Comms @StarkWareLtd | Co-host 🎙 of Clear Crypto w/ @gazza_jenks | Cutting through the blockchain blah blah 🔍 Opinions my own
Joined October 2021
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While writing Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust, someone asked me...
"Why should anyone who isn't already in crypto care about blockchain?"
I answered the way many of us in this industry do.
I talked about decentralization, consensus and cryptography. Then I stopped halfway through!
I realised most people don't care how a ledger reaches consensus.
They care whether they really own something, whether a record can be trusted and whether an agreement will still count years from now.
That conversation changed the opening chapter.
Instead of beginning with blockchain, Eli and I began with trust.
The first chapter of Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust was the one I questioned the most.
Part of me wanted to get straight to zero knowledge proofs.
Instead, Eli and I spent the opening chapter talking about records, trust, ownership and something as ordinary as who gets to decide what is true.
At first, it felt like a detour, but eventually, I realised it was the foundation.
Zero knowledge only becomes meaningful once you understand why proving something matters in the first place.
The most technical part of the book depends on the least technical chapter.
That is why Chapter One exists exactly as it does.
If you're curious where the story begins, the first chapter is in the comments.
Read the free first chapter of Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust here: drive.google.com/file/d/1rES…
Every technology eventually disappears
The technologies that change the world usually stop being described by the technology itself.
Nobody talks about TCP/IP when they send an email, GPS every time they order a taxi, or encryption before opening a banking app.
The technology disappears because the value becomes obvious.
I suspect blockchain will follow the same path.
The long-term success of this technology will be measured by how rarely people have to wonder whether an important digital record can be trusted.
That has always seemed like the more interesting story to me, and it is the story Eli and I set out to tell in Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust.
🚨 We Confuse Convenience With Trust
Convenience is one of the great achievements of the internet.
It is also easy to mistake convenience for trust.
A service can be beautifully designed while still requiring you to accept that its records are accurate, its policies are fair, and its operators will always act in your interest.
Those assumptions rarely matter until something goes wrong.
The question blockchain asks is whether convenience and verification can exist together.
It is also why the first chapter of Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust begins with everyday life rather than cryptography.
🚨We Have Normalized Asking Permission
One thing surprised me while writing Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust.
We have become so accustomed to asking institutions for permission that we rarely notice how often we do it.
What blockchain forces us to ask is a different question.
Should every important fact about our lives require an intermediary to confirm it, or are there cases where the record itself should be enough?
That is a subtle distinction, but it changes the way you think about digital infrastructure.
The technology is interesting because it challenges assumptions we have stopped noticing.
That is one of the conversations @EliBenSasson and I wanted to start in Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust.
A credit score looks like a number, but it can shape whether someone is treated as trustworthy, employable, eligible, or financially safe.
That is the quiet power of credit scores and platform records
Modern life depends on them, yet many of the most important records are held somewhere else.
For most of modern life, trust has been institutional.
Now, trust is moving from institutions to proofs
We trust banks, platforms, governments, and companies to keep the record and process the transaction.
The shift I care about is not from trust to no trust.
It is from trust that must be assumed to trust that can be checked.
Why ordinary people still have not heard the real blockchain story
Blockchain has suffered less from a lack of ambition than from a lack of explanation.
Most people met it through price, scandal, jargon, or ideology.
The real story starts with ordinary questions: who holds the record, who can change it, and who gets to decide what counts?
'Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust' was written because the real story has too often been told from the machinery outward.
Read the free first chapter of Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust here: drive.google.com/file/d/1rES…
What happens when a record cannot be quietly rewritten?
A better question than “what is blockchain?” is this:
What changes when a digital record cannot be quietly rewritten?
That matters for money, documents, identity, access, ownership, and rights.
Once you start from the record, the technology becomes easier to understand.
The internet connected everyone, but trust did not come with it
We can move information instantly, yet we still depend on platforms, to tell us what happened and whether it should count.
That tension is easy to miss because the internet feels complete.
I do not think it is complete.
The first internet made information abundant. The next version has to make records, payments, identities, and computations easier to verify.
That is the larger story behind 'Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust.'
Your life is stored in other people’s systems
Your money, photos, files, reputation, credit score, documents, and identity increasingly live inside systems you do not control.
That is convenient until the record is wrong, frozen, lost, changed, or impossible to question.
This is where blockchain becomes a human story, not just a technical one.
Can digital life remain convenient while giving people stronger guarantees about ownership, access, accuracy, and trust?
🚨 Quantum Readiness Is Now a Blockchain Necessity
NIST is pushing organizations to prepare for post-quantum migration, and @StarkWareLtd has published a post-quantum roadmap for Starknet.
That is the right time horizon for serious infrastructure.
If blockchains are meant to hold records for decades, they must be built for threats beyond this cycle.
Tokenized assets need more than tokenization
RWA.xyz tracks about $33.37B billion in distributed asset value and 961,009 total asset holders.
That growth matters, but the harder questions matter more.
What does the token represent, who verifies it, what are the rights, and where does the record actually hold?
CCData reported that total stablecoin market cap reached a new all-time high of $317 billion in March 2026.
That number is usually discussed as a crypto market statistic, but I think the larger story is more interesting.
In the first chapter of Zero Knowledge, Infinite Trust, we write about the contradiction of a global, instant, digital internet still relying on payment systems full of intermediaries, delays, and failure points.
Stablecoins are one answer to that contradiction.
Ransomware Shows Records Are Leverage
Verizon says 48% of breaches now involve ransomware.
I read that as a record-keeping warning, not only a cybersecurity statistic.
Modern life runs on records of money, identity, access, ownership, and history. When attackers freeze the record, they freeze the institution.
Crypto never stops, but Congress takes a multi-week snooze. As politicians take a break, the regulatory clock stops, leaving markets stranded in the dark. And it's bad for crypto.
Sometimes it feels that code is relentless and transparent while politics is just a game of who controls the pause button.
This changes the trust conversation in crypto and beyond.
Verizon’s 2026 DBIR says 31% of breaches now begin with software vulnerabilities, ahead of stolen passwords.
The next internet cannot only ask whether people are careful.
It has to ask whether systems can prove they did what they claim.
Software is now the trust problem
