bjj retweeted
theres been a sudden wave of interest in where @gitcoin is headed.
but have we *earned* it?
i worry about the hype getting out ahead of fundamentals, so where things actually stand.
we are building techne: an everything app for localism. the first pieces are small, and over time we expect it to grow into local commerce, local funding, local events, and whatever else a town needs to coordinate itself.
this represents our most serious attempt to date to go mainstream. if we are successful, we bring our mission (Fund What Matters) and impact ($69m funding via 5mm txns) to everyday people. if we are successful, your nocoiner friends will be using our app.
the bet: if enough of a community's daily life runs on shared rails, you get network effects that bootstrap a local commons, and the money moving through it stays in town longer. (today a lot of it leaks out to platforms skimming 15-30% off every transaction.)
where things stand:
1. one of the applets is live in private alpha. it's in a small group's hands and it's rough in the ways alphas are rough.
2. we've got an sdk in private alpha too, so other builders could eventually ship their own local applets on the same rails. (builders: help build it!).
3. the other applets are very early. if you're waiting on one of them, expect to wait a while (builders: unless you want to help us build it!).
4. nothing has changed with GTC. it's still a governance token with no claim on economics, and nothing in this plan changes that. Allo Protocol and Grants Stack (our last gen products) are still wound down (but protocols live on on mainnet!). there are no plans for a new token. (governerds: proposals welcome).
5. beacon (the first app) helps you meetup with friends locally ran its first in-person test: 10 of roughly 15 invitees showed up in bad weather, we have 8 engaged beta testers, and 5 people reported a new connection. promising pilot, way too small to conclude anything from. (alpha testers wanted!).
6. buoy (the second app) helps you fund locally is targeting november. this will be a test of a simmilar magnitude of the beacon first test. (alpha testers wanted!).
7. we will continue to scale product - this means rolling out apps and pilots. if/when the trend is bigly up and to the right, and the final everything app slaps, we ship it and we do a big splashy launch around it. (beta testers wanted!).
8. we're setting up a 501(c)(3) and aiming to raise $$ from mainstream grants and mains donors eventually. this may also mean that future fundraising on our platforms will be tax-exempt in the US!
9. we're moving fast on product because the window on localism is open right now, the tools to rebuild enshittified technofeudalist corposlop SAAS products into something better are available now, and people are feeling the squeeze of ai displacement and platform rent in their actual towns.
10. this is my personal interpretation, not a decision by gitcoin governance, and not financial advice. dates are targets, not commitments, and all of it may change as we learn. this post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, make your own decisions.
11. if you think im doing it wrong, REeEEeeeE at my in the comments.
12. if you think im doing it wrong, and constructively/earnestly want to help right the ship, @ me on gov.gitcoin.co - make sure you tag the transition stewards (there are a half dozen of them, and they're here to hold all of us accountable to a new direction!)
tldr
1. what we care about is people using this stuff where they live. the 1st private alpha is live but that number is small today.
2. if you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is fill out this form and start contributing: forms.gle/gh7vNtZJhpCBBRJD9
3. lets not get ahead of ourselves.
4. yall shouldve heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and you should heed mine today - ask yourself "have we earned it?"
ALT callback!!! if you had heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and not gotten ahead of yourself, you'd have had a good time!
bjj retweeted
two frontiers im pondering as we quietly lay tracks for @gitcoin next chapter
1. syntropic financing
2. consumer adoption
syntropy is the tendency of living systems to organize toward greater order, energy, and complexity over time.
eg a forest doesn't just sustain itself, it gets richer over time. richer (in the context of nature) = more soil, more species, more energy turned into resilience each season.
syntropic financing asks what capital would look like if it behaved the same way. money that leaves every system it touches more alive than it found it, where the returns are measured in the health and growth of the whole.
consumer adoption is how that reaches the world. the primitive only matters if ordinary people touch it through products they'd already choose, no ideology required.
get both right and you have an engine that grows the system and an on-ramp wide enough for everyone to climb aboard.
I think in 2019-2022 @gitcoin was a leader in both. QF is a small glimmer of what syntropic financing can be. and @gitcoin was one of the first consumer dapps ppl used.
