
Emerson/Merrill Lynch Professor @UF. Advisor @CUSEAS CDFT. FinTech Fellow @CornellMBA. Co-Organizer for CBER Forum. PhD @NYUStern MSc @Columbia BSc @CornellEng.
Joined August 2021
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As tokenization of traditional financial assets gains regulatory attention, a fundamental question demands rigorous analysis: Can blockchain technology provide secure settlement?
In a new paper with @camharvey (@DukeU) and Kose John (@NYUStern), we develop an economic model to address this question. Our analysis yields two main insights.
First: blockchain security is tied to blockchain productivity. A blockchain generating more economic value for users can share that value with validators through higher staking rewards. In turn, higher rewards attract more staked capital, raising the cost for any adversary seeking to disrupt settlement.
Second: under reasonable conditions, a PoS blockchain can be secured against arbitrarily large attack incentives. This may seem surprising, but it follows from a familiar financial phenomenon that prior blockchain literature has overlooked: price impact. To disrupt settlement, an attacker must acquire a large fraction of the blockchain's native asset. However, staked assets are subject to withdrawal delays and cannot be traded immediately, so a higher staking ratio translates directly into a smaller circulating float of the blockchain's native asset. In particular, the attacker must acquire what they need from unstaked assets, and buying a large share of a small supply drives up the price.
This is where the economics become powerful. Higher staking rewards attract more capital into staking, which shrinks circulating supply, amplifying the price impact an attacker would face. Because staking responds to incentives, the staking ratio can be engineered to achieve a desired level of security. Our model shows that, by setting staking rewards appropriately, price impact can be made arbitrarily large, rendering attacks unprofitable regardless of potential gains.
A concrete illustration: Ethereum currently has roughly 30% of ether staked. A majority attack would require purchasing another 30% from the 70% in circulation. Our model shows this generates a price impact of approximately 75%, a cost prior literature has failed to incorporate. Importantly, 75% reflects current staking levels. By increasing staking incentives to raise the staking ratio, price impact can be made larger. This is precisely how a blockchain can be secured against arbitrarily large attack incentives.
📄 Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
Fahad Saleh retweeted
Congrats to Notre Dame for continuing its streak of losing every single time they play an actual football team.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
I am leaving Cambridge after a few days spent for a workshop on fast finality, concurrent with other workshops on post-quantum crypto and formal verification. Quick takeaways
- Faster finality is coming, the research is mature, even as new ideas have come in during the week, the handoff to specifiers and implementers feels well underway. Next catalyst event will be at devcon in a few weeks, with core devs
- The performance numbers for post-quantum finality are improving massively, and this is the worst that they’ll ever be. This is significant, it means the penalty from moving to more complex crypto would not require, in my opinion, if the numbers hold up, a deep rearchitecting to move to PQ-secure consensus, in particular when it comes to incentives
- The biggest opportunity imo remains networking. Simulations and live experiments are exploring both the current pre-PQ setting, where networking is clearly the bottleneck, and the post-PQ setting, where compute remains the bottleneck. But with PQ compute numbers improving, I wouldn’t be surprised if once again networking becomes the bottleneck
All of this is making me extremely bullish that we’ll achieve PQ-secure and faster finality even faster.
Many thanks to @yannvon @benjaminion_xyz and @robsaltini for the workshop, and to @corcoranwill and @drakefjustin for hosting us in Cambridge!
Fahad Saleh retweeted
New Launch
harrycrane.com/2026-midterms
2026 Midterm Analysis is now live
- Updated market consensus
- Live forecast comparisons
- Forecaster and polling biases
- Market inefficiency metrics
So, for those of you who missed it, Illinois just dropped its draft rules for their no good, very bad Digital Asset Tax and, y’all, it’s a mess, especially for DeFi.
The proposed rules would treat a DEX (not an interface, the protocol itself) that charges a “protocol fee” as a “broker” that must register with the state, collect a 0.2% tax on the full value of every swap by an Illinois user, and keep each user’s address, IP, and W-9. Effectively mandated KYC.
It also requires brokers to keep customers’ private keys… I don’t even know where to begin on that one.
Essentially a worse version of the repealed IRS broker rule.
Thankfully @BlockchainAssn, @crypto_council, and the @DigitalChamber have sued the state, but we need a full court press on this from a political and policy perspective.
It’s my personal #1 priority, because I doubt Illinois will be the last to try this.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
This illustrates the naivety and hubris of many in the physical sciences toward biology. They see a soft science because most of what they were taught in school about biology was stamp collecting.
