Can't wait to see their results on the Succinct Prover Network.

[drouyang @drouyang]

SP1-SRT is where top-tier zkVM meets top-tier GPU acceleration!

[Uma Roy @pumatheuma]

Snarkify has top-tier cryptography and performance engineering talent. They've won awards in the Z-Prize competition for ZK acceleration a few years in a row.

Today, they join Succinct Network as a prover.

Teams like Snarkify will drive down the cost of proving for all.🤝