I think that in 2027+ it is possible we could do it again at a larger and more holistic scale - tho success is not guaranteed, this is an aspiration and a target, imo we are well positioned to take another shot.
bjj retweeted
Onchain options are no longer a one-venue market.
Notional volume more than doubled to $4.83B in September. Derive nearly kept pace and remains the clear leader. Its share of notional eased from 88.1% to 79.3% as two smaller venues grew even faster.
Hypercall and Paradex together held under 4% of the market in August. Hypercall went from $9.4M to $538.8M in a single month and now ranks second. Paradex nearly quadrupled after opening its request-for-quote system to the public.
Onchain options are starting to look like a competitive market.
bjj retweeted
I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography.
The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices.
(and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation)
So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math.
The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be?
This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-.
For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption.
And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10.
To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety.
And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all.
Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems.
For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size).
Concrete TLDR, my own personal views:
* Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all
* For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ...
* For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism.
* If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**.
* For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money"
firefly.social/post/x/210783…
bjj 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.
bjj retweeted
We just added the reincarnated @zk_money to the L2BEAT's Privacy Page.
Aztec's permissionless, private DAI wallet encrypts transfers on @aztecnetwork, but maintaining end-to-end privacy on the protocol comes with distinct trade-offs.
Here is a full breakdown from us👇
bjj retweeted
Permissionless, programmable, unstoppable privacy.
Top things that will be possible on Aztec via zk.money this year:
1. Savings vaults
2. Bank / IBAN payouts
3. Fund L2 accounts privately
4. Zero knowledge passport proofs to unlock larger limits with @ZKPassport
6. Pots and group bills
7. More passkey support / accounts types
8. Mobile apps
9. Delegated account access to agents
bjj retweeted
The funds from the $3.8M NEAR Intents hack were sent back in full.
We are stopping the investigation.
Please use bug bounties instead of disrupting the services.
bjj retweeted
NEAR is permissionless programmable money.
Permissionless means nobody needs permission to own and transfer assets, or deploy contracts on NEAR.
It does not mean every application or liquidity provider must process every transaction.
SHIELD is how NEAR Intents applies this in practice: shared, real-time risk intelligence that lets participants identify hacks and other incidents and choose not to facilitate stolen funds. Partners can both consume and contribute incident data.
In the Bitget hack, SHIELD identified $50M+ in attempted flows through NEAR Intents and helped stop funds during execution.
Open financial infrastructure does not require us to make theft easy. Instead of hiding behind "it's permissionless, what can we do" while sitting on pause button, we should be creative in solutions that are addressing underlying problem.
We can have permissionless protocols that have intelligent defense. This is what we are building with SHIELD and invite everyone to join to make SHIELD industry-wide.
bjj retweeted
As @DeriveXYZ is growing exponentially, heads up there is an agent-powered trading app built @DeriveXYZ called @OverwriteIntern.
This will be such a hit once more discover how it suggests/feeds you all the different trading ideas and yield-earning setups possible on Derive.
⚡️ Derive = the engine for options trading
📊 Overwrite = user-friendly trading app on Derive
🔗 Still in beta but try it / join waitlist here: overwrite.pro
AI makes options accessible to everyone 🤝
Not because people suddenly love options but because AI can do all the translation work: take your trade idea and show you the best way to express it.
@nickforster on why this is a big tailwind for @DeriveXYZ V3 shipping soon!
bjj retweeted
Many of you have asked us why yields on tokenized stocks are so high, and where that yield actually comes from.
For Coinbase Tokenized Stocks on Zyfai, the yield has three layers:
→ Underlying pool yield, including pool incentives
→ Additional Zyfai USDC incentives
→ rZFI rewards
Today, incentives account for the yield in these stock vaults.