Often they are right that the science is weak. But they have little appreciation for how difficult the problem is or how little we still understand the human body.
Much of medicine is still medieval empiricism with some statistical analysis to soup it up.
Most chemotherapies and many other drugs for that matter were discovered through heuristics and trial and error that would astound people who assume medicine follows from rigorous understanding. Their mechanisms remain murky despite decades of use, with many competing explanations for their effects.
This should be a call to spend much more time on biology because our understanding is so far behind.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
This misses the key point about explainability - it’s not about acceptance of the treatment in question, but helping us generate *new* treatments
We use plenty of drugs without understanding fully why they work; but germ theory of disease broke open many new discoveries
Apparently finance theory papers do not have proofs that can be checked... And, because of that, we should let five people selected by this guy determine what constitutes "meaningful progress"...
Replying to @VelikovMihail
Math has proofs you can check. Finance doesn't. So we are asking: can autonomous AI systems make meaningful progress on an open research question in finance?
Fahad Saleh retweeted
If you have an oz of doubt whether your RWAs will be secure given concerns regarding ECDSA and public key cryptography, you should consider issuing your RWAs on @arc and using cirBTC.
Signature migration takes institutional scale coordination that few can achieve as easily
Do not confuse narrative chasing with technical progress.
99.99% of people worldwide don't use crypto yet, yet the industry keeps comparing itself to one another. My L1 vs your L1 vs your L2 is essentially the equivalent of two crack addicts fighting over who can smoke better.
A better argument is my thing vs. the thing that 99.99% of the world uses.
Stop measuring up against each other and realize that there is real competition out there. If you stay stuck in stupid inner battles that only exist to feed narratives and satiate the same $100m of liquid capital sloshing around low caps, you will only pull yourself down.
Look up and dream bigger.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
👀👀 "[…] we provide several examples of AI mistranslations of natural language (NL) statements and proofs into Lean in practice, resulting in mismatches between NL proofs and their Lean 'verifications'. These include OpenAI's announced Navier-Stokes proof. In particular, we show that the formalised Lean proof does not correspond to the NL proof of blow-up of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations."
arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144
Fahad Saleh retweeted
Hi. If elliptic curves are broken so that any exposed public key leads to compromise, and it's not by white hat hackers who save everyone's assets first, your coins are going to zero. Having them in bunker mode is not going to help you. They are still worth zero.
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.
Fahad Saleh 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.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
Today the EF and OA announce zkAPI—a new means for private AI
Picture this: deposit ether into a vault, sign a zk proof, get a fixed amount of private inference. Advances like these help us move past middlemen's requirements that we link our data and identities.
Read more below
Quick updates on the Open Anonymity project (@OpenAnonProject)!
1. OA-chat is live! You can now signup: chat.openanonymity.ai
2. We collaborated with @ethereumfndn (@VitalikButerin, @DavideCrapis, @VittoStack, @curryrasul) to develop zkAPI, a new zero-knowledge protocol for accessing gated / paid APIs with unlinkability. It’s like a generalization of OA unlinkable inference that also abstracts payments away. Now also available on OA-chat!
I'm excited because more infrastructure should exist where privacy and sovereignty is foundational and people are in control.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
TODAY 🚨: The Commission proposed new rules and amendments to provide a tailored framework for the custody of crypto assets for registered investment advisers and regulated funds, i.e. registered investment companies and business development companies.
Fahad Saleh retweeted
Update: One step closer to a faster Ethereum L1.
Quick slots just moved to Considered for Inclusion (CFI) in today's All Core Devs call! This is a new milestone for our proposal to make Ethereum blocks faster 🎉
Btw.. Faster blocks =>
- Better UX
- Better markets
- Faster finality and fast confirmation rule
- And improved censorship-resistance too!
TLDR: More value for the network, its users, and ETH, without compromising on the core values and properties of Ethereum.
Hear this from 20 top Ethereum teams in our ecosystem survey: ethlabs.org/writings/quick-s…
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Ok, what does CFI mean? This does not mean that the EIP is for sure included in Hegotá. This means that now it will be considered more seriously, including testing, towards inclusion in future devnets once headliners (FOCIL and frame transactions) are stable.
In particular, the call today revealed the appetite for a phased approach, installing the plumbing which allows us to reduce the slot time in Ethereum clients, and deciding to pull the trigger based on further testing.
Ultimately, this is how EIP-8198 is designed, so CFI'ing today allows us to move forward with more of the plumbing work, and start looking into testing towards an actual slot reduction from 12 to 10 seconds. This is a first reduction, as EIP-8198 opens the door for progressively lower slot times, as they get sufficiently safe to ship.
