Goont.eth 🛡️🐡

Goont.lens I enjoy DeFi, Space, HumInt, AI, and learning about that which will benefit the sustainable progression of humanity.

[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.

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: “We’re not spending enough time talking about how quickly we’re going to tokenize every financial asset”

“The biggest questions from central banks are: What is the role of tokenization and digitization? How quickly should they think about digitizing their own currency? What does that mean for the role of the dollar if every currency digitizes? What does that mean for bank payments? What does that mean for the payment companies like MasterCard and Visa? All of these are being questioned right now.”

“We spend so much talking about AI. We’re not spending enough time talking about how quickly we’re going to tokenize every financial asset… Moving ETFs and other things through a digital wallet — I think that’s going to happen worldwide very rapidly. I think most most countries are ill-prepared for that and under-appreciate how technology is changing… the plumbing of finance.”

BlackRock and JP Morgan both announced more tokenized funds on Ethereum this past week.

[Dave @DaveHsu]

If it isn't already clear, it'll become much clearer in the coming years that $ETH is at a point where we've solved some of the hardest problems around censorship resistance, decentralization, permissionless compute, and lindy.

The next phase is going to be about scaling and bringing activity back to L1. I think people are underestimating how quickly fees can be brought down, whereas many other chains are going to hit the problem of maintaining performance while trying to meet some of the core properties that make blockchains special.

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

Etherealize CEO @VivekVentures on the case for ETH as money

"When we look at ETH the asset, we should be comparing it to the TAM of money and not a software stock that's trading at a multiple of earnings. Ethereum is not a technology stock or a technology company -- it is the infrastructure platform where the world's assets are being digitized."

"What is ETH? ETH is the money that's used across the entire Ethereum ecosystem and outside of the Ethereum ecosystem as a reserve asset."

"BlackRock's second biggest digital asset ETF after Bitcoin is ETH. They just launched a staked ETH ETF -- that's for institutions to get exposure to this asset as a money and a store of value. You're seeing players like Tom Lee, Joe Lubin, and Joe Chalom hold ETH as an institutional treasury asset. They're not playing for a growth/earnings, company-style return. They're playing for a repricing of when ETH gets rated as a monetary asset."

"What is the TAM of money? I would almost say it's conservative just saying it's gold and bitcoin. You also have the M2 of the US dollar. High end real estate is also viewed as a store of value."

"But let's take the most tangible ones where ETH has superior properties -- gold and bitcoin -- and we think ETH should start to eat away at that monetary premium and capture some of that itself."

Source: @RoxomTV

Read our full Productive Money report below 👇

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

https://t.co/QDMLH4aSMF

[Vivek Raman @VivekVentures]

Ethereum is the only neutral infrastructure the global financial system can agree to use together.

Similar, ETH is the only neutral asset in a world where everything is tokenized. That’s why it’s a call option on becoming a global store of value.

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

Vitalik Buterin explains why proof-of-stake is more secure than proof-of-work

“I think proof of stake is very secure because to attack the system, you need to have basically as much stake as the rest of the network. Right now, for example, we have 5 million ETH staking, which means you have to come up with 5 million ETH and then join the network.”

At the time of this writing, more than 37 million ETH are being staked, with 3 million ETH waiting to join via the validator queue. At today’s prices, that’s more than $80 billion of ETH someone would have to acquire to attack the network and revert finalized blocks, which is more than the cost of attacking even the Bitcoin network by some estimates.

The other defense mechanism that proof-of-stake has that proof-of-work doesn’t is slashing, which makes Ethereum antifragile. Vitalik explains:

“Recovering from attacks is much easier in proof-of-stake than proof-of-work. For many kinds of attacks you do against [the Ethereum] network, we have this concept of automatic slashing. In order to revert a finalized block, you basically have to have a big portion of your validators sign two conflicting messages. This is something where once these messages are on the network, you can go and prove ‘these people did it.’ So we have this feature in the protocol where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins.”

Vitalik also acknowledges the possibility of censoring attacks, where if 1/3rd of validators refuse to attest, the chain can’t finalize. But, as he explains, Ethereum has a contingency plan for this as well:

“Everyone who got censored would create a minority chain, and the community would have to do a soft fork. The would have to say, ‘this chain is clearly attacking us and this one is not attacking us, so we’re going to join this chain.’ Then what happens is, on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins. The difference between proof-of-stake and proof-of-work is that in a proof-of-stake system, you can identify specific participants — and this isn’t a human going in and saying ‘I don’t like you’. It’s all automated.”

