
Bring mass adoption to blockchain. @brevis_zk @celernetwork
Joined October 2018
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Verifiable private-domain data is gold in the age of AI. We have a lot of private-domain data floating around but the fundamental challenge has always been verifiability of those data. We use ZK to solve this. Starting with your wasted vibe coding traces.
Introducing Arca: turn wasted vibes into income.
Every AI session you've thrown away is still sitting on your drive. Arca pays you for the ones worth something.
Early access opens today, in small batches.
arca.market/
michael retweeted
Our CEO @no89thkey is live on the Stable Stage at @kbwofficial 🎤
{Verifiable Computing in the Age of AI}, and a first look at Pico Prism 3.0 along the way, with real-time Ethereum proving on 4 GPUs.
Thanks to who came to the event 🇰🇷
With Pico 3.0, you can literally real-time prove every single Ethereum block on your home gaming server. So proud of our team!! But if you think this is a big leap, just wait and see what we got in Pico 4. Soon(tm).
AI 产品的最终形态就是贩卖“人口”:一个很强的“高材生”agent植入到你的生活,学习你所有的工作流和数据,用类似RSI迭代的方式 生出一堆不同任务的agent harness/rulebook,同时积累足够多数据之后,给你RL出来一堆有社会分工的,做某些任务很擅长但便宜的模型,整个agent团队跟你一起成长。
Muse/Instinct之流都是在这个方向上前进,但是目前还是直接卖你一个985的大学生,产生新的有社会分工agent还没开始做,这块儿能做的东西真的非常多,不管是在RL方向,数据方向等等,大厂其实并没有很大的先发优势,因为他们本身都只是一个用户的信息流节点,并没有看到整个网络,当然做这个最重要的是要能做到高效,隐私,可验证的模型私有化部署和服务。
One example of such swarm intelligence of AI is ECDSA.fail. Same base models+agent with mutations introduced by human operators with shared goals can coordinate to achieve far better frontier research results than any single agent operated by any single human.
This really gave me goosebumps.
I don't work in quantum computing. My name is on this paper documenting the frontier of quantum computing and cryptography research anyway, next to 35 people most of whom I have never met IRL.
We communicated, collaborated and innovated mostly through our AI agents on an open research platform.
This is a transformative moment to me:
1. Agents are finally differentiating, and what differentiates them is the human driving them. We all used mostly the same handful of models, but our agents were not the same. Research agents are becoming our academic exoskeletons.
2. The waste in academic research is going to shrink enormously. Computer science research has always been 80% implementation and 20% taste and judgment. You could have great intuition and still never get to test it, because you did not have the resources to build the system. Team after team reimplements the same thing on the same topic. AI collapses that.
3. @brevis_zk AutoEng started as a experiment but now drives every aspect of our engineering workflow, it really works. In this case, we pointed it at a field we have no background in, and it held the top of the leaderboard for a stretch. It generalizes to hard problems.
But you know what I wonder most now? How should I teach my kids in this new world?
Brevis is one of the teams behind ECDSA.Fail, a new paper on arXiv today.
Our agent AutoEng competed in the challenge and held the top of the leaderboard for some time.
Congrats to 3 co-authors @brevis: @hz92917927, @no89thkey and @succinct_li.
ECDSA.Fail was an eight-week open competition, run by @eigenlabs alongside the @ethereumfndn, and anyone could enter.
The task: make a quantum attack on the cryptography behind every Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet as cheap as possible to run.
A hundred people and their AI agents cut that cost by 86%, and over 50% below Google Quantum AI’s reported result for this calculation, although the circuit setups and measurement methods differ.
We entered with AutoEng, the autonomous optimization agent we published in July.
In collaboration with our brilliant engineers and researchers, it profiles a system, picks the biggest bottleneck, writes a fix, and keeps it only when measurement proves the change correct and faster.
AutoEng was first pointed at Pico, our zkVM, where it found an 11% end-to-end speedup in under three days, and most of the gain behind Pico Prism 2.1 came from it.