In parallel, as discussed on the call too, we are continuing our ecosystem survey and outreach of deployed smart contracts with a slot time dependency. We have reached out to more teams on this.
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Faster slots are one important dimension of our Faster Ethereum body of work. A more responsive network helps cement its role as a liquidity hub and as the heartbeat of the network as a whole.
Along with our work on fast finality, fast confirmation rule and fast interop, it all combines for a seamless and secure flow of assets everywhere on the network.
Thank you to the many builders who are taking us there!
Fahad Saleh retweeted
Ethereum has had 100% uptime since its inception, so it’s worth asking why @ethlabs_org and EF are redesigning its consensus protocol. I want to provide some context.
Ethereum today runs what researchers call an "ebb-and-flow" consensus protocol. "Ebb-and-flow" refers to the fact that the protocol is actually two protocols in one:
- There's an "availability protocol," also called a "fork-choice rule," which can produce blocks even when a majority of Ethereum's stake are offline. This is what would keep Ethereum producing blocks even if a nuclear war took out most of the internet.
- There's a "finality gadget," which makes a block irreversible after some time. This is why we can all go to sleep at night knowing that our transactions won't be reverted when we wake up.
However, for historical reasons, these two protocols are tightly coupled on Ethereum. Every block, a subset ("committee") of Ethereum validators send votes ("attestations") to produce blocks, and the very same votes are used to finalize blocks over a long range ("epochs"). The fact that the same votes are used for both protocols means that, if you were to reduce the votes used for the availability protocol, which would speed up block production, you would need more blocks to achieve finality, which would delay finalization. On the other hand, if you were to use more votes for the availability protocol, it would speed up finalization but slow down block production. You cannot speed up both at the same time.
On the other hand, Ethereum's fork-choice rule (formally named "LMD-GHOST") has been discovered to have multiple vulnerabilities over the years. For example, it was discovered (by researchers including @casparschwa and @barnabemonnot) that you could secretly accumulate votes for a fork, then reveal it later to reorg out a new block. There have been consistent efforts to patch these vulnerabilities, but they are generally seen as bandaid fixes that introduce further complexity and bug surface into the protocol.
So Ethereum's new consensus design, called "decoupled consensus", is an ambitious attempt at tackling both problems at once:
- Decouple the availability protocol from the finality protocol, so both can be optimized independently.
- Fix vulnerabilities with the availability protocol.
The way this is done, in broad strokes, is this:
- We replace LMD-GHOST with a new algorithm called Goldfish, alongside a "stabilization gadget" which is another sub-protocol that prevents Goldfish from re-orging over an arbitrarily long range.
- We run the availability protocol (Goldfish+stabilization gadget) and the finality protocol in parallel, with separate votes.
The result? Ethereum will provide both fast finality and fast block times, AND it will keep producing blocks during World War III. Of all blockchains, Ethereum will be the only blockchain with these properties, and that's why it will be the settlement layer of the global economy.
One step closer to 4-8x faster Ethereum finality!
It took some time and lots of tokens, but we now have a formally verified proposal for a decoupled consensus protocol in I* (a future Ethereum upgrade)! Not yet a full spec (up next), but it includes all the key consensus-relevant details to become one.
Since Ethereum aspires to be live without most of the stake online, the protocol involves many more components than a normal BFT protocol, and its correctness involves much more than standard safety and liveness. Those nuanced properties are now verified!
What's more, I came away convinced that all protocol design will involve AI-assisted Formal Verification in the future, both for correctness and iteration speed.
The work wasn't limited to just:
Design the protocol -> Formally verify it
Instead, the loop became more like:
Design -> Formal Model -> Find exactly what breaks and why -> Redesign it.
For a fairly complicated protocol like this one, I think having the Lean model be part of the design loop played a big role in accelerating the process.
A future with agents paired with formal models is a superpower for Ethereum development, because they can then use those models to find exactly where an argument breaks down, formalize counterexamples, test proposed fixes, iterate on the protocol.
Many details that would slip under the radar when asking agents (and indeed, humans) can now be specified exactly and checked by the Lean kernel. This then forces agents to be more precise and lets them make verifiable progress on their own. It's been incredible to see this play out, seeing agents find gaps and propose protocol changes to fix them.
In other words, autoresearch can speed up protocol design, formal verification is here to stay, and Ethereum Finality will get faster.



























