Kevin Park.hl

[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.

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

@Hypurr @fiege_max 💙 hypurr

[Hypurr @Hypurr]

thank you community

hyperliquid

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

@Hypurr thank you jeff and team

hyperliquid

[Flood @ThinkingUSD]

Friendly reminder to those who own hype and have made considerable amounts of money now dunking on other companies.

Let’s not be smug and alienate future users of the platform. An exchange that is not growing is an exchange that’s dying.

Hyperliquid is for EVERYONE.

[MTS @MTSlive]

.@VitalikButerin on why a 1,000-year lifespan wouldn't get boring:

"Even if we lived to 1,000 years old, we're not gonna get bored. We're gonna keep creating new worlds for ourselves."

"Everything around us, the people, the world, changes so much over 10 years that it almost might as well be a death and a rebirth."

"15 years ago, it was normal for close friends to not talk to each other for days. Doesn't that sound crazy now?"

"In the first 20 years of your life you're a learner, a consumer. You're someone playing games that other people set up for you. One of the big transitions as you grow up is getting into more of a role of actually being the one that has to create and define and contribute to the games yourself."

@sodofi_ @binji_x

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

It's a companion to Machines of Loving Grace, an essay I wrote over a year ago, which focused on what powerful AI could achieve if we get it right: https://t.co/TDKfXIPw15

[AzFlin 🗿 @AzFlin]

i think the cognitive load of dev work has increased

before AI, a lot dev work was manually typing out variables, if statements, function calls etc. Not trivial but not super demanding

now AI's completely automated that, so we're left with the hard stuff:

- testing. So much testing now. Anytime AI ships sometime we have to test it to ensure that it not only works, but doesn't break/regress anything prior

- making decisions. Thinking about what to build, whether to include this feature or that feature, is mentally draining. There's often no black or white right answer so you're constantly internally debating

- multitasking, handling 2+ trains of thoughts at once. I recently moved from 1 claude code on 1 project -> 2 claude codes on 1 project (2 diff branches). Your focus and concentration required almost doubles

So yeah.. coding w/ AI definitely got easier.. but in a sense it also got harder 😭

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

@thsottiaux @doublemover still getting a lot of stream disconnections

[Mogie @mogie__]

downtown Puerto Rico if Jeff’s ex woulda settled for 15 min instead of 30

[Colossus @colossusmag]

Read the profile:

https://t.co/6r7dyghKhO

[androolloyd.hl @androolloyd]

Heads up everyone.

Seems the .fi registrar is likely compromised.

The .fi name servers were updated overnight to point back to the attacker.

While we still have access to the account it appears someone internally is coordinating. the dns has been moved away from the parking domains the attacker has been using.

The domain is registered with regery, if anyone else is using them, consider this your wake up call.

Be vigilant always.

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

@ripdotxyz hype

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

@tradexyz hyperliquid

[Hyperliquid Policy Center @HyperliquidPC]

CFTC @ChairmanSelig laid out an exciting roadmap for the Commission's top priorities at @MilkenInstitute's Future of Finance 2026 today:

"I view Project Crypto as a historic initiative between the agencies to upgrade and modernize our rules and regulations and future-proof them for technologies like crypto...."

"Many of the firms want to move onchain. The prior administration drove a lot of these firms and the liquidity offshore. The perpetuals markets are a great example of this. We've had perpetual futures contracts in crypto assets for a very long time[,] but they've developed offshore[.] We've got to bring that back to the United States. We need to have that liquidity here in the U.S...."

"We're working towards getting perpetual futures, true perpetual futures, not long-dated contracts, here in the U.S. within the next month or so.... We're also working towards onchain markets, so we're looking to have clear guidance as to what sort of digital wallets would implicate our regulations. The prior administration really went after firms that were just offering software products...."

"We're also working towards regulations that accommodate onchain software systems, so decentralized finance protocols and other types of blockchain networks.... We're going to make sure it's very clear as to what implicates the CFTC's regulations and what doesn't, and to the extent that an onchain software system or front-end does implicate our rules or regulations, we're modernizing and future-proofing those rules so that there's a place for all of that."

HPC applauds Chairman Selig's forward-thinking approach to regulation and stands ready to support his crucial work ensuring that decentralized markets for perpetual derivatives thrive in the United States. 🇺🇸

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

@bgdlabs oh dayum

[Dan Robinson @danrobinson]

Focus is probably even more important now than taste

AI will 10x your productivity but it will simultaneously hit you with weapons-grade nerdsnipes that consume 90% of your time

[schmosby @schmosby_xbt]

'look i know i fumbled this cycle by not selling again and i know i missed the entire metals and semiconductors and energy trade but ive been experimenting with opencla...'

'peter im getting married'

[Hyperliquid Policy Center @HyperliquidPC]

We are Hyperliquid Policy Center.

HPC is a research and advocacy nonprofit focused on advancing a clear path for decentralized finance to thrive in the USA.

We will introduce policymakers to @HyperliquidX and bridge the gap between law and next-generation market infrastructure.

[Kevin Park.hl @tenQkp]

gud grok

[Grok @grok]

@SageWhale