$NVDAc has the highest APY at ~30%, with yield coming from:
→ @superformxyz incentives: 10% in USDC and 8.69% in sUP, a staked $UP token
→ Zyfai incentives: 10% in USDC and 1.17% in rZFI, a vested $ZFI token
IPOR Fusion's stock vaults for $METAc, $AAPLc, and $GOOGLc also offer incentives:
→ @ipor_io incentives: 10% in USDC
→ Zyfai incentives: 10% in USDC and 1.17% in rZFI, a vested $ZFI token
Next comes the carry trade, which IPOR is preparing to activate soon:
→ Tokenized stocks are used as collateral to borrow USDC
→ The borrowed USDC is deployed into yield-generating lending markets or vaults
→ The strategy earns the spread between the USDC yield and borrowing costs, net of fees
We're also working to support this strategy natively in Zyfai, with your Yield Account handling the entire flow directly instead of allocating into a curator-managed vault. More on that as it develops.
bjj retweeted
If you're building anything that touches user data onchain, this is the @EFDevcon talk to sit in.
@Zac_Aztec will present what programmable privacy entails at the system level, from the perspective of the network that already shipped it.
Private state. Public network. Hard tradeoffs.
@Zac_Aztec, Co-founder of Aztec Network, is joining Devcon 8 to unpack what programmable privacy actually demands from the systems we build & where the toughest design choices show up.
Catch his talk in the Privacy & Consent track.
bjj retweeted
BREAKING: @idrx_co, the regulated, fiat-backed Indonesian Rupiah stablecoin, is live on Celo, the most widely adopted network for stablecoin payments 🇮🇩
Backed 1:1 by Rupiah reserves & bonds, IDRX will power remittances & payments & w/ @Textileprotocol onchain FX from day one!
bjj retweeted
People killed by AI: zero
People killed by governments: millions
Let's give control of AI to the governments and call it safety
bjj retweeted
Bold is the tree hiding the forest of friends who gave up on self-custody.
After a decade, we simply did a poor job of educating people on how to use the chains safely.
Stuck between being too dogmatic, pushing for purity of an overly complex system, and too reckless of yolo mode
Let me try again; don't just bookmark this do it. Give the link to this tweet to your AI and have it help you:
1) Use @ambire as your main wallet; it handles simulation, complex tx, and is designed to work well with @safe
2) Deploy a Safe now. I don't care if it's a 1/1 linked to your hot wallet for now; it's fine. It's already better this way, and with Ambire, using it is seamless.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO USE THE SAFE UI; Ambire will do it all for you.
3a) Generate a real seed; use pen and paper. You'll get the fancy steel stuff later if you want.
3b) Too lazy for the seed stuff? ok, use a "hotwallet" for your signer generated with a passkeys with an good password manager, you have a Mac? The Passwords app is fine; you're a Revolut client? NordPass is included; you ready to spend a bit? 1Password has a great API, and you'll love it once you're AI-pilled.
5) The signer wallet must hold no funds, doesn't hold gas, doesn't do any txs; it's the key to unlock the door of your safe; it signs, and that's it. You'll learn later that proposing (creating tx), signing, and executing tx are 3 different jobs that don't need to be done by the same wallets.
6a) Now create a second hot wallet, "executooor," and send some gas to it, a few bucks of ETH suffice. Use gas.zip to have some gas on every chain you use.
6b) Don't want to do that? No worries, use the "gas tank" feature on Ambire; it does the same job you can always improve later.
That's it for step one, and just that you're safer than Bold and 99% of guys out there.
Step 2 is buying a hardware wallet and rotating the safe signer with it for much safer holding
Once you're there, you can start considering a 1/2 with a second hw or with an old phone you have in your drawer that you've factory reset and will use only for that. You keep it out of easy reach; it's your insurance if something bad happens to your main signer.
Then maybe a 2/3 and the nerdy stuff; you can always do "better," but the foundation of all that is getting your first safe deployed and climbing from there.
Do it now; it's not hard, it's worth it.
This quoted post is unavailable.
bjj retweeted
Cap almost reached.
The ETH carry vault is close to full, again.
Get ~8% APR paid out in ETH.
Uses Liquity and Curve only.
app.ipor.io/fusion/ethereum/…
bjj retweeted
The hardest part of using your @MiniPay Card at the market?
Picking out your produce 🍇🍌🥭
The rest is easy. Pay with stablecoins at 175M+ merchants & earn 5% cashback using the card built by @Opera with @Visa & @GnosisPay, only on Celo: minipay.to