
Building @mintlayer. Ex-Bitfinex/Tether. Bitcoin infrastructure, institutional adoption, and AI
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Joined October 2008
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I asked Martin Hellman, the man who invented public-key cryptography, how you find your own blind spot, the part you can't see by definition.
His answer was immediate: "Look at the thing you hate the most."
Three days at Castel Gandolfo with two dozen Nobel laureates, arguing about whether AI belongs anywhere near nuclear launch systems. I went as a builder, not a diplomat.
The fear in that room was not a robot deciding to kill us. It was speed. A nuclear crisis is a decision made under a clock, and human beings have sat in that window before, looked at what the instruments were screaming, and decided not to believe them. They were right. Remove the pause and you remove the place where doubt lives.
enrico.rubbo.li/en/2026-07-v…
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
Today, Andorra 🇦🇩 and San Marino 🇸🇲 officially sign the Association Agreement with the EU.
Gaining access to the EU Single Market will create new opportunities for people, trade, and economic stability.
More ⬇️ link.europa.eu/M9YXTq
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
This illustrates the point I’ve been making about the limits of centralized approaches to SI safety in cyber.
OpenCode (and earlier Hugging Face) hit the same wall mid-attack: frontier models refused to analyze the very exploits needed for defense because the payloads tripped safety filters. The guardrails backfired.
Meanwhile, the attackers found a way around restrictions to access advanced capabilities. This is not surprising. Chinese models are only about 6–9 months behind the American frontier in cyber. Obviously the U.S. has no jurisdiction over them.
The only durable response is decentralized: make powerful models available so defenders can build and run their own cyber defenses. The only solution to SI-powered cyberattacks is SI-powered cyber defense.
People criticizing Tesla for missed timelines have never done engineering at the frontier. Most of it is solving complex problems you can’t easily predict. It takes time and effort to build something real. but when you do, it flies.
Europe lags behind the US and China in high-impact innovation (especially in digital technology, software, and AI) not because of a shortage of talent or funding.
The gap is largely the result decades of policy choices that favor heavy regulation, market fragmentation, and risk aversion over the conditions that allow new ideas to flourish and scale quickly and freely. – at Cervia, Emilia Romagna
Satoshi choice of secp256k1 mostly comes from the fear of a NSA backdoor on NIST elliptic curve.
Antropic disproved the backdoor:
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
"You don't create startups with a five-year plan. You create them by getting out of the way." – at Cervia, Emilia Romagna
Funny thing I notice every time I talk to French people who've never lived in the US.
They see Americans as the bad guys. "They lobby Brussels." "They crush our companies." "They take all the value."
Here's the truth: Americans aren't the problem. They're just playing the game. And they play it extremely well.
You write absurd rules? They'll play by your absurd rules. They have more capital, more talent, more speed, better execution. So they win. Every single time.
That's not imperialism. That's competition.
The only ones responsible for Europe's situation are Europeans. More precisely, our inability to get rid of the central planners who keep stacking absurd regulation on top of absurd regulation, and the bureaucrats like Macron who think building a tech ecosystem means writing plans, hosting summits and launching useless commissions.
You don't create startups with a five-year plan. You create them by getting out of the way.
Silicon Valley wasn't built at a summit. It was built by people who were allowed to take risks, fail, raise money and hire fast.
As long as these people run Europe, nothing will happen. Absolutely nothing.
Stop blaming Washington. Look in the mirror.
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
Funny thing I notice every time I talk to French people who've never lived in the US.
They see Americans as the bad guys. "They lobby Brussels." "They crush our companies." "They take all the value."
Here's the truth: Americans aren't the problem. They're just playing the game. And they play it extremely well.
You write absurd rules? They'll play by your absurd rules. They have more capital, more talent, more speed, better execution. So they win. Every single time.
That's not imperialism. That's competition.
The only ones responsible for Europe's situation are Europeans. More precisely, our inability to get rid of the central planners who keep stacking absurd regulation on top of absurd regulation, and the bureaucrats like Macron who think building a tech ecosystem means writing plans, hosting summits and launching useless commissions.
You don't create startups with a five-year plan. You create them by getting out of the way.
Silicon Valley wasn't built at a summit. It was built by people who were allowed to take risks, fail, raise money and hire fast.
As long as these people run Europe, nothing will happen. Absolutely nothing.
Stop blaming Washington. Look in the mirror.
Non è questione di non capire, è questione di usare pregiudizi politici per valutare una tecnologia. – at Cervia, Emilia Romagna
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
a car just did something straight out of science fiction and half the internet immediately started debating commercial viability
not every engineering achievement needs a fucking business model. you are allowed to experience wonder
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
If Elon created a cancer vaccine, people would complain about the size of the needle.
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
Giornata difficile in alcune redazioni. Dare la notizia che Elon ha presentato un'auto volante o ignorarla? Ignorarla mentre sui social circolano i video entusiasti di milioni di persone, darne conto, oppure darne conto ma criticarla in qualche modo? Ore difficili per i giornalai
investing in health is the best investment you could ever do. but beware, like every other field, dyor. plenty of "influencers" you shouldn't trust on social media
science is an open book: that's our latest understanding of how nature (and our body) works
the foundation is free. building good habits doesn't take big money, but it compounds the same: sleep, train, eat well
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ 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.
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
🔴 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐓 | @Pontifex Encyclical Letter Magnifica humanitas will be presented in Brussels on Wed 14 October at the Chapel for Europe with representatives of the Holy See, the EU and AI experts. Only registration to online participation is still open. comece.eu/high-level-event-p…
🚨 Deepseek v5 Leak: Beats Astra
> DeepSeek is reportedly preparing an imminent V5 launch
> it could match or beat Fable 5.1 and Astra
> Expected to deliver much stronger performance at a lower cost
> DeepSeek is reportedly keeping the open-weight strategy
Could DeepSeek V5 become the new king of open-weight AI?
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
If Dario wants to slow down the pace of AI, he should just move the company to Europe.
Other chains ask you to proofread your addresses. Mintlayer correct them. Security starts at the format level.
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Enrico Rubboli ⚡ retweeted
I’ve spent the last two years working on ethical and responsible AI. Following tonight’s AI discussion, I can’t help but feel I’ve seen this movie before: INCEPTION, THE PRESTIGE, and THE ILLUSIONIST.
I keep wondering: could some of what we’re seeing be staged to make us demand the very restrictions its architects want? My concern? THE FINAL ACT: AI declared too dangerous for open source, but safe in the hands of a few approved giants.
Ethical and Responsible AI requires accountability, and that includes scrutinising those asking to write the rules. So, before we applaud the safety proposal, I would like to know who owns the theatre.





















