SamJernigan.eth

Cur Non 🦇🔊 'ETH Maxi of Wall Street'
Not Financial Advice

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

We are @ethereum. I hope you join us.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Yesterday Ethereum turned 10. Today, lean Ethereum is unveiled as a vision—and personal mission—for the next 10 years.

We stand at the dawn of a new era. Millions of TPS. Quantum adversaries. How does Ethereum marry extreme performance with uncompromising security and decentralization?

TLDR: next-generation cryptography is central to winning both offense and defense.

Disclaimer: This is a Drake take™ aimed at a broad audience. A technical deep dive into hash-based post-quantum signatures and SNARKs will follow. A healthy diversity of views across Protocol, the EF, and the broader Ethereum community is expected and welcome. It strengthens us.

defense—fort mode

Ethereum is special. 100% uptime since genesis. Unrivaled client diversity. $130B in economic security (35.7M ETH staked × $3.7K)—maybe soon $1T.

Ethereum is poised to become the bedrock of the internet of value, securing hundreds of trillions over decades, even centuries.

Ethereum must survive anything: nation states, quantum computers. Whatever comes. Call it fort mode. If the internet is up, Ethereum is up. If the world is online, the world is onchain.

offense—beast mode

Ethereum is hungry. “Scale L1, scale blobs” is a strategic urgency inside the EF’s Protocol cluster. Expect low-hanging performance gains over the next 6–12 months.

Longer term? Think gigagas L1, teragas L2. Call it beast mode.

→ 1 gigagas/sec on L1: 10K TPS, ambitious vertical scale
→ 1 teragas/sec on L2: 1M TPS, sprawling horizontal scale

Scale vs decentralization? Why not both. The moon math we need is now tamed:

→ real-time zkVMs for lean execution
→ data availability sampling (DAS) for lean data

A delicious cherry on top: full chain verification across every browser, wallet, phone.

lean upgrades

Lean Ethereum proposes bold upgrades across all three L1 sublayers:

→ lean consensus is beacon chain 2.0: hardened for ultimate security and decentralization, plus finality in seconds; formerly branded as “beam chain”
→ lean data is blobs 2.0: post-quantum blobs, plus granular blob sizing for a calldata-like developer experience
→ lean execution is EVM 2.0: a minimal, SNARK-friendly instruction set (possibly RISC-V; pronounced “risk five”), boosting performance while preserving EVM compatibility and its network effects

The consensus layer (CL), data layer (DL), execution layer (EL) have each been reimagined from first principles. Together, they unlock fort mode and beast mode.

The goal: performance abundance under the constraint of non-negotiable continuity, maximum hardness, and refreshing simplicity.

lean cryptography

Hash-based cryptography is emerging as the ideal foundation for lean Ethereum. It offers a compelling, unified answer to two megatrends reshaping the ecosystem:

→ the explosive rise of SNARKs
→ the looming quantum threat

Imagine the leanest cryptographic brick—the hash function—singlehandedly powering L1:

→ CL: hash-based aggregate signatures upgrade BLS signatures
→ DL: hash-based DAS commitments upgrade KZG commitments
→ EL: hash-based real-time zkVMs upgrade EVM re-execution

A cryptographic jewel in each of lean CL, lean DL, lean EL.

lean craft

Lean Ethereum is more than a blueprint for hardening and scaling Ethereum. More than just doubling down on security, decentralisation, and cutting-edge cryptography. It is an aesthetic. An art form. A craft. Think Jiro in Dreams of Sushi. When we can go the extra mile, we do.

Minimalism. Modularity. Encapsulated complexity. Formal verification. Provable security. Provable optimality. These are subtle yet important technical considerations. Stay tuned for the post on post-quantum cryptography that will make them explicit.

lean legacy

After 10 fantastic years, lean Ethereum is a generational oath. To keep Ethereum online no matter what. To scale it without compromise. To make it worthy of those who come next.

This is about legacy. We are builders, we are missionaries. We are Ethereum. I hope you join us.

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

Looks like the $ZEC community handled this well. Holding my ZEC.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

https://t.co/v7BiOdzU9E

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

Pretty much. You really should try codex.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

It's time to fly.

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

@thsottiaux @fcoury Ty!

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

Ethereum’s issuance policy should serve holders, not staking service providers seeking to maximize rent extraction.

If the system can buy the same security with less dilution, failing to change the curve is a transfer from spot holders to rent-seeking actors.

[Sreeram Kannan @sreeramkannan]

Super fun to be on MTS talking about how the crowd beat Google!

[Fede’s intern 🥊 @fede_intern]

PropAMMs on @ethereum: 1.5 bps tighter than @binance VIP9. 8 bps tighter than @Uniswap. The best execution venue for ETH is no longer a CEX.

Onchain is already winning on price! This is only the case for less than 10k tades, but the reason isn't technical, it's just a lack liquidity. Liquidity will grow with time and more MM and PropAMMs will keep entering the game. With time between Ethereum and CEXes and other L1s will become even bigger. Ethereum is about to become the global financial hub. Still many things to improve. We're working all day long to deliver.

Amazing work @titanbuilderxyz and @class_lambda.

[Thomas Coratger @tcoratger]

Ethereum is preparing for a post-quantum future.

The transition away from BLS signatures starts with a dedicated Post-Quantum (PQ) Public Key Registry.

https://t.co/H1UUFfUZqk

Here is a deep dive into the design space, XMSS, and how Ethereum will secure its validators. 🧵👇

[Fede’s intern 🥊 @fede_intern]

With @titanbuilderxyz and @ergodicgroup companies (@class_lambda, @alignedlayer, @polfinance_) we are working on creating the best trading experience on Ethereum L1.

Check the work we are doing. It will become very interesting very quickly.

[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.

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

@sreeramkannan The power of Codex! @sama @gdb @thsottiaux

"...Gautham Anant (@bbuddha_xyz), an undergraduate on our team with no formal quantum training, a Codex subscription and some spare evenings, took one of the best published circuits in quantum cryptography and improved it by ~2x."

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

@gajesh LFG

[Quasar Builder @QuasarBuilder]

We are now live with a @titanbuilderxyz compatible propAMM maker quote update web-socket.

Please see our documentation at
https://t.co/MecLdkWqn8

More to come soon as we start to bring on more market makers and volume!

[Sreeram Kannan @sreeramkannan]

https://t.co/2PNyFNV6Oi

[alex zhang @a1zhang]

ptc is the way

[Jerome de Tychey 🦇🔊 @jdetychey]

@wmougayar @VanessaGrellet_ @aggregatoreth Very true 🐇, excessive staking yield is so unfair to DeFi products that the industry is driven to extreme restaking risks overlapped in derivatives that even recently resulted in an unprecedented sinkhole in our leading RePo platform.

[SamJernigan.eth @macrosam]

It is easy to forget that @ethereum has been operating for 10 years with zero downtime.

This is why I have bet my entire career on Ethereum. It is uniquely capable of serving as the Unified Ledger for the global financial system.

[Wu Blockchain @WuBlockchain]

Sui Foundation explains causes of three consecutive mainnet halts

Sui Foundation said three mainnet halts on Thursday and Friday were caused by two separate bugs introduced in the v1.72 upgrade. The first two halts were tied to a gas-charging bug exposed by the “address balances” feature, while a rushed interim fix carried a known low-probability halt risk that later triggered another halt.

The third halt occurred when validators restarted to install the fix and hit a latent bug in how the network preserves randomness settings. Sui said the bugs have been fixed, no user funds were at risk, no settled transactions were reverted, and it has built a mechanism to force-close a stalled epoch.