H A W T H O R N Ξ

typos proev you’re not slop | cofounder: @wenllama

[Curve Intern @curve_intern]

uhhhhhhm

[Ivan Livinskiy @ilivinskiy]

This is a worthy assessment and what interesting neighbors 😄 $crvUSD

https://t.co/dVJEUrwkXf

[Curve Finance @CurveFinance]

Home of Stablecoins

[Left Curve Capital @CurveCap]

While I wrote this article the old fashioned way, I asked @AnthropicAI's Fable 5 to vibe code whatever it wanted.

It enthusiastically shipped Slingshot☄️, a "gravity golf" web game coded in about 20 minutes, and it's actually quite fun! https://t.co/5BKPsAGjFE

[Curve Finance @CurveFinance]

Introducing Llamalend v2

A new lending framework built around Curve liquidity

- Use Curve LP tokens as collateral
- Isolated market risk
- Improved range-based liquidations powered by LLAMMA
- Better market security

Launching first on Optimism.

https://t.co/9dG7NjBqLZ

[Michael Egorov @newmichwill]

These @yieldbasis users seemingly earn 20-30% APR on ETH (thanks to volatility) while earning 5% on USD (thanks to @CurveFinance) at the same time

[Michael Egorov @newmichwill]

Seeing a lot of fears about Claude Mythos allegedly releasing today or tomorrow and "everything getting hacked".

I suspect that we should not directly translate its success in detecting bugs in browsers and Linux Kernel to smart contracts. The software where Mythos found something is containing tens of millions lines of code and simply cannot fit the context.

Smart contracts are really different. They usually have a few thousand lines of code, and both humans and "usual" AI perfectly fit that code in context and can reason well about it.

So I suspect we might not be having a wave of DeFi code hacks, but we may see a lot of things in OpSec getting hacked (looking like multisig keys compromises) and supply chain attacks on frontend dependencies, and those are way less dangerous in true DeFi

[H A W T H O R N Ξ @Hawth__]

@WenLlama @CryptoChris91 Chad moves

[Tangent @Tangent_fi]

Dear @CurveFinance, @ConvexFinance, and @StakeDAOHQ users.

In addition to the usual incentives, $veCRV, $sdCRV, and $vlCVX holders who vote for the following gauges will share 2% of the total $TAN supply:
- USG/USDC
- USG/frxUSD
- USG/sDOLA

Details below 👇

[Michael Egorov @newmichwill]

I see a lot of doomposting about Bitcoin and crypto because crypto is somehow not the favourite toy of the market at the moment (AI stonks are).

I want to remind that crypto is not a toy, and it's serving its true purpose - self-sovereignty of every user, financial rails which are always on and do not stop working. Institutions are also into adopting something which has no clunky intermediaries now, so fundamentally we are better than ever.

AI is foundational, but it will go through its own valley of death: replacing humans by AI would put AI outputs into AI inputs, quality will degrade, and costs will grow exponentially to maintain it. Large companies who push AI everywhere aren't necessarily using it correctly, so they report some overly large expenses.

Both technologies - crypto and AI - are foundational. They are not the same thing though, and they are not competing with each other in principle.

Crypto is the future of Finance!

[RAAC @Raacfi]

$iREET Bond matures smoothly and the $iREET pool experiences a 3x growth in assets.

17 properties, $5.9M in underlying value, $41,884 in monthly rental income.
Unimpaired.

Next, $iREET becomes collateral in RAACLend.
More details coming👇

[RAAC @Raacfi]

https://t.co/Yn6NR0sWku

[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.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Vyper devs continue doing impressive things. Highly encourage people (and their bots) to take another look at the language.

[Curve Finance @CurveFinance]

If you have deposits or loans in asdCRV LlamaLend market on Arbitrum - please exist ASAP out of precation.

The market is fine right now but its price oracle can become unstable due to the vsdCRV exploit which can cause liquidations.

[H A W T H O R N Ξ @Hawth__]

@newmichwill Hard agree

[Tangent @Tangent_fi]

Tangent is live.

Up to 2.5M $USG are available to borrow across 12 markets.

Link and details below.

[Curve Finance @CurveFinance]

This is good for crvUSD!

[scoopy trooples @scupytrooples]

@austingriffith best implementation of it so far is @CurveFinance liquidity gauges even if they dont call it that imho