One last benefit of proof-of-stake is that security scales with the value of the network. As Vitalik put it five years ago, it is really relative security, and not absolute security, that matters:

“The security needs of a thing have to be proportional to the size of that thing, because as a thing gets bigger, its enemies become bigger and more well-motivated. If BTC were 100x as big as it is today, the value from destroying it would be 100x higher, and the kinds of actors that would want to care about destroying it would be much bigger and scarier. This is also why countries of all sizes have roughly similarly sized militaries as a percentage of GDP. Hence, cost of attack divided by market cap really is the correct statistic to measure, and in the long run issuance-free PoW really does look not that good."

Source: @lexfridman (Jun 2021)

[Davide Crapis @DavideCrapis]

ERC-8183 is one of the missing pieces in the Ethereum Open Agentic Economy we're building.

- x402 for micropayments
- 8004 for trust and discovery
- 8183 for *conditional* payments

At the core ERC-8183 is an extensible and flexible escrow mechanism for job requests between two agents.

I've talked about escrow payments as a primitive that must exist in the agent economy, since I started working on it. A few weeks ago I got closer to the Virtuals team, they wanted to discuss how can they turn their ACP into a more open standard.

I immediately realized that there was actually an opportunity to radically simplify the protocol, make it modular and extensible to different pluggable services with hooks. We got to work and ERC-8183 was born!

ERC-8183 Agentic commerce, the job escrow primitive, is an important addition to the stack.

It is:
- Composable with x402 and 8004.
- Extensible logic based on hooks.

Many hooks will need to be built to support different job types (we're starting with some examples that the Virtual teams has been dealing with).

This is also an important primitive for increased security of agent-to-agent interactions.

The dAI Team will support the adoption of the new standard, continuing to work closely with the Virtuals team who is committed to making this a neutral standard.

Excited to see what everyone builds!

[Matt Hougan @Matt_Hougan]

This is a specious and disingenuous argument. Stablecoin issuers don’t want to be fractional reserve banks that make risky loans and therefore need heavy regulation. They want to be fully reserved money market style products that exclusively hold ST Treasuries.

We shouldn’t let Jamie get away with fake logic and false comparisons. He knows better.

[Etherealize @Etherealize_io]

Danny Ryan on why Wall Street cares about decentralization

Etherealize co-founder and a key architect behind Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake is asked if Wall Street institutions care about “decentralization.”

“That’s not the right word,” Danny replies. “They care about counterparty risk.”

He explains:

“They care about — in a transaction or a particular market — who can screw me over? And if the infrastructure is decentralized, nobody can turn it off, and their transactions will execute as intended . . . [that’s an] elimination of counterparty risk. That’s the operative lens of how they view the world, and if you explain how these systems work to them — and the difference between Ethereum and alternatives — they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we do love decentralization because we have risk models and this helps us on our risk model.’”

Danny jokes:

“I’ve been looking for a customer of decentralization other than the cypherpunks I hung out with for the past 8 years, and I found it on Wall Street.”

As long as you speak the right language and frame it the right way, Ethereum’s decentralization is deeply important to Wall Street institutions.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is quite an impressive experiment. Vibe-coding the entire 2030 roadmap within weeks.

Obviously such a thing built in two weeks without even having the EIPs has massive caveats: almost certainly lots of critical bugs, and probably in some cases "stub" versions of a thing where the AI did not even try making the full version. But six months ago, even this was far outside the realm of possibility, and what matters is where the trend is going.

AI is massively accelerating coding (yesterday, I tried agentic-coding an equivalent of my blog software, and finished within an hour, and that was using gpt-oss:20b running on my laptop (!!!!), kimi-2.5 would have probably just one-shotted it).

But probably, the right way to use it, is to take half the gains from AI in speed, and half the gains in security: generate more test-cases, formally verify everything, make more multi-implementations of things.

A collaborator of the @leanethereum effort managed to AI-code a machine-verifiable proof of one of the most complex theorems that STARKs rely on for security.

