ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
This is one of the great virtues crypto has offered to the world: affording relative privacy to the individual, while enabling unprecedented transparency and verifiability of certain financial flows of a company or protocol.
Real transparency through opt-in market-based provable mechanisms > feigned transparency through regulatory diktat
AI is making Ethereum more ambitious.
You might have heard about the challenges that blockchains face in a post-AI world, and while security assumptions will surely be stress-tested in the coming months and years, there is another side to it. I believe AI will let us speedrun towards a world that's both more secure and feature-rich.
As we look towards Ethereum's first post-AI upgrade, Hegotá, the R&D community is asking itself what increasingly powerful tools could help us do differently:
> How far can we push both security and iteration speed?
> How much of the design space can we examine before committing to one?
> How easily can we test the interactions between complex features?
My recent formal verification work @ethlabs_org has given me some reasons to be optimistic about these, as work that would have previously not even been attempted is now being done by agents in days. In September, I posted about using formal verification as part of designing a new consensus protocol. This time, I want to tell you about formally verifying something already fully specified and in production: Ethereum's Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR).
If you are not familiar with FCR, it lets applications confirm Ethereum blocks in seconds, roughly 30x faster than waiting for finality, under additional assumptions (from waiting 13 minutes to 24 seconds!). It also further solidifies Ethereum L1's case as an asset hub and center of gravity for the onchain economy. FCR now has a safety proof in Lean, closely modeling the rule in the consensus specs, which is the source of truth for Ethereum's consensus clients.
Some takeaways:
> FCR is safe! Under its assumptions, confirmed blocks remain canonical. On top of the manual proofs from the paper, we now have Lean proofs of this for the actual spec, additional evidence for applications considering FCR!
> The bulk of the formal verification work took just a 4-5 days (check out the animation!), with agents working mostly unsupervised. We should be very ambitious about using this as a tool at scale.
> After verifying the current rule, it was easy to adapt the model to the upcoming Gloas changes. Immediately, this surfaced a subtle bug caused by changes to fork choice. The problem was in the spec itself and not a gap in the model. The safety proof would not go through, and the agents could precisely pinpoint what was causing it to fail. The bug is now fixed, and formal verification of the corrected protocol goes through.
Iteration is never quite over, even for "finished" features like FCR, because the protocol keeps evolving around them. A formal model lets us ensure that key properties keep holding throughout the evolution of the protocol. With these capabilities, Ethereum can and should keep upgrading faster, tightening fork timelines and exploring more ambitious features, while still raising the security bar.
This picture has been getting much clearer over the past few months, and the past week confirmed it for me, as @drakefjustin and @corcoranwill brought together 100+ Ethereum researchers, cryptographers and formal verification experts in Cambridge for six days of workshops on post-quantum cryptography, formal verification and fast finality. Beyond its own workshop, formal verification was the omnipresent star of the week: everyone is using Lean and doing amazing things with it! Piece by piece, Ethereum's technological core is being rebuilt for the post-AI age.
The excitement was palpable, the sense of optimism was pervasive, and every talk and conversation carried a level of ambition I'd never seen before. The Ethereum R&D machine is upgrading itself, and we will see the outcome of that on the network sooner than you think.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Over the last 90 days, $16.75T of stablecoin transfer volume settled on @ethereum and its L2s. That is 77% of all stablecoin volume across every network.
→ @ethereum mainnet $7.1T
→ @base $8.5T
→ @Optimism Mainnet $0.8T
→ Other Ethereum L2s $0.35T
$21.55T moved across all networks in the period. $16.75T of it settled on Ethereum.
Per @tokenterminal, 15 July to 12 October 2026.
Ethereum is the home of onchain finance.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
I am leaving Cambridge after a few days spent for a workshop on fast finality, concurrent with other workshops on post-quantum crypto and formal verification. Quick takeaways
- Faster finality is coming, the research is mature, even as new ideas have come in during the week, the handoff to specifiers and implementers feels well underway. Next catalyst event will be at devcon in a few weeks, with core devs
- The performance numbers for post-quantum finality are improving massively, and this is the worst that they’ll ever be. This is significant, it means the penalty from moving to more complex crypto would not require, in my opinion, if the numbers hold up, a deep rearchitecting to move to PQ-secure consensus, in particular when it comes to incentives
- The biggest opportunity imo remains networking. Simulations and live experiments are exploring both the current pre-PQ setting, where networking is clearly the bottleneck, and the post-PQ setting, where compute remains the bottleneck. But with PQ compute numbers improving, I wouldn’t be surprised if once again networking becomes the bottleneck
All of this is making me extremely bullish that we’ll achieve PQ-secure and faster finality even faster.
Many thanks to @yannvon @benjaminion_xyz and @robsaltini for the workshop, and to @corcoranwill and @drakefjustin for hosting us in Cambridge!
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
I'm a Ethereum maxi, not a decentralization maxi. I believe the world needs only one fully decentralized / permissionless / trustless blockchain, and that is Ethereum. Every other chain -- whether they are stage 0/1/2, trusted, trustless, centralized, semi-centralized, etc. -- can and should be built on Ethereum.
In fact, the beauty of Ethereum is precisely that because it's itself maximally decentralized, other systems of various degrees of centralization can be built on top, and that they can interop with each other through Ethereum. As long as these systems provide real value to real people, they will strengthen the network effects of Ethereum and bring in more users and liquidity into the overall Ethereum ecosystem, which ultimately leads to a stronger L1 and stronger ETH.
Ethereum is the only credibly neutral, global settlement layer of the world. We are the hub. Let's celebrate the nodes that connect to us.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
News: @IBKR has launched ethereum:native staking for eligible clients.
Interactive Brokers supports 20 digital assets. ETH is the only one you can stake.
Interactive Brokers at a glance:
→ 5.5 million client accounts
→ $964 billion in client equity
Ethereum is the home of onchain finance.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
*Tradfi* headlines last few days…
It’s happening.
I remember when I was told crypto was all a scam.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Justin Drake’s call for “bunker mode” and mass migration, alongside talk of cryptographic breaks within months, is hyperbolic. There is no evidence of a new attack on elliptic curves or any quantitative basis for a short-term timetable for such attacks emerging.
Prominent researchers need to consider how non-experts will receive their language. Speculating that within months individuals could break cryptographic primitives that the internet and digital economy rely on carries consequences. It is a huge leap from AI making progress in other fields of mathematics to predicting the imminent failure of primitives that have faced decades of cryptanalysis.
The idea that hash functions are safer from AI than elliptic curves is speculation. Hash functions contain structure, and we model them as random oracles without justifying proofs.
There is no evidence that elliptic curve cryptography is more vulnerable to AI than symmetric cryptography. If historical human-led analysis is any predictor of the future, the opposite is more likely.
The worst possible reaction to AI developments is to rush into new cryptographic primitives, away from multi