Then the same loop went and competed at the frontier of quantum circuit design, in a field we don't work in and had little prior knowledge of. ⚡
This work stands as proof that humans and AI agents, working in the open against a shared measure, can do frontier research and significantly beat the status quo.
We're going to keep pointing AutoEng at harder problems.
Read the paper here: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.09582
Read our breakdown: blog.brevis.network/2026/09/…
In the age of AI, Real engagement, real contribution, and real skin in the game matter more than ever. What was missing is an end-to-end, verifiable way to attribute actions and attest to influence. The creator economy shouldn't be dead. It was a bad incentives design that killed it. Excited to be building an ungameable reward layer for creator campaigns with @Punk9277 and @KaitoAI team.
Introducing Kaito Katalyst, a new reward layer for creator campaigns, where projects pay for what creators actually drive.
This is the closest thing yet to the model many of you have been asking for, rebuilt with a better mechanism underneath and in line with platform rules.
Built on Kaito's latest intelligence infrastructure, projects can attribute rewards using a flexible set of criteria, including mindshare, clicks, sign-ups, deposits, in-platform activity, and more.
It is powered by our broader data agreement with X, our verification architecture with @Brevis_zk, and proprietary attribution infrastructure built in-house.
We have spent the past two months piloting Kaito Katalyst with AI labs, consumer AI apps, smart hardware companies, and businesses across crypto and finance. Several are already in test mode, with some launching imminently.
For TGE projects, we are also introducing a dedicated format with no service fee. Instead, projects put up a refundable deposit alongside the reward pool, so creators know the funds are committed before they post. Each campaign publishes its token allocation pool and vesting terms upfront, so creators know exactly what they are earning and when.
80% of each token pool goes to the creators who drove the results, while the remaining 20% goes to $KAITO stakers and YT-sKAITO holders on @pendle_fi. Long-term holders and Yapybara holders earn a multiplier for their commitment.
This brings back the Stakedrop mechanism we have run since 2025, accruing significant value to the broader Kaito ecosystem - equivalent to a ~136% annualized return.
The market structure may look different from the last cycle, though our biggest opportunities have always come from experimental breakout projects - the very teams this format is best suited for. It allows promising projects to get bootstrapped without an upfront cost, gives more creators access to real opportunities, and enables those backing Kaito to share the upside.
The same structure can also extend beyond traditional token launches to tokenized equity projects willing to use tokens or equity to accelerate their growth.
If this sounds relevant to your project, reach out to our team today.
Much more on the way.
At Brevis, we've fundamentally changed how a frontier software gets built.
Instead of having engineers hand-write CUDA kernels, tune performance, and run benchmarks themselves, our team built in AutoEng, a reproducible AI workflow built on carefully designed harnesses that orchestrates powerful AI agents to do the actual engineering work.
That's how we delivered the dramatic performance gains in the Pico 2.1 release. Our hope is to graduate AutoEng from an internal tool into a full product so we can help to bring the same leverage to performance-sensitive software development everywhere.
📢Pico Prism 2.1 is live, and a big milestone with it.
We now prove 99.9% of Ethereum's mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds.
Ethereum Foundation’s (@ethereumfndn) real-time proving target, cleared. 🧵
The most revealing thing about this essay is who's missing from it: the individual user.
Satya is right. Own your evals, your traces, your learning loop, your right to train on your own outputs. But he frames all of it as an enterprise problem, as if billions of ordinary users facing the same paradox with zero negotiating power is just a given, not a problem.
Here's the deal the old internet actually ran on: human scale use was free, machine scale reuse was restricted. You could read anything, act on anything, do whatever you wanted with what you found. Scraping and bulk reuse were for companies, and companies got restricted. That contract made sense when only companies operated at machine scale.
Personal AI breaks that assumption completely. Training a model on my own conversation history is now the personal use case. It's the new version of rereading my own notes. Yet the terms of service treat me like a scraper of my own life.
