Flying Nobita

ZK. ProgCrypto. Privacy.

DMs open for opportunities.

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@arnaucube Scary!

[Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️ @rstormsf]

🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️

🙏 I'm Roman Storm. To @ethereum, and to everyone who has stood with me through this - thank you. Truly.

When you're a developer facing decades in prison for writing open-source code, the nights get very long. And then this community shows up. Again and again. And I remember I'm not alone. That's everything. 💚

Let me be clear about what this case actually is. I didn't rob anyone. I didn't steal, didn't touch a single user's funds, never took custody of a single coin. I wrote software. Privacy software - the kind of thing that, in any sane world, belongs on a résumé. Not in an indictment. 🧑‍💻

So I want to tell you why, even now, I have every reason to keep fighting. Because this isn't blind hope. The courts have already started to speak - and what they said has a name. Van Loon. 📜

In November 2024, a federal appeals court - the Fifth Circuit - looked at what the government did to Tornado Cash and said it plainly: government broke the law. OFAC overstepped its authority when it sanctioned the protocol. Those immutable smart contracts aren't "property" that belongs to anyone. ⚖️

Sit with the court's own words, because they're extraordinary. The judges described Tornado Cash's contracts as "unownable, uncontrollable, and unchangeable — even by [their] creators." 🤯

Uncontrollable. Even by their creators. A federal court, after studying the actual technology, found that I literally cannot control the code I helped write. It runs on its own. It always will. No one can stop it - not me, not OFAC, not anyone. That's not a loophole. That's just how it works.

And the government's own position has since crumbled. After Van Loon, OFAC removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list entirely in March 2025. The protocol they once branded a national-security threat - delisted, out in the open. ❌

And yet they're still prosecuting me. So look closely at what they're actually holding against me - because the harder you look, the thinner it gets. 🔍

My team integrated Chainalysis's official OFAC sanctions screening directly into the Tornado Cash interface - a real-time compliance measure to block sanctioned addresses. The government's response to that? They called it "window dressing." Compliance, dismissed as decoration. 🙃

Then there are my own words, from my own chats, reacting to hackers getting traced: "I'm glad those fuckers are detected." That's the person they're branding a criminal conspirator. The story and the evidence don't match - because the story isn't true. 💔

And once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere. A court says the protocol is uncontrollable even by its creator - yet they want to jail me for "controlling" it. That's the kind of case this is. It gets worse. ⬇️

The indictment's most-quoted line - a dramatic "how do you go about laundering $600 million?" - was pitched as a co-founder's words. It wasn't. It was written by a CoinDesk reporter asking the team how mixers work. A forwarded message got mislabeled in the data extraction. A journalist's question became Exhibit A. 📰

Then the most damning of all: on the very day I was indicted, FinCEN officials privately told these SDNY prosecutors that non-custodial tools like this are NOT money services businesses. The prosecutors walked into court and argued the opposite. My defense didn't learn about it for ~21 months. ⚖️

Even the DOJ doesn't seem to believe its own theory. Weeks before insisting I'm guilty, the same DOJ told the Supreme Court - in its amicus brief in Cox Communications v. Sony Music — that "knowledge that a buyer plans to misuse a product with substantial legitimate uses, without more, does not support an inference of culpable intent." The exact opposite of what they argue against me. Same DOJ. Weeks apart. 🔁

https://t.co/cRoJAQZwB8

So step back. If you only hear "crypto mixer," you might assume the worst. But this is not a shadowy contraption. It's mainstream, studied, respected technology. 🎓

Stanford teaches Tornado Cash — not as a cautionary tale, but as the textbook example of how cryptographic privacy works. It's a final-exam question in CS251, Dan Boneh's renowned cryptography course. 📚

https://t.co/2A77txqf4g
https://t.co/65jdsOEtuw

And Stanford's own exam notes something the prosecutors won't: Tornado Cash ships a built-in compliance tool, letting a user voluntarily prove which deposit was theirs to satisfy an exchange like Coinbase. Privacy and compliance, designed to coexist. 🔎

This isn't fringe, either. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a primer on Tornado Cash for economists and policymakers - treating it as legitimate financial-privacy infrastructure, and describing that very same compliance tool. 🏦

https://t.co/d6orD3ydQT
ers

So add it all up. Technology taught at Stanford. Analyzed by the Federal Reserve. Vindicated in a federal court of appeals. Built with real-time sanctions screening the government waved off as "window dressing." And the developer who helped build it - me, is facing prison. Tell me that sits right. 😞

