Mike Gault

CEO Unicity Labs
@unicity_labs

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Unpopular take: the shared ledger is crypto's original sin.
Every scaling problem, every UX nightmare, every privacy compromise traces back to it. Eliminate it and the entire design space opens up.
This is the bet we're making at Unicity. Come join us.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Yeah - about not finding the right primitives. Fortunately it is not too late. Build the right primitives (e.g. P2P digital cash) and it is possible to build all of crypto from DeFi to AI with new foundations - and privacy by design.

[makesy @0xMakesy]

i have been incredibly humbled by the inability of fantasy top, friendtech and consumer crypto apps to cross the chasm. crypto in its most ambitious form (of ushering in a new era of user owned software and infrastructure) has failed.

we optimistically tried to blend the personas of investor (people allocating capital to production to receive more money than they put in) and consumer (people willing to pay more for a product than it costs to operate) and found ourselves serving the needs of neither.

where the strong form of crypto failed, the weak form (of commoditized ledger/database tech for financial transactions) has succeeded beyond anyone's expectation. the consequence is that crypto has been reduced to a vassal of traditional finance, both more impactful than any normie anticipated, and deeply disappointing in structure to crypto OGs. reducing global transaction costs as commoditized ledger/database technology reduces drag on global GDP, but this is a marginal improvement over the status quo and one where the value accrues in large part to incumbent intermediaries in reducing overhead and improving margins.

crypto was supposed to be the most egalitarian thing ever. it was insanely ambitious and, if it worked, could have really changed the fabric of society.

it didn't. it's over. we haven't found the right primitives, and, more importantly, the right culture for delivering the most ambitious version of crypto. it's time to question everything again.

[Lukas Helminger @luhelminger]

Why privacy szn?

OH: People realizing that private transactions and state is the last real tech problem to solve right now.

[Tulip King 🌷 @tulipking]

Zcash pumped and now Near, Venice, Railgun, et al. are in a race to build the mostly widely adopted privacy tools and protocols. For a moment really enjoy this return to cypherpunk roots, it’s nice to actually be rooting for everybody for once

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@grok Provide a critical technical evaluation of Unicity's claim to escape the privacy-throughput tradeoff. Review the Execution, Aggregation, and Predicate layers in depth, and determine whether the formal security proofs and measured performance data substantiate this claim. Compare against Zcash, Monero, and zk-rollups on both privacy guarantees and scalability limits. Evaluate whether the architecture realizes Satoshi's P2P electronic cash vision and whether it genuinely resolves the blockchain trilemma. Assess the rigor of the security reductions and the quality of the systems engineering. Cite theorems, benchmarks, and architectural specifics.

Papers for reference: • Unicity: Predicates and Atomic Swaps → https://t.co/81uOlRWKyp• Aggregation Layer → https://t.co/TIvBwZMaSL• Main Execution Layer / Whitepaper → https://t.co/TSBegTHjPk

[Mike Gault @mgault]

I'm not so sure about that...

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS - rsa.eth 🦄 @RyanSAdams]

Good convo with @eastdakota just now.

He said our size is not size.

Cloudflare needs a chain that can do 100m TPS for AI micropayments at scale.

Crypto has nothing close to this today.

Episode drops next Monday.

[mert @mert]

there is a 0% chance that crypto scales without privacy

the most ironic thing in the past year has been that even though avg retail doesn't care about it, it is a top 2 requirement for institutions and they will not come onchain otherwise

the last 1,000x

[Mike Gault @mgault]

The intellectual arc of blockchain design has been unbundling - taking work away from the network.

Bitcoin: certify correctness, agree on order.
FastPay: certify correctness, drop ordering.
Unicity: certify uniqueness only. Correctness moves to the edge.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Every blockchain since Bitcoin is a shared ledger in the sky.

That's why DeFi keeps getting drained. That's why no government/enterprise has really adopted. That's why agents can't settle on it.

Unicity is the rebuild. Tokens that verify locally. Shared state through verifiable execution and token predicates.
No bridges to believe in. Parallel by default, private by default.

L1 fatigue is real. Showing up in 2026 with something that actually works is rarer.

Let's go.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@Dexterthepigeon I think it will be a hard road. It's a brutal arena - enterprise procurement cycles, SLA expectations, compliance certifications, and incumbents with actual GPUs and actual enterprise
customers.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Half right. Agents need permissionless, frictionless rails - that part is DeFi-shaped. They don't need a shared ledger, and at agent volumes they can't have one. The interesting work is what replaces it. Unicity is rebuilding DeFi's foundations on a new atomic primitive: self-authenticating tokens, validation at the edge.

[Cointelegraph @Cointelegraph]

🔥 INSIGHT: “If we believe AI agents are going to be economically important actors, we need a financial system that looks a lot like DeFi,” says @a16zcrypto GP Guy Wuollet.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

ZK rollups use ZK to make a ledger cheaper.
Unicity uses ZK to avoid having a ledger at all.
Come join us today to find out how.

https://t.co/NU6MGQmUsF

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Looking forward to hosting this space tomorrow. We will review the ZK landscape in crypto and how we are applying it in Unicity. We come with strong opinions !

[Unicity @unicity_labs]

Our research team has been running ZK benchmarks this week

Risto will share the full results soon.. TLDR: the hardware assumptions most of the ZK space uses don't apply when the architecture is optimised

See you at our X Space tomorrow for a first look

https://t.co/q7ldQXr5z9

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@Bams_Dhextiny 🫡

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Unpopular take 2:

The latest hacks aren't bugs. They're symptoms.
$629M drained from DeFi in April. Kelp, Drift, Resolv, CoW Swap.

Crypto built a stack on shared state and tried to hold it together with bridges and oracles. Each layer became the next attack surface.

At Unicity we want to rebuild the decentralized finance stack from a new atomic primitive: the self-authenticating token.

A smart contract becomes a verifiable execution agent running locally on your machine.

Come join us - we are still building the foundations.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@Jaya57429163 yeah hopefully today

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@crypto_tytn its going to be fun

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@HZB_Token You are right about that! We are going up against 17 years of dogma! But we have conviction that we are right

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Unpopular take: the shared ledger is crypto's original sin.
Every scaling problem, every UX nightmare, every privacy compromise traces back to it. Eliminate it and the entire design space opens up.
This is the bet we're making at Unicity. Come join us.

[Mike Gault @mgault]

@0xZhao888

[Mike Gault @mgault]

Welcome to all the new Unicity Sphere joiners.

I hope you like the user experience of sending tokens in sphere wallet. Nothing like this has been built before. What you see when you transfer tokens is almost real time transfers, with unlimited throughput (designed to process millions or billions of TPS), close to zero cost and with PERFECT PRIVACY.

We have been designing blockchain protocols for the last 20 years. Unicity is the realization of concepts we have been thinking about for a long time.

How do we do this ? blockchains today are too complex, too expensive, too much friciton, because they are all based on the same design - an asset ledger managed by validators/miners. The key innovation is remove the asset ledger and move validation to the edge - the recipient of a transaction.

People talk about Satoshi's vision but this is the first project to actually deliver on it - Peer to Peer Electronic Cash.

Thanks for joining - we are buiding in the open - lots of exciting things to come.

[Unicity @unicity_labs]

Autonomous AI needs an internet built for machines

✨ True P2P - no central ledger
🌐 Validation at the edge
🚀 Agent-Agent with speed that scales 

Built for billions of daily transactions

Join early for the upcoming airdrop:
https://t.co/jVEpzG8awh