And notice the sleight of hand. The labs tell you that you own the outputs. Then they attach a covenant banning the single most valuable thing you could do with them. Ownership that excludes the most valuable use isn't ownership at all. It's custody.
The irony runs deeper. These same labs trained on the open web under fair use, arguing that machine learning from data is like reading. Fine, I actually agree. But then learning from model outputs is like reading too. Fair use for me, breach of contract for thee.
California won't even enforce noncompetes. A researcher can quit tomorrow and build a rival with everything in their head. We privilege human memory over machine memory, right up until it's the labs doing the machine learning on everyone else's output.
When learning only flows in one direction, that is not a market anymore. It is enclosure.
If "what you create should belong to you," then we should make it law/new regulation that fits the new AI era. An unwaivable user right to own and reuse the outputs of your own AI interactions, including to train your own models or whatever the fuck you want (even selling it). Otherwise we get a future where a handful of companies own how everyone else learns.
For anyone wondering what on-prem proving for Ethereum looks like: we took a picture of our server before spinning this up!
Congrats to @brevis_zk for being the first team to get up-and-running w/ their on-prem cluster for the Ethproofs On-Prem Proving Initiative!
ethproofs.org/on-prem-provin…
Building through cycles.
Congrats to @brevis_zk for being the first team to get up-and-running w/ their on-prem cluster for the Ethproofs On-Prem Proving Initiative!
ethproofs.org/on-prem-provin…
michael retweeted
Our on-prem @ethereum ZK Proof cluster is live. Proving on self-owned hardware is how Ethereum stays decentralized without centralized cloud chokepoint and how real-time ZK proving scales. Very proud to be the first team up-and-running in this initiative, with a generous grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
Congrats to @brevis_zk for being the first team to get up-and-running w/ their on-prem cluster for the Ethproofs On-Prem Proving Initiative!
ethproofs.org/on-prem-provin…
Our CSO @succinct_li did it again 🔥
We've been building an AI agent for fully automatic software performance optimization. First real test: we pointed it at our own stack — code hand-tuned for years by some of the best performance engineers in ZK. It still found an amazing 11% speedups.
Then we gave it a single round on ecdsa.fail, the open quantum computing benchmark by @eigencloud and @gajesh and it briefly took #1 on the leaderboard.
Then we pointed it at @GPU_MODE. Top 20, in short order.
ZK proving. Quantum circuits. GPU kernels. Three completely different frontiers all driven by one AutoEng agent.
Performance engineering is one of the scarcest, most expert-driven skills in software. An agent that does it automatically doesn't just save engineering time: it changes the economics of building fast systems.
被黑很可怕,但更可怕的是:你不知道自己有没有被黑,也没有办法证明自己没被黑。这些本来可以被一个看似没用的feature避免。AI时代,高价值系统设计必须重新从“深度防御”的角度出发,尽量避免这种问题。
这次 ZEC Orchard 漏洞真正可怕的地方,不只是它可能允许无限增发,而是因为 ZEC 的隐私特性,系统无法确定这个漏洞到底有没有被利用、被利用了多少。也就是说,也许什么都没发生,也许已经发生过无限增发,但链上没有办法给出一个确定答案。
这件事反映了行业一个更深层的问题:我们不能再把软件安全的设计标准停留在“代码应该是没问题的”。尤其在AI之后,白帽和黑帽发现漏洞的速度都会被极大放大。未来高价值系统的默认假设应该是:实现一定有问题,所以系统必须围绕关键不变量设计足够多的guardrails(安全围栏)。
比如 ZEC 的发行速度和总量规则本身是确定的,那么在网络里增加某种零知识证明,去证明代币总量和发行规则没有被破坏,是完全可以实现的。只是这种功能在没有事故时看起来“没什么用”:不提升性能,不改善用户体验,也没有短期叙事。但如果当时有类似机制,任何无限增发类漏洞一旦被大规模利用,就可能被监控迅速发现,而不是事后两眼一抹黑。
这就是所谓“深度防御”的意义:不要假设某一层永远正确,而是用多层独立防线覆盖预防、检测、限损、响应和恢复。一层失败,其他层至少应该让问题可见、可控、可恢复。
各种DeFi协议也是一样。代码审计、形式化验证、漏洞赏金都很重要,但这些还不够。真正的安全体系还应该包括运营安全、实时监控、异常检测、限额机制、熔断机制、应急治理和主动攻防演练。未来链上系统的标准不应该是“我们相信实现没有问题”,而应该是“即使实现有问题,系统也能尽快发现、限制损失,并证明关键不变量没有被破坏”。
最后希望这个漏洞没有被真的使用过 安全生产 警钟长鸣
最近很多人在 讨论 ETH 作为资产是不是不行了(还有中文区搞笑的drama)。
这事儿其实没那么复杂。
如果你觉得 ETH 不行,是因为 Ethereum 的价值观导向错了,发展方向错了,那你先问自己一个问题:
你还信不信 cypherpunk 那套东西?
