@deivonchain@AngieMKTmom Humans will be humans and will use any tool they can. Some of these tool are risk free, others, well, i hope will not end up like skynet.
“Encourage, but don’t force it.”
That, in a nutshell, is my take on Claude, vibe coding, and how startups should use them.
We talked about this and a few other topics in a really fun interview with the amazing @AngieMKTmom last week.
Here is a short teaser. The full interview will be out at the end of the week.
With the risk of sounding like a broken record: Q-Day timelines may compress faster than expected.
Microsoft’s Majorana 2, a topological quantum chip, was developed with help from agentic AI. They are now pointing to a scalable quantum computer by 2029.
AI is speeding up both hardware and software development. You should start your Post-quantum planning long before quantum feels achievable.
Announced today at #MSBuild: Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2, a next-generation topological quantum chip developed with the help of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI. https://t.co/esVcmeWdgh
The biggest mistake in any prediction, and especially in quantum timelines, is assuming tomorrow moves like yesterday.
Start by reading Justin’s post - its worth reading in full.
The short version is pretty wild:
Google’s quantum team published major Shor’s algorithm optimizations for elliptic curve cryptography, using secp256k1 as the example, the curve behind Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.
To make it simple, Shor’s algorithm is the quantum algorithm that could break widely used public-key cryptography - if a large enough fault-tolerant quantum computer can run Shor at scale, today’s elliptic curve signatures become vulnerable.
But the key optimization that they did to Shor was not fully disclosed. It was hidden behind a ZK proof after Google engaged with the U.S. government (which is pretty cool!)
Not telling everyone how they did it - well, made everyone look harder. And as a result, the main trick has reportedly been rediscovered by French quantum researcher André Schrottenloher, and ecdsa{dot}fail is turning the whole thing into an open optimization race.
Now for the part that we are all missing, and that matters most:
This is no longer just a few labs quietly improving quantum algorithms. You now have cryptographers, quantum researchers, open verifiers, community contributors, and AI-assisted search all pushing on the same problem.
Justin puts the odds of Q-day at 50% by 2032 and 10% by 2030. That is already much more aggressive than the usual government-style 2035 timelines.
My view: even that may still be too conservative. To be clear, I am not saying I know better than the U.S. government, NIST, the NSA, or Justin Drake. I don’t. But one thing I am confident in is that progress is no longer linear.
For years, Q-day was mostly framed as a hardware question. How many qubits? What error rates? How fast can fault tolerance scale? That still matters. But the software side is moving too. Better circuits, better algorithms, better verification, more people working on the problem, and now AI helping search the optimization space. Each improvement pulls the others forward.
So the question is not whether quantum computers are ready today. They are not. The question is whether the next 3 to 5 years will look like the last 10 years.
Crypto, AI, and hardware are now colliding around one of the most important security problems in the world. That does not feel like a normal R&D cycle. It feels like a compression event.
My base case is simple: teams treating PQ migration as a 2029 problem are probably closer to reality than teams treating it as a 2035 problem.
And if the next wave of AI-assisted research is even close to what we have seen in other domains, 2029 may not sound that aggressive for long.
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.
AI attacks are getting smarter, and public data is becoming the attack surface.
The answer is not just better passwords or other defense mechanisms. It is less exposure.
Today Instagram had this massive exploit where hackers were just stealing rare handles left and right. Hundreds of accounts gone.
People losing handles they’ve owned since 2010, some worth hundreds of thousands.
I own a few rare ones so I was actually stressed watching this happen in real time, which I haven’t been in years.
Obama White House account got hit.
These aren’t some random new accounts, these are verified, locked down accounts and they still got compromised.
The thing is the exploit is so simple it’s almost funny. Attacker goes to Forgot Password, says their account is hacked, turns on a VPN to match the target’s location (which now you can find on the about section of the page).
Instagram’s AI support flow asks them to verify with a selfie.
They grab a photo from the target’s profile, run it through an AI video generator to make an animation of the person’s face moving around, upload that to Meta’s AI as proof.
