Innovating inside Deutsche taught me that scope is how you get things through. Its crypto custody is exactly that: BTC, ETH, USDC, EURC, EURAU. Custody and transfer only, Germany only, Asia ambitions. Not a crypto desk. Settlement first.
Digital assets are becoming part of everyday banking infrastructure. 1/4
reuters.com/business/finance…
Sensible note from Coinbase on quantum Bitcoin. No panic, just planning. Swappable signatures and an early start. The hard part is old coins. ~30% of BTC already has its public key on-chain, and Chainalysis estimates 3-4m BTC may be lost for good. Who moves those?
coinbase.com/blog/working-to…
matt.eth 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.
Civilisation advances when we build hard things. Humanity’s job is to build a better future through science and art.
Prometheus brought us the gift of fire. What will you do with it?
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
Polynomial inner product encryption / Witness encryption might be productionized soon! 👀 No hard fork required.
The company behind the benchmark for the entire planet's wealth has just bought the security layer of DeFi.
Onchain infrastructure == financial infrastructure.
At Lombard we've worked with @OpenZeppelin for 2 years, so congrats to the whole OZ team!
Today we are announcing that S&P Global has entered an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin.
Onchain finance is growing from an emerging market into core financial infrastructure, and the standards and rails our team and community built are becoming the rails of global finance. OpenZeppelin smart contracts facilitated over $37 trillion in value transferred, with the vast majority of the largest DeFi protocols, blockchain networks, stablecoins and tokenized funds relying on them.
With S&P Global, we expect to accelerate the impact of onchain finance, backed by more than a century of trust in global markets, benchmarks, and risk frameworks.
To our clients and to all the users of OpenZeppelin open source tools:
• OpenZeppelin Contracts and all our open source applications and tools remain open source, free, and publicly maintained on GitHub. Building open source standards stays a core priority.
• Audits, engineering work, and ecosystem programs continue with the same team, brand, quality, and customer experience, with what will be the added benefit of S&P Global's research capacity, market data, and institutional reach.
For the last decade, OpenZeppelin has set the security standard for onchain finance. Today begins a new chapter for that mission, together with one of the most trusted names in global markets.
Read the full announcement: openzeppelin.com/news/spglob…
Shipped: LBTC's yield engine moves to an institutional covered call strategy. From a product view, here's what actually changes if you're building on LBTC: nothing in the integration surface. Token contract, mint/redeem logic, the CCIP bridge, all identical. Full rundown: docs.lombard.finance/use/lbt…
LBTC proved demand for yield-bearing Bitcoin. Today, we double down on that thesis.
LBTC is moving to institutional yield. @Bitwise will manage a covered-call options strategy with a 4.5-year legacy track record, to generate LBTC's yield, targeting 2.5% net APY paid in Bitcoin.
Shipped: Bitcoin Onchain Credit Strategy. Bitcoin Earn depositors provide collateral coverage through Symbiotic, Flow Traders borrows through Cap, the premium flows back as Bitcoin yield.
Full mechanics on the blog: xitter.cf/Lombard_Finance/status…
matt.eth retweeted
Following a comprehensive security review of the cross-chain infrastructure underpinning LBTC and BTC.b:
- CCIP will replace LayerZero as the cross-chain infrastructure across Solana, Etherlink, Berachain, Corn, and TAC
- LayerZero on Morph and Swell will be fully deprecated
Paradigm's quantum escape hatch for Satoshi-era Bitcoin is the right call.
You don't hold the governance debate when the threat is live. You hold it now, while there's time - years - to implement and raise awareness.
paradigm.xyz/2026/05/pacts-p…
matt.eth retweeted
Had people reach out to me about @IOHK_Charles livestream.
To clarify: @Lombard_Finance DID NOT have any direct exposure.
This report presented on the livestream is AI-generated and contains incorrect information.
matt.eth retweeted
.@Bitwise Asset Management joins Lombard's Bitcoin Smart Accounts as a strategic yield partner.
The global crypto asset manager with $15B+ AUM and 40+ investment products is developing scalable Bitcoin yield strategies for the estimated $500B in institutionally custodied BTC.
matt.eth retweeted
Bitcoin as a productive asset onchain, what does that actually look like? Speaking at @blockworksDAS today at 2:20pm in good company alongside @HHorsley, @JacobPPhillips, and Justin Brill from @Anchorage.
Come listen!
