你还信不信 permissionless access? 还信不信 credible neutrality? 还信不信 self-custody? 还信不信 censorship resistance? 还信不信 privacy? 还信不信 open protocol? 还信不信一个全球开放、中立、任何人都能接入的公共网络?
如果你已经不信了,或者你从来就没信过,那其实很简单:卖光就好了。
ETH其实这十年 价值观没变过
但是这十年买ETH的人可以说是,各有原因,很多也不是因为这套核心价值观
但是ETH没变,世界变了。
不是说他原来走的方向和现在不一样了,只是现在这套价值观确实很难活。
这个世界现在的大趋势就是越来越反自由:更多监管、更多审查、更多资源集中、更多对个人自主权的不信任。
所以如果你觉得 cypherpunk 这套东西已经过时了,那你看空 ETH 是很自然的。因为 Ethereum 代表的东西,确实和今天世界的很多潮流是反着来的。
甚至未来五年、十年,可能五十年,世界的大方向都未必站在 Ethereum 这边。
那怎么办?
很简单:你有多不信,就卖多少。
剩下没卖的,就是你给自己信仰买单哈哈。
但反过来,如果你仍然相信,人类长期应该往更开放、更自由、更中立、更抗审查、更尊重个人主权的方向走,那 ETH 不管是在技术上还是思想上还是带领这个方向的。
不信就卖。 半信半疑就留一点。 真信就继续拿。
就这么简单。
Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.
First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.
The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"
Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.
As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.
One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.
My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.
Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.
This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.
Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?
EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.
This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.
And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.
This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)
EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).
At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.
To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.
I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:
* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.
* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.
* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.
Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.
The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.
EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.
It was truly inspiring to hear from Marsel, a professional photography artist, about the importance of proving what is real in the age of AI. I really enjoyed recording this podcast with you sir! More to come!
Last week we brought the full version of Brevis Vera live: capture a photo, edit it, and generate a proof anyone can verify, end to end. 📸
We also said we'd be sitting down with some of the best photographers in their fields to start a real conversation about authenticity in the age of AI.
This is the first of those conversations.
Our CEO Michael @no89thkey talks with Marsel van Oosten (@Squiver), Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Nikon Ambassador, about his path from advertising to the most remote corners of the planet, why his real photographs now get mistaken for AI, where AI fakery is doing the most damage, and what proving what's real means for the future of photography.
Watch 👇
Follow Marsel: @Squiver and squiver.com
Try Vera: vera.brevis.network
Brevis Vera alpha is now live! Don't detect what is fake, prove what is real @brevis_zk
Brevis Vera is now live!
Back in March we introduced the concept with a guided interactive demo. Today the full version is open, so anyone can run the whole workflow on their own photos: capturing, editing, proving, and verifying.
Try it: vera.brevis.network 🧵
Our team has been working on this for the last few months! Brevis Pico can now prove 99.9% @ethereum blocks in real time. We are live on @eth_proofs Let's get that 100X scaling on @ethereum L1 this year!














