Privacy is a serious design requirement for institutional Ethereum. On Oct 22-23, @RedoudouM joins: > Kaushal Vyas (@eth_systems), > Rob Dawson (@Consensys), > John Church (@Nethermind) > Vivek Raman (@Etherealize_io) ..for the Building Ethereum panel at @lfdecentralized's NYC workshop, moderated by Johnna Powell (@DTCC).

Made with Opus 5.5 + Three.js water-opus.vercel.app/ the water physics, the fish, blossoms... why is this soo pretty 😭😭

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.

🦾 @Nethermind FTW!

Nethermind continues doing excellent work and making Ethereum more efficient and faster. firefly.social/post/x/210738…

There is unfortunately precedent for this. Before word processing, document length was bounded by the human capacity to copy long-form text & plateauing. After word processing, the tax & legal codes grew without check.

a lot more could have gone on here, but these are the ones which stand out the most in hindsight

Aave is starting to look much bigger than a DeFi money market. I think its recent governance proposal is underrated. It's Custodied Collateral Lending for @aave V4. The idea is simple: Institutions often hold BTC and other assets with regulated custodians and cannot simply move those assets into DeFi. Aave V4 wants to let them borrow onchain without moving the collateral out of custody. The proposed flow: 1. Institution keeps BTC with Anchorage 2. Chainlink CustodySync verifies and synchronizes the custodied balance 3. A non-transferable Custodied Collateral Token (CoCT) tracks that balance onchain 4. CoCT is posted inside a dedicated Aave V4 Isolated Spoke 5. Stablecoin liquidity comes from an isolated Hub 6. The institution receives stablecoins while the BTC remains with the custodian Even liquidation is different. Instead of sending the custodied BTC to an onchain liquidator, the custodian can execute an OTC sale and use the proceeds to repay the Aave debt. This is where V4's Hub-and-Spoke design starts becoming much more interesting. Aave can build a completely isolated institutional lending market without introducing an exposure path to its existing markets. And IMO this also puts Aave increasingly into the same addressable market as Maple. Maple has spent years building institutional secured lending, with borrower underwriting, legal agreements and collateral held with institutional custodians. Aave is approaching the same problem from the opposite direction. Maple: institutional credit platform → bringing more of the credit stack onchain Aave: onchain liquidity protocol → extending its liquidity infrastructure into institutional credit They are not the same model. But the market they are competing for is starting to overlap. The bigger implication for Aave V4 might be that “Aave markets” no longer need to look like one giant DeFi lending pool. Different Hubs can serve completely different forms of credit, with different collateral, permissions and risk models, while still using Aave as the underlying liquidity infrastructure. That feels like a much larger endgame for $AAVE.

So what are we cooking so hard at @Nethermind ? 1. Nethermind 2.0 (and 2.1...) with super optimised archive node! 2. More optimizations of block processing, RPC (eth_call) 3. Hegota features 4. Super optimized guest client for zkVM's