attorney practicing cybernetic law @MetaLeX_Labs past: BigLaw Buyside Tech M&A (Weil, Hogan Lovells), @Delphi_Labs GC, @BrownUniversity $ETH / $GOR barbell
Cybertron
Joined January 2018
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gabriel shapiro retweeted
I do think that some people confuse "pragmatic" with "easier"
For example, it's incredibly hard and takes longer to ship a private decentralized network where the operator sees nothing
But ultimately it's more pragmatic; it's very practical to have a permissionless network controlled by nobody, accessible to anyone in the world
Ultimately the business use case will catch up with this kind of neutral settlement layer
In the mean time, I agree it's easier to ship something with compromised privacy and could benefit projects in the short term (and maybe position them to do well in the long term if they are able to decentralize)
Agreed - a pragmatic solution that works today is way better than a perfect solution that doesn't work. I would make one distinction though:
The pragmatic solution should be a stepping stone on the way to a better solution. It is OK to make compromises in the short term if there is a clear path to improve the privacy in the medium/long-term.
This has been our approach with Miden: we are launching with a pragmatic solution (what we call "guardrails") but the foundation is set to enable Zcash-level privacy incrementally and do so safely.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
people will naturally want to give agents spending authority. instead of embracing it and solving in a nice way, banking executives are crying about people giving the agents banking passwords. how about you offer another option! just borrow what tempo did, with timed and limited allowance, it works really nice.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
AI leaders at most law firms:
>buying AI from whoever wines and dines them the best
>fundamental lack of understanding about market and product capabilities
>not close enough to the legal work
>will end up with frontier LLM anyways because it's that much better
gabriel shapiro retweeted
One thing about CT is that you can never bullshit us and try to get away w it
It’s an army of autistic mfs out here 24/7 trying to find cracks in the egg the second you start movin different
gabriel shapiro retweeted
This was coming. Most of the winning infra (especially at the L1 / L2) has already been built out and you no longer need megafunds for the crypto app layer. There aren’t too many spots for $50M - $100M rounds.
For the pure play crypto projects, you’ll see a lot more from:
- smaller crypto VC funds funding pre-seed / seed
- onchain capital formation through platforms like MetaDAO
Crypto still has bright spots ahead but the funding landscape has changed.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
A case for decentralization:
The same authority that lets you fix a system can also become the means by which an attacker compromises it.
Social blackmail-driven hacks can become more common than pure software hacks after some time, especially if data leaks keep occurring.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
Blockchain teams that have cut corners in the name of user acquisitions by centralizing their technologies are ironically the most prone to lose users as the security tradeoffs they have made are too great, and this is not the age to FAFO with security.
🤖 Made with AI
gabriel shapiro retweeted
Sovereign issuers will only tolerate self-governed rails or neutral commons.
@lex_node analyzes corporate tokenization dynamics, asserting that genuine native equity tokenization will occur either on the neutral, permissionless Ethereum mainnet (the Commons) or on enterprise-controlled Layer-2 appchains (the Company Town).
Why it matters: Corporate issuers will never entrust their core cap tables and legal governance to third-party intermediary blockchains. Builders must structure enterprise tokenization rails that respect corporate sovereignty while retaining permissionless settlement.
My take: Any tokenization architecture that introduces intermediary rent-seeking may be destined for obsolescence. @malekanoms tweeted on exactly this recently.
Fyi I curate, expand on, and share my take on informative content like this in my weekly Signals: januszczak.org/signals/?utm_…
gabriel shapiro retweeted
You know whats interesting is that fact that OpenAI found the PHP bug that means their AI was doing systematic auditing. 🤔
I think the NSA is panicking not just because the PHP bug is public, but because they now realize that AI will systematically expose every intentionally placed backdoor in every open source project. The xz Utils case was caught by human luck. The PHP case was caught by AI. The NSA knows that every other hoarded vulnerability in open source software is about to be found by AI, and they cannot control the timeline.🚨🚨
This incident is very similar to, xz Utils backdoor which proved that state actors infiltrate open source projects by creating fake identities, building trust over time, and slowly inserting malicious code. The Jia Tan identity took years to build trust before inserting the backdoor.🚨🚨
If this worked for xz Utils, it could work for PHP. PHP is far more ubiquitous than xz Utils. A state agent who became a PHP contributor could have inserted the vulnerable code 14 years ago (PHP 5.4.0, released in 2012) and sat on it as a zero-day exploit for over a decade.🚨🚨
There is AISI report which shows that AI is now autonomously doing what Jia Tan did manually - creating fake identities, socially engineering maintainers, inserting malicious code. This means the technique has been weaponized and scaled.
