Joined April 2008
Ken Smith retweeted
1/ Buying a hardware wallet should not mean learning to spot a hidden implant. Supply chain attacks belong in the security model. GridPlus has built defenses against them into the Lattice1 since its 2020 launch. Here's how.
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Ken Smith retweeted
ROCKET POOL VOTERS BACK $rETH WITHDRAWALS @Rocket_Pool's proposed queue would let holders recover $ETH through validator exits when liquidity runs short. The full Saturn 2 package still needs ratification. Read more here: thedefiant.io/news/defi/rock…
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EVA Symposium III is coming to Mumbai 🇮🇳 During Devcon, we're bringing together Ethereum validators, staking operators, and researchers for candid conversations about the future of Ethereum. With @0xzak as our emcee. Previous attendees and speakers have included Ethereum Foundation, Lido, Bitcoin Suisse, and many other individual and institutional stakers. Special thanks to @ethcforg for helping us coordinate this event. Request your spot below.
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Ken Smith 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.
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Ken Smith retweeted
Formal verification of Aztec’s cryptography is underway. We've completed formal verification of major components of our proving system & our workflow for formally verifying the Aztec stack is quickly accelerating. Stay tuned for more updates with the upcoming Alpha V6 release
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What we're cooking for the tenth anniversary is bigger than a conference or a festival. It stays weird, it's built around the core of Ethereum, and we'll share it in October. Please DO NOT buy tickets from sites advertising ETHDenver 27. ETHDenver is, and always will be, free.
🤖 Made with AI
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Ken Smith retweeted
Today we are announcing an AI-assisted breakthrough in Ethereum development.
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.
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Ken Smith retweeted
Arriving on Aztec on Tuesday, September 29th.
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Ken Smith retweeted
Our next Community Call will feature a special guest from @ryskfinance We'll discuss a new DeFi opportunity that uses ethereum:0xae78736cd615f374d3085123a210448e74fc6393 as collateral Join the call in the Rocket Pool Discord at 3pm UTC on the 3rd, link below 👇
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Ken Smith retweeted
Update your Ledgers!
🚨Every Ledger running the Ethereum app is vulnerable to signature substitution A malicious dApp with WebHID access could race an APDU during your transaction review and swap the tx being signed while the device still shows the original Here's what you need to know:
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A young American hero. 🇺🇸 16-year-old lifeguard Ryder Williams courageously saved 10-year-old Nathaniel Rai on a California beach. Today, President Trump recognized him for his bravery in the Oval Office. ❤️
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Enter: EthCoordinate. tl;dr: EthCoordinate is a crypto-native organization born inside the EthStaker community, bringing together separate efforts under one umbrella to help with Ethereum governance coordination, support Forkcast, increase stakeholder engagement on proposed or upcoming EIPs and, of course, continue providing software, tooling, and technical support for home stakers. EthStaker started in 2020 when a loosely connected group of Ethereum enthusiasts joined efforts to speed up the development of the beacon chain. The organization steadily evolved, incorporating as a 501(c)4 nonprofit and taking up initiatives around independent participants of Ethereum's consensus mechanism, aka home stakers. Throughout the years, it has played a decisive role in coordinating the launch and operation of devnets, testnets, and mainnet hard fork upgrades; facilitating information flows and generally connecting dots that needed connecting. This year's tectonic organizational changes in the ecosystem have opened up functional gaps in Ethereum coordination. To close these gaps and continue supporting the network, EthStaker's core members are joined by mission-aligned fresh blood to aggregate efforts under one name to produce greater results than operating independently. EthCoordinate is a natural evolution of EthStaker; as Ethereum mainnet heads to its third radical consensus protocol change at a steady pace, it’s time for EthStaker to recalibrate around what Ethereum’s evolving community needs. Our mission is to facilitate interaction between stakeholders of the ecosystem to accelerate the adoption of the Ethereum network and to provide continuity for governance operations. We believe that the Ethereum mainnet is an unparalleled bedrock for the augmentation of humanity's productivity output and that ETH, the asset, is the token that aligns the incentives of all actors involved. We stand up for our values, combining technical rigor with pragmatism for Ethereum to continue being the most accessible and credibly neutral global blockchain. The team is 10 long-tenured Ethereum professionals and currently our main work streams are: ⇥ Maintain a high-quality venue for independent stakers to remain engaged and informed ⇥ Facilitate coordination around core protocol development and adjacencies ⇥ Develop and steward Forkcast, the most popular platform to track the research and engineering initiatives around Ethereum's core protocol ⇥ Facilitate research, discussion, and coordination around protocol economics in support of Ethereum's long-term economic health ⇥ Maintain open source tools and documentation used by participants of the consensus set We're energized for this chapter in Ethereum coordination & our role in it.
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Ken Smith retweeted
Those considering the 5-10 year horizon know that we'll need to review validator/prover roles with Lean Ethereum and that would be a perfect time to lower issuance with responsibility changes. Doing it now is adding community friction for little to no network gains.
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This is some of best and constructive critique of the EIP I have read to date.
Ethereum's most consequential monetary decision is being dressed up as a math problem. So much for the idea that perfect theory equals common sense.
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Good question, and the answer is the key to the whole proposal: the thresholds in 4/ only exist under the taper, not the current curve. Today, per ETH yield falls with the square root of total stake. (see eth2book.info/capella/part2/…) That decline is too gentle to ever flip the math. Adding stake always increases total revenue for any operator at any size, and yield floors around 1.5% even if every ETH is staked. So the current curve does not self-regulate. Growth pays forever. EIP-8363 changes the shape. Total net issuance rises, peaks near a 20% staking ratio, then falls to zero at 50%. Past the peak, the pie is shrinking, so adding stake means a bigger slice of a shrinking pie. For a large enough book, the shrink outweighs the slice. That is where the thresholds come from. Self-regulation is not something the current curve already has. It is the feature this proposal adds.
Replying to @nextblock_eth
Are you able to explain this a bit further? And wouldn’t this imply that the current curve should self-regulate without the need for change?
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1/ As an active participant in the home and solo staking community, I have been surprised to see a number of folks whose opinions I highly trust claiming that EIP-8363 is detrimental to home stakers. I think there is an important aspect that is not being understood. As written, the proposal affects large staking entities much sooner than home stakers, and in fact, it protects home stakers more than the current model does. Let me explain. 🧵👇
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7/ The legitimate home staker concern is fixed costs, and that applies to any yield decline, including the one already happening as stake grows under the current curve.
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8/ I encourage everyone, especially fellow home stakers, to work through the mechanism before concluding it hurts us. And ask yourself: what happens if we don't change the issuance policy?
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