This is why it reaches so far beyond me. If publishing neutral, open code makes you a criminal for whatever a stranger later does with it, every developer here is exposed. Every wallet team. Every protocol. Everyone who's ever pushed to a public repo. 🧨

Privacy is not a crime. Open source is not a conspiracy. Writing software is not the same as committing the acts of those who misuse it. The easiest principles in the world to defend - which is exactly why we can't afford to lose them here. 🛡️

Van Loon is the law catching up to the truth. Now I deserve the same justice the protocol already received. We're close. The arguments are strong. And with you behind me, we can finish this. 💪

So please — follow my co-founder in this fight @alex_pertsev, and share our stories. And if you're able, support my legal defense at 👉 https://t.co/lx9E4ILDrn 💚 Every voice, every dollar, every repost tells a court — and tells me — that I don't stand alone.

I'm Roman Storm. We started this together. Let's end it together. 🌪️

🌪️⚖️🛡️ ——————————————— 🛡️⚖️🌪️

[Ethlabs @ethlabs_org]

Announcing Ethlabs: a non-profit R&D lab for Ethereum and ETH

Our mission is to make Ethereum the settlement layer of the global economy.

The internet became global because shared protocols created a common language between networks. Private systems remained useful, but bounded. Finance is approaching a similar moment. As value, assets, and markets become digital, the world needs shared settlement infrastructure.

Ethereum is uniquely positioned to become that shared base layer, the neutral foundation on which users, institutions, and agents can transact without intermediation.

What we believe:

• We believe credible neutrality matters. Ten years of uptime and the lowest counterparty risk. Ground that cannot be pulled away by any one country, institution, company, or person.

• We believe ETH matters. The most valuable, programmable store of value. A decade of broad distribution, deep liquidity in onchain markets, and maximally trustless asset on Ethereum.

• We believe DeFi matters. Markets, liquidity, credit, exchange, and coordination, open to anyone.

• We believe adoption matters. Principles do not change the world until people benefit from them.

We sit between two worlds: real usage from the builders at the frontier, and the protocol that has to support it. We work with users, applications, wallets, L2s, infrastructure teams, institutions, ETH holders, core devs and researchers, then turn what they actually need into protocol work, shared standards, infrastructure, and shipped products.

Ethlabs is independent but Ethereum is a shared project. We are one node in a much larger network of stewards. This is the multi-node future.

We have spent the better part of the past decade contributing to Ethereum core research and development.

We are opinionated and transparent. We move with urgency, learn in public, and course-correct when we’re wrong.

We are building a lean, talent-dense team for people who want to do the most important work of their careers: [email protected]

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

This is both smart and funny in many ways

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

Got em. I poison my AGENTS.md (and other things like code comments) all over the place with prompt injections like this to find people who don't review their code and sling it off to another human. Catches folks all the time and then its an instant ban.

As I've said, I don't care if you don't review your own code. But if you're submitting code to an OSS project and crossing a human boundary, it is simple courtesy to do some human review.

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@itsreallyvivek Nice post! I think it does a good job capturing ml research

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

https://t.co/a8Gtgw3bRP

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@cryptodavidw Zero trust seems a better fit

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

Caught a roundtable with some core Ethereum people talking openly about the recent drama at the Foundation.

Pretty insightful if you’re trying to figure out what’s going on with EF right now.

[The Defiant @DefiantNews]

EF exodus or necessary reset? @camirusso sits down with @dankrad, @laurashin, @chainyoda, and @wmougayar to unpack the real question behind the Ethereum Foundation drama: if the EF is doing less, who steps up to keep Ethereum competitive - and what does that mean for ETH?

This debate gets into leadership turmoil, the talent departures, Vitalik's direction, tokenomics, and whether Ethereum is still built to win.

Watch the debate here 👇🏻

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@binji_x 👏👏

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Getting increasingly bullish on just vibe-coding the important things in Lean.

eg. see:

https://t.co/YOdVyJMNAv

https://t.co/XbDCD0BCEu

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Dijkstra’s Algorithm Just Got Dethroned After 41 Years And the Future of Navigation, Logistics, and AI Just Got WAY Faster!

Imagine this: For over six decades, Edsger Dijkstra’s legendary algorithm has quietly powered everything that moves data, people, or packets across networks.

