prev: head of engineering @superstateinc , core eng @fraxfinance

New York
Joined April 2020
Next week will be my last week at @SuperstateInc For over three years, I've had the pleasure of working alongside @rleshner @HiltnerJim @Dean_Swennumson and many others. The engineering org is in a ridiculously strong place, and is stronger than I could have imagined when we started it. I will continue to cheer for Superstate from the sidelines. Superstate is already positioned to be the most important and impactful tokenized funds and equities company. Chris Ridmann will be taking over for me as Head of Engineering. Everyone that knows Chris knows he is extremely sharp, kind, hardworking, and curious. He will do an amazing job leading Superstate to continued victory. I'm going to take some time off and then chew glass with some other challenging task in crypto. 🫡
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Jon Walch retweeted
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS. Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
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i think the toughest thing to understand is that it literally doesn't matter if your software is open source, closed source anymore - if it's closed source, people can and will RE: its internals, if it's a part of a broader suite, ppl will make it a plugin in their suite, if it's a model that people can blackbox fuzz and the model isnt huge and didn't have incredibly proprietary data, you are going to get copied on the tech so every core product launch probably needs to be treated as an extreme countdown race, before the incumbent with the distribution eats you brutal times to be playing, and extremely valuable/rare to find a corner of the stack that may be defensible and will stay defensible
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Jon Walch retweeted
In 2017, $BCH hit 30% the mcap of BTC. $LTC hit 8%. Both behind the "better version of Bitcoin" narrative. $ZEC currently sits at 1.6%. Getting to 15-20% is not unreasonable. At $100k BTC, that would price $ZEC at $15 - 20k. 5 digit Zcash. Most are not ready for this scenario.
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Jon Walch retweeted
Want to be a “forward deployed lawyer” at Superstate, or know somebody who would? Perfect role for fun, fast pace, lawyer with a securities background. Law is dying, join a fantastic startup.
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Jon Walch retweeted
my options trading MCP suggested $ANF yesterday. stock is currently up +40% after crushing earnings, and my position is up +600% overnight you need to be trading with codex/claude
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Are there any hardware wallets with zcash shielded support besides Keystone 3 Pro? Been waiting for Ledger forever and about to capitulate.
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Jon Walch retweeted
Introducing Permissioned Pools on Uniswap v4 A new hook standard that brings permissioned assets to the AMM with compliance checks enforced at the protocol level Built in collaboration with @SuperstateInc, @Securitize, Dowgo, and other leading teams bringing value onchain
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I appreciate the interest in--but not the hyperbole about--the contemplated innovation exemption for the onchain trading of tokenized NMS stock. Keep in mind: I've always expected that it'd be limited in scope & would facilitate trading only of digital representations of the same underlying equity security that an investor could purchase in the secondary market today, not synthetics.
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Jon Walch retweeted
1/ Natively tokenized @galaxyhq shares are now available on @Kamino’s Superstate Market. Eligible ex-US investors can bring shares onto @solana through Superstate and use them as collateral to borrow stables. The real shares of a major public company have entered DeFi.
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Jon Walch retweeted
Big news: @SuperstateInc and @InvescoUS are working together to build the future of tokenized funds. Our original fund $USTB will soon become Invesco USTB, the first product by an established asset manager running on the Superstate tokenization platform 📈
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Jon Walch retweeted
1/ We’re proud to announce an $82.5M Series B, led by @BainCapCrypto and Distributed Global, with participation from @HaunVentures, Brevan Howard Digital, @galaxyhq, Sentinel Global, @Bullish, @hypersphere_, and @flowdesk_co alongside our existing investors.
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Jon Walch retweeted
I'm proud to announce that @SuperstateInc has raised a $82.5M Series B, to continue building the world's best tokenization platform and team. Thank you to our investors, and the partners that trust us to bring securities onchain, and into DeFi. Big things ahead 📈
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Jon Walch retweeted
Tokenized stocks: what’s actually tokenized? Tokens make everything look the same Your rights don’t
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1/ Real Equity. In DeFi. 🔔Opening Bell tokenized equities are now available as collateral on @kamino, marking the first time real public equity has entered an onchain lending market. Onchain issuance was step one. Utility is the next phase.
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1/ Forward Industries (NASDAQ: $FWDI) has officially tokenized its SEC-registered shares on @solana through 🔔Superstate Opening Bell. @FWDind is the first to enable ex-US investors to use their shares as collateral to borrow stablecoins through lending platform @kamino.
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