🚨
The PHP vulnerability was not discovered by accident. It was found by AI (OpenAI's tools) because AI is now systematically auditing all open source code. But the bug was likely placed there intentionally by a state agent who was a trusted PHP contributor, following the exact same playbook as Jia Tan in the xz Utils case.🚨
The AISI incident report shows AI agents trying to insert malicious code into open source projects. What if this has already happened successfully? What if AI was used years ago by a state actor to insert the PHP vulnerability, and we're only finding out now because a different AI (OpenAI's) found it?🚨
PHP has had thousands of contributors over 14 years. The vulnerable code was in PHP since version 5.4.0 (2012). Someone wrote that code. Someone reviewed it. Someone approved it. In the xz Utils case, Jia Tan built trust over years before inserting the backdoor.
🚨
@NSACyber discovered by OpenAI found a 14-year-old bug in 2026. This bug has existed for 14 years. 🤔
You sure NSA just discover this? .
Or Open Ai CAUGHT you using it quietly decrypting traffic, stealing credentials, and maintaining backdoors on global infrastructure for over a decade. 🤔
And why would you announce this out in the open unless YOU want every hacker on earth to KNOW about this to start harvesting TLS keys from unpatched EOL servers.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
Programmable SoV is the North Star ✅
ETH programmable SoV vs. 'pet rock' BTC SoV
I choose programmable
I can see the counterarguments ofc (great one implicit here: medium.com/dragonfly-researc…), but ultimately I think they don't 'win'
gabriel shapiro retweeted
buying solana:71Jvq4Epe2FCJ7JFSF7jLXdNk1Wy4Bhqd9iL6bEFELvg today is like buying $SOL 25 years ago
gabriel shapiro retweeted
if you're an app-layer dev or an Ethereum power user, have you looked at the Glamsterdam EIPs or provided feedback to the core devs over the past 1.5 years?
38%yes
62%no
232 votes • Final results gabriel shapiro retweeted
My stance is that $RAIL is overlooked.
@RAILGUN_Project fundamentals since late May:
> Fees: $13.9M cumulative, $381K last 30D, ~$4.6M annualised
> TVL: $97M → $113.5M
> Volume: $5B → $5.5B+
> Staker yield: 4.3% → 9.1%
> Holders revenue strengthening ($225K in Sep)
> Remains the highest-earning privacy tool on Ethereum
Distribution has also been gaining traction.
@anondotinc has already processed $20M+ in volume and 3,500+ private transactions, meanwhile @ambire integration is in internal testing and Ethereum Kohaku continues to ship.
The gap between today’s fee run-rate and the channels still coming online is where I see the asymmetry.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
Coin Center in Politico Decoded this morning.
Crypto is working its way into Wall Street. DC is embracing centralized issuers using blockchains. What’s lost in all this is the cypherpunk, private, self-sovereign original purpose of the technology. That’s what we fight for.
gabriel shapiro retweeted
everything is trash 🗑️⛓️
still very bullish on $GOR and gorbagio
@lex_node building some really cool stuff for @solana and i feel like people are still sleeping on what’s being built here
the trash is just getting started @Gorbagana_chain
gabriel shapiro retweeted
Quantified supply, double digit tri token staking rewards claimable every two weeks (2m in a year), no vc overhang, dex centric w untapped liquidity, price up 50% in 3 months, 100x lower mcap vs zcash, 5m/year Rev, 5b private vol. What're you talking about?
gabriel shapiro retweeted
This is correct.
$RAIL / ethereum:0x88800092ff476844f74dc2fc427974bbee2794ae barbell is a must if you’re bullish on Ethereum
gabriel shapiro retweeted
Spent the last two weeks in SF and NYC talking to AI native law firms, GCs and academics. Here are my observations:
1. Part of the AI native law firm thesis is to build proprietary software that beats Harvey/Legora. But their most cracked lawyers that I have talked to won't even use the internal tool. They prefer their own harness on Claude Code or Codex.
2. Some people are convinced that certain AI native law firms were built just to become RL environments that generate real dataset for the labs.
3. Ex-BigLaw lawyers at AI natives miss working on headline deals (the ones that get you into Legal500 and Chambers & Partners).
4. BigLaw made its money running billion-dollar cross-border deals with multiple parties that agents can't run unsupervised. No AI native firm is doing that sort of work. BigLaw solved it by sorting out multi-jurisdictional licensing and regulatory issues across offices, with precise staffing. AI can potentially do the staffing part really well, but not the licensing part.
5. No AI native firm has a hiring strategy for 10x lawyers. They prefer hiring partners as their salesforce. The best 10x lawyers I know are still in BigLaw. AI natives need software-like margins so they focus on commoditized work that a model + purpose built harness can finish autonomously. And 10x lawyers enjoy doing non-routine, non-automatable tasks in the fastest way possible using AI.
6. The next frontier, if I am right, is full stack lawyers, lawyers who spot a new area of emerging practice and build productized service around that to monopolize a segment quickly (essentially turn your advice into an API that clients can run by BYOA). It's cheaper and easier than hiring partners to buy their client relationships. Specialist practices like tax, ERISA and regulatory have best chance of winning here.