Google Maps rerouting you around traffic in real time? Dijkstra. Booking the cheapest flight with optimal connections?

Dijkstra. Internet routers blasting your cat videos across the globe at lightning speed? You guessed it, Dijkstra.

Textbooks declared it unbeatable on sparse graphs since 1984. Even the great Robert Tarjan snagged an award last year essentially saying, “Yeah, this is as good as it gets.”

The “sorting barrier” felt like a law of physics.

Until now.

A brilliant team from Tsinghua University (led by Professor Ran Duan) just dropped a bombshell paper that shatters that 41-year-old ceiling.

They’ve created the first deterministic algorithm to beat Dijkstra’s classic O(m + n log n) time bound for the Single-Source Shortest Path (SSSP) problem on directed graphs with real weights.

The New Champion: O(m log^{2/3} n) — Mind-Blowingly Faster on Massive Graphs

Their breakthrough? They stopped obsessing over fully sorting every node by distance.

Instead, they fused the relaxation power of the Bellman-Ford algorithm with a genius “recursive partial ordering” technique. This cleverly shrinks the “frontier” of candidate nodes you need to track, avoiding the full logarithmic sorting hit that’s haunted Dijkstra for decades.

On huge sparse graphs (think the web, global supply chains, social networks, or road systems), this translates to significantly faster route-finding. We’re talking real theoretical wins that could cascade into practical speedups as implementations mature.

This isn’t some incremental tweak — it’s the first major deterministic improvement since 1984, and it just won Best Paper at STOC 2025.

Science is self-correcting in the most exhilarating way possible!

Why This Feels Like Magic
Dijkstra works by always picking the next closest unprocessed node elegant, but it forces you to maintain a sorted order.

The Tsinghua team said: “What if we don’t need the full order right away?”

They use divide-and-conquer on vertex sets, bounded multi-source subproblems, and smart pivots to compress the work. It’s like navigating a city by smartly grouping neighborhoods instead of checking every single streetlight one by one.

Robert Tarjan himself called it “amazing.” When a legend in the field reacts like that, you know history is being rewritten.

What This Means for the Real World

• Navigation & Maps: Faster dynamic rerouting on planetary-scale graphs. Traffic apps could feel even snappier.
• Logistics & Supply Chains: Optimizing millions of routes in less time = lower costs, greener deliveries, happier planets.
• Networking: Internet infrastructure could route packets more efficiently than ever.
• AI & Games: Pathfinding in massive virtual worlds or graph-based ML models gets a turbo boost.
• Beyond: This cracks open the door for rethinking other “impossible” barriers in algorithms. If we can beat sorting here, what else is waiting?

Implementations in libraries like NetworkX or Boost Graph are coming, and the entire algorithms community is buzzing.

What a time to be alive in tech!
Tsinghua just proved that even the most sacred cows in computer science aren’t untouchable.

The sorting barrier?

Obliterated.

The shortest-path problem isn’t solved, it’s reopened for even greater conquests.

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

If US ever needs some motivation to beat seedance for her netizens, here's one!

[CuiMao @CuiMao]

Welcome to China, Mr. Dalio! 😊
@DarioAmodei @AnthropicAI @claudeai @ClaudeDevs

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

Superset & Conductor worktrees are a key feature, but frustrating.

They default to remote with no easy way to use local branches. If your local is ahead but you aren't ready to sync, unpushed changes are ignored.

Major workflow blocker.

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@hardmaru Can I be a beta tester?

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@QuangVDao 🚀🚀

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

@xyz_pierre @MMJahanara 🚀🚀

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

Mila Jovovich, played the main character in the Resident Evil movies, made a AI agent memory system with 34k ⭐️. WTF!!

She once fought AI. Now she’s helping AI!

https://t.co/Zk5BRF61tS

[Flying Nobita @FlyingNobita]

WhatsApp is rolling out private AI message processing powered by TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments).

It allows them to offer features such as message summarization without actually reading your chats.

[Trail of Bits @trailofbits]

Before its launch, we audited @whatsapp's Private Processing TEEs and found 8 high-severity issues (patched). The enclaves yielded to injected config files, unmeasured ACPI tables, spoofed firmware levels, and stale attestation reports. 🧵

[Sebastian Raschka @rasbt]

https://t.co/HH23b6VZ6O