
she/her; former founder/CEO @entropydotxyz (RIP 2021 - 2025)
berlin
Joined October 2014
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I am winding-up Entropy.
After four years, several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs, I’ve decided to wind-up Entropy and return capital to our investors.
For the latter half of 2025, the Entropy team was hard at work on a crypto automations platform (basically n8n/zapier/etc for crypto) with the addition of automated signing using threshold cryptography, secure computation via TEEs, and deep AI integrations.
After an initial feedback request revealed that the business model wasn’t venture scale, I was left with the choice to find a creative way forward or pivot once more. After four hard years working in crypto, I decided that the best I could do has already been done: it was time to close up shop.
I have a lot to say on “giving up”, maybe for a different time. I’ve never once given up in my career. The only thing I’ve ever quit was college, so this makes the second thing. It’s challenging, but I find peace in the fact that a career is a practice: the goal is not the destination, but the journey of innovation. Every step is a new result towards something even bigger than before.
The remaining team is exceptionally skilled: a brilliant software engineer (soon, a likely founder), an insanely talented and hungry product marketer, and the best and most talented product designer i’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. If any of these profiles fit your needs, please reach out and I’ll try and provide a double opt-in. These folks have been the best team a founder could ask for.
As for me, I’ll be taking a much needed break to do research on my next venture, spend time relaxing, and making art.
My time in crypto might be coming to an end, as I feel myself drawn specifically into pharmaceuticals: I want to innovate on hormone delivery, specifically for women who experience menopause and trans women for HRT. I will be spending my time validating my research on new Estradiol drug formulations, as well as biophysics and organic chemistry. If you have experience in the pharma or medicine space, please reach out!
Special thanks to @a16zcrypto and @guywuolletjr for being exceptionally helpful throughout this process. Their guidance has been invaluable.
Thanks to everyone who has been involved: without y’all, none of this would have been possible.
Thank you,
Voltairine Novatore Pacific (aka Tux)
tux pacific retweeted
Claude figured out the origin of the NIST curve parameters. Turns out to have been timestamps!
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
likewise, if you are a founder shutting down shop, hmu. happy to share my experience and how failure feels/how to handle it.
operator/advisor here — can help you startup and tell you exactly What The Fuck Not To Do.
if you’re interested in my perspective, hmu. i don’t mind yapping about my experiences to other young or green founders.
tux pacific retweeted
Post-quantum signatures are 10 to 100x bigger than today's. Aerie shrinks them back down.
tux pacific retweeted
München Hbf ich fress gerade einen McRib und trink dazu ein kühles Augustiner DB Sicherheitsdienst kann anblasen
in a coworking space and hearing the question, “how does staking work?” activated me like a sleeper agent
slightly related, i was 14 a few years after the crash and i had a job at chick fil a (i know…) and my middle-aged manager used to like… bully me because i was an effeminate teen.
one day, he was making fun of me for not knowing about football, and i just replied “why do you have a nuclear engineering degree and still work at a chick fil a, that’s kind of sad”, and then i quit my job and said he could have my hours /shrug
tux pacific retweeted
A question for actual mathematicians/people who have actually tried to read and understand the OpenAI proofs:
What (if any) are the big new methods/ideas you've seen in the proofs?
1/
if you are a cryptographer/mathematician, and you can distill a problem to distinctly one of these specific optimizations, you will find significant utility in using AI _right now_.
Replying to @TomerAshur
Where I do think AI is going be effective is in "bookeeping". This could be by finding slightly/somewhat better ways to reorder terms for maximum cancellation, finding a relation between round constants in two consecutive rounds, etc. >>
tux pacific retweeted
This is what I have been telling everyone who will listen.
The most valuable thing the frontier labs can now do for crypto (and math more broadly) is publish their *negative* results. What ideas they tried, how much compute they used, and what obstacles they found.
Replying to @matthew_d_green
And specifically for cryptanalysts who are working with models and for the labs:
Folks, what we need right now are *negative* results. Silence is the worst thing you could be publishing.
i was going to make a better worded announcement about this, but i feel quite compelled now to say that i am now working at @TheTNetwork to exactly move us from ECDSA to Schnorr in a matter of weeks, not months :)
look forward to a better announcement later.
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.
> besides frontrunning
the idea here isn’t to prevent address reuse entirely, it’s to mitigate the reuse to a timeline < the time to attack.
therefore, if it takes a week to pull off an attack, it’s reasonably safe to assume that u have a week to move assets if u reused an addr
besides frontrunning which bunker mode doesn't address yet
I think the 1 of 2 @safe might be the simplest approach to "bunker mode"
bundle each txn so its
- Do stuff
- add new signer (N +1)
- kick signer (N)
ideally this is integrated into a UI
tux pacific retweeted
These 0.99999984 solutions are not as "ugly" as it may seem.
The truth is, those are not the real runtimes of the algorithms published. To make the proof simpler, they use absurd safety bounds like 2^50 that are entirely arbitrary.
For example, imagine proving that 1/x^2 > 0. This proof is much harder if you include the area around x=0, as it blows up to infinity there. Instead, if you only prove it for x>=99999, it avoids this blowup and simplifies the proof, but still gets the point across.
The "real" bounds of those solutions are probably much tighter, maybe even something "beautiful" like O(n*lg lg n). But the goal of the AI papers was just to show that improvement is possible, not that the bounds are perfect (which is usually much harder to prove). Over the coming weeks and months, we'll likely see a lot of tightening.
























