@cass_on_mars shipped some pretty impressive updates (Klearu and MetaVM) for @QuilibriumInc.
In case it was too complex for you, here it is explained for normies!
MetaVM — What is it?
Imagine you hire someone to do a maths problem for you. Normally, you'd have to redo the entire problem yourself to check they got it right. MetaVM is a tool that lets that person hand you a tiny "receipt" that mathematically proves they did the work correctly, without you having to redo anything. One quick check and you know the answer is legit.
What makes it stand out is that it works across three major computing worlds: RISC-V (a general purpose chip architecture, the kind that runs Linux, and the direction Vitalik has publicly said he wants to move towards), Ethereum's EVM (the engine behind ETH smart contracts), and Solana's BPF (the engine behind Solana programs). It can verify an entire Ethereum block or an entire Solana slot in one go.
It also plugs into Quilibrium's own cryptographic foundation, while remaining compatible with Ethereum's. That means it can speak both languages.
Why it matters: For Quilibrium's network, this solves the fundamental trust problem. You don't have to trust the random machine that ran your code. You just check the proof. That's what makes decentralised computing actually work rather than just being a nice idea.
The bigger picture:
Quilibrium's founder has already gone directly to Vitalik pointing out that MetaVM does exactly what Ethereum's own roadmap calls for. And because the code is released under strict rules (AGPL), any company that wants to build a business on top of it would either have to make their entire product open and free, or come to Quilibrium for a commercial deal. That's a deliberate move to prevent big players from taking the technology, privatising it, and extracting value without giving anything back, which is exactly what happened with Ethereum's own codebase when companies like Coinbase built Base on top of it. It positions Quilibrium not just as a technology provider but as a gatekeeper against corporate value extraction in the crypto ecosystem.
Klearu — What is it?
Right now, when you use ChatGPT or any AI chatbot, you're sending your raw thoughts, questions, and data straight to a company's servers. They can see everything you type. Klearu is Quilibrium's answer to that problem. It lets you use AI models without anyone seeing what you actually asked.
It has two big pieces:
The first is speed. Normal AI models process everything: every single connection in the neural network fires for every word, even when most of that work is pointless. Klearu uses a technique based on peer reviewed research (the SLIDE paper family) that flips the approach. Instead of brute forcing through the entire model, it uses smart shortcuts to figure out which tiny fraction of the network actually matters for your specific input and only runs that part. The result, proven in academic benchmarks, is that a regular CPU can outperform expensive GPU hardware for certain workloads. That's a massive deal because Quilibrium's network runs on regular computers, not GPU farms.
The second is privacy. Klearu lets two parties work together on AI inference where neither side sees the other's secrets. The person running the model never sees your prompt. You never get access to the model's weights. Both sides work on encrypted data the whole time, using real cryptographic protocols, not "trust us, we deleted the logs" promises. The maths guarantees it.
Everyone is talking about AI right now, but almost nobody is solving the privacy side. Every big AI company has full access to every conversation you have with their models. Klearu means $QUIL could offer AI as a service where privacy is baked into the maths itself. A node operator on the network could run a LLaMA model and serve your requests without ever knowing what you asked or what the answer was. That doesn't exist anywhere else in a meaningful form right now.
The trade off:
This is still early. The privacy mode adds real overhead, roughly 2MB of encrypted back and forth per token at the highest security level, which is heavy. And the benchmarks so far use smaller models (up to 1.7 billion parameters), not the massive models people associate with frontier AI. But as a foundation for private AI on a decentralised network, it's one of the most technically serious attempts out there. And crucially, it runs on CPUs, which means it's built to work on the kind of machines that already power the Quilibrium network rather than requiring expensive specialised hardware that would centralise everything again.
At a $15M valuation, $quil has one of the best R/R setups for me personally!
Don't be lazy, guys, spend some time researching. Q!
Tagging @AlgodTrading since he's the guy who always looks for conviction plays.
The biggest question for crypto:
will AI use it?
Say an instance of ChatGPT, or Claude, wants more compute.
Does it pay by wire transfer, credit card, or crypto?
On the one hand, trad finance doesn't work well for AIs.
Like—how do they KYC? They have no passport, address, social security number, or even name.
Crypto works much better—it's already digital, it's permissionless, AIs can already query the blockchain, etc.
On the other hand, we might see an 'agent' model:
each AI is treated as an agent of some specific human, and that human does the KYC, is responsible for what the AI does, etc.
(Which brings up a related question: who is legally responsible for what an AI does?)
Either way, some work needs to be done to plug the world of AI into the world of trading and payments. Either that work will be natively digital and crypto-based, or it'll be reliant on a human 'master' for the AI.
Which direction it goes in has huge implications for the world.
One of those is the future of crypto.
@VitalikButerin@0xSigil it would be interesting to see more open/dweb-adjacent labs focusing on interpretability, red-teaming, security, and privacy in frontier AI, as opposed to more agent and capabilities slop
0/ ERC-8004, the standard for universal AI agent identity, reputation, and verification, is now live on Ethereum Mainnet.
With the ERC-8004 standard, AI agents are accountable economic actors.
Here are 5 unlocks that ERC-8004 gives to builders, and how to integrate today.