And Meta’s AI just accepts it because it can’t tell the difference between a real selfie and an AI-generated video of someone’s face
.
Once verified they change the email to theirs. Password reset link goes to their email. They own it now. 2FA gets bypassed somehow in the process but honestly I don’t know exactly how, just that it did.
Point is even locked down accounts went down.
Then you try to recover your account and you’re talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help.
You can’t escalate to a human. You’re just stuck. Your asset is gone and there’s no one to call.
The whole thing just highlighted how stupid it is to automate account security without any human in the loop.
One AI fooling another AI while there’s literally no person anywhere to catch it.
Meta took hours to even acknowledge it while accounts were getting stolen every minute.
Now thankfully it’s patched but I don’t think it will be the last one. Stay safe!
This post was written in Chrome
There are so many ways to minimize our online presence. But first, we need to acknowledge the problems. Many people say, "I use Google, so my data is public already," as an excuse. I know I did. But this is no longer a minuscule problem - the recent hack on Instagram demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate systems based on the data we offer freely.
The main barrier to the adoption of privacy is ease of use. I use chrome becouse it is easier. It syncs well across platforms. if i had that with Tor i would switch.
The US government built a tool that makes you invisible on the internet. Then they gave it away for free.
Tor is legal. Most people think it is not.
The US Naval Research Laboratory invented it in the 1990s. Three scientists named David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson. The Office of Naval Research and DARPA paid for it. The State Department still pays for it today.
The same government that runs the NSA also funds the tool that stops the NSA from watching you.
How it works: your traffic bounces through three random volunteer servers. No single server knows both who you are and what you are looking at. Your internet provider sees only that you connected to Tor.
What Tor does NOT do: it does not make you a hacker. It does not drop you on the dark web. You browse normal websites with more privacy. It does not break any law in the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, India, or most countries.
Who uses it:
The New York Times runs a Tor address for sources to send tips. The BBC runs a Tor mirror so people in censored countries can read the news. Facebook has run a Tor address since 2014. Edward Snowden used Tor in 2013. A 2012 NSA internal slide deck, made public through the Snowden files and reported by The Guardian and Washington Post, called Tor the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity.
In 2023 and 2024 the US government paid the Tor Project $2,556,472. The biggest grant funded uncensored internet access in China, Hong Kong, and Tibet.
The Naval Research Laboratory's own page says two million people use Tor every day.
BSD-3-Clause license. Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. Roger Dingledine still runs the project.
This is what the internet was supposed to look like from the start.
(Link in the comments)
@GergelyOrosz Even with an additional 60% of the headcount, this attack would still happen. Any system with a defense mechanism based on public data is no longer relevant. And we as users need to start keeping our data private.
We have seen extreme founders before. Some were very successful, others failed miserably. I personally want to make sure that we enjoy the way, not just the end result.
But if any of my employees want to do a fhenix tatoo, well... go for it.
"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".
Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.
- The company works 7 days per week.
- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.
- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.
- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.
Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.
My condensed notes below:
1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:
Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.
2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:
Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.
3. Lead from the Front Lines
You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.
4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning
Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.
5. Lifespan vs. Victories
Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."
6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."
If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.
Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.
I like seeing Vitalik talk about privacy. But what I really want to see is Joe Lubin saying MetaMask is adding native support for private tokens.
Posts help. Deployments matter more.
Acknowledging a problem and dealing with it is what makes greatness. Vitalik coming out publicly to comment on the recent changes in the EF is a good sign. What I really liked about his answer is the part that seemed the most obvious: we need "Provably bug-free Ethereum." The realization that Ethereum as infrastructure needs to mature and address all the less sexy aspects of infrastructure is becoming a reality. And this is really the missing piece in driving adoption. The real blockers for Ethereum adoption were never speed or cost. Adoption needs a mature platform: no bugs, compliance, confidentiality, and institutional-grade guarantees. Glad this is finally being acknowledged
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.