Manu Nalepa

[prestonvanloon.eth @preston_vanloon]

In the age of AI discovering critical bugs in blockchain protocols, client diversity has never been more important.

A bug in one Ethereum client implementation is limited to a subset of nodes, while the majority of nodes can reject the invalid behavior.

[Thomas Coratger @tcoratger]

How Ethereum plans to replace BLS with Post-Quantum signatures by @hashcloak

https://t.co/12wqb3X9lN

[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.

[terence @terencechain]

A quick post on how ePBS changes Ethereum scaling:
https://t.co/texbKsqMAb

[ladislaus.eth @ladislaus0x]

https://t.co/ZgrmK0xL9U

[raulk @raulvk]

non-headliner proposal period for Hegotá is open. we're proposing at least 4 EIPs for the networking stack:

1. ethp2p erasure-coded broadcast for exec payloads => supercharged RS, speeding up p95 delivery of 2MiB payloads by 6x (9s -> 1.5s), at half the bandwidth.

2. attestation broadcast redesign => targeting sub-500ms worldwide propagation.

3. batched attestations at origin => operators can send one aggregate for validators scheduled on the same committee, without consolidating balance in advance.

4. ethp2p/libp2p coexistence => plan for gradually migrating to Ethereum's new networking stack, and making QUIC compulsory (looking at you, Teku, Nimbus, and Lodestar 👀)

together with cell-level deltas and sparse blobpool, these changes free up bandwidth while making everything faster.

on the execution/data front, this capacity can be reallocated to increase gas limits, scale blobs, carry optional zkEVM proofs, and transmit BALs sooner for exec parallelization.

on the consensus front, we can consolidate subnets and reduce the committee count. because we hear from more validators sooner, we can shorten epoch durations and speed up finality to 16, 8, or even 4 slots.

things are looking gud for Ethereum 🫡

[Prysm Ethereum Client @prylabs]

Release v7.1.3 is now live!

This release adds bug fixes, logging and better node fallback.

In addition this release brings a security update to go-ethereum v1.16.8, extensive Gloas (next fork) groundwork, a major logging infrastructure overhaul, and numerous performance optimizations across the beacon chain.

Operators are encouraged to update at their convenience.

You can find the v7.1.3 release here:

https://t.co/l1ZbwvOhAQ

[joshdavis.eth 🐙 @joshdavislight]

Ethereum Protocol Studies is back for 2026 with new content tracks in Cryptography and Lean Consensus/zkEVM, plus a self-paced learning platform.

Program starts Feb 23rd. Open, permissionless, free.

[Potuz @potuz_eth]

This one is for @0x9212ce55 that loves ePBS files. This is the first pass at trying to annotate forkchoice
https://t.co/RaZhHVhsmc

[Potuz @potuz_eth]

This one is more on the technical side, it's a first pass annotating the Gloas Fork until @benjaminion_xyz catches up.

Mostly for client devs that are asking why this or that was included instead of how the spec works.
https://t.co/TSLphGhHcm

[Kev @kevaundray]

Tomasz gently frontran us :) but here's our summary for how we plan to implement the L1-zkEVM roadmap: https://t.co/ioGSO8HVpr

Let us know what you think and also feel free to join the discussions on #l1-zkevm & #l1-zkevm-protocol on the ETH R&D discord server!

[ethPandaOps @ethPandaOps]

BPO2 landed last week. It bumped the max blobs per block to 21. We've been going through the data.

Initial analysis doesn't look good! Have a look at this scary chart. But there might be more to this story..

Link below!

[Potuz @potuz_eth]

Ok, a lot of noise got into my timeline that @x's algo was broken. I didn't realize by how much until I saw a tweet by the official geth team account about a crit, with only 2k views and 20 likes. Something is really broken. Anyway this should be broadcast everywhere

[Manu Nalepa @manunalepa]

@ethPandaOps https://t.co/9VMtAWrMQ0

[Manu Nalepa @manunalepa]

@christine_dkim @jameshe_eth @prylabs Thanks a lot @jameshe_eth and @christine_dkim!

Also that journey started thanks to @_TaxMeIfYouCan_ and @joshdavislight and their amazing EPF program :)

[Potuz @potuz_eth]

I wish I was doing this on better circumstances. But anyway this is the first post of a blog that may have just this single post
https://t.co/Q2O9vqxSXH

[terence @terencechain]

Our post mortem on the incident shortly after Fusaka is now live https://t.co/DKXYL61RKv

[Sam Calder-Mason @samcmAU]

Heres some data from the last 24h of nodes that we connected to on Mainnet wrt. PeerDAS.

- 17.6% of nodes are supernodes (4096+ ETH staked)
- 46.1% custody 4 columns (the minimum)
- 23.4% custody between 5-8 columns

IMPORTANT: These are NODE counts. They are not directly stake weighted.

More insights below 👇

[Prysm Ethereum Client @prylabs]

Prysm v7.1.0 is now live

If you're still on v7.0.0, move to v7.0.1 or later and drop the flag --disable-last-epoch-targets

Highlights:

1. Backfill for Fulu

Checkpoint sync now backfills data columns. Turn it on with --enable-backfill.

2. Semi supernode mode

--semi-supernode lets your node custody enough data columns to rebuild blobs without needing full supernode setup.

The December 4 attestation issues have been addressed. A full post mortem is on the way.

https://t.co/b699Dhalo2

[Christine D. Kim @christine_dkim]

so excited for this, my first live guest episode recording for the @ready4merge podcast! it's going to be a fun one chatting it up with @BarnabasBusa and @jameshe_eth about Fusaka. tune in tomorrow for our live takes on the upgrade from scoping to shipping ⛴️