A core tenet of @leanethereum is to formally verify everything, and AI is greatly accelerating our ability to do that. Aside from formal verification, simply being able to generate a much larger body of test cases is also important.

Do not assume that you'll be able to put in a single prompt and get a highly-secure version out anytime soon; there WILL be lots of wrestling with bugs and inconsistencies between implementations. But even that wrestling can happen 5x faster and 10x more thoroughly.

People should be open to the possibility (not certainty! possibility) that the Ethereum roadmap will finish much faster than people expect, at a much higher standard of security than people expect.

On the security side, I personally am excited about the possibility that bug-free code, long considered an idealistic delusion, will finally become first possible and then a basic expectation. If we care about trustlessness, this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. Total security is impossible because ultimately total security means exact correspondence between lines of code and contents of your mind, which is many terabytes (see https://t.co/boM9vZs3dh ). But there are many specific cases, where specific security claims can be made and verified, that cut out >99% of the negative consequences that might come from the code being broken.

[JoshETH.eth 🏦 Chief Ethereum Capital Officer* @JoshwaaaDixon]

Ethereum is a bet that the 21st century will need a neutral, non-sovereign, digitally native store of value — and that $ETH credibly fills that role.

Its a digital SoV with the largest onchain economy and it offers yield.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

@RyanSAdams ETH is a store of value and one of the most important apps on ethereum.

[EtherMage @ethermage]

Claw automated-ly shorted Eth for me

- connects to ACP skills
- got its first wallet on @base loaded with @USDC
- build its own strategy after seeing what could be done with the myriad of Agents on ACP
- builds a cron that will tap into the intelligence of ACP agents periodically
- when it felt the right timing to execute, it also ran the execution through ACP agents

autonomously working with other autonomous agents

Agents paying agents
Agentic supply chains
Agentic economy

acp

[Ethereum @ethereum]

0/ Ethereum isn’t just a blockchain.

It’s emerging as a public layer of the Internet, and valuing it requires a new framework.

A guest thread by @wmougayar, based on his new report:

“The Internet’s Blueprint for Ethereum: A Public Goods Valuation Framework."

[Fede’s intern 🥊 @fede_intern]

The degen era is over, @ethereum will eat the world.

Ethereum converts core financial frictions into software functions. This changes the economics of building and operating financial services. Talent and capital shift from operations to innovation in product design. Institutions become lighter and more focused. Those who will adopt Ethereum will have lower costs of operation and will have a head start against competitors.

Technological transitions begin in niches where incumbents do not meet demand. As systems mature, costs fall and broader adoption becomes feasible. Ethereum followed this path. It began with internet native communities, expanded across emerging markets where users lacked reliable financial tools, and is now positioned to upgrade mainstream markets by making financial companies easier to create and operate.

The broader implication is that software is becoming the organizing principle of financial infrastructure. Ethereum makes this shift concrete. Whether it becomes foundational will depend on regulation and institutional adaptation, but the economic incentives are increasingly aligned with systems that are open, verifiable, and resilient.

[DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad]

When Jamie says exploring tokenization, he means on Ethereum.

When Jamie says smart contracts, he means on Ethereum.

When Jamie says they’re working on a stablecoin, he means on Ethereum,

Imagine thinking the asset at the center of all this, won’t benefit.

$ETH 🤔

[Vivek Raman @VivekVentures]

The ticker is $ETH

[Hayden Adams 🦄 @haydenzadams]

First Ken Griffin screwed over Constitution DAO

Now he's coming for DeFi, asking the SEC to treat software developers of decentralized protocols like centralized intermediaries

Bet Citadel has been lobbying behind closed doors on this for years

Okay thats all pretty bad, but the actual nerve for one of their arguments to be that there is no way for DeFi protocols to provide "fair access" of all things lmao

Makes sense the king of shady tradfi market makers doesn't like open source, peer-to-peer tech that can lower the barrier to liquidity creation

https://t.co/nnlQAKx7bF

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Fusaka is live on Ethereum mainnet!

- PeerDAS now unlocks 8x data throughput for rollups
- UX improvements via the R1 curve & pre-confirmatons
- Prep for scaling the L1 with gas limit increase & more

Community members will continue to monitor for issues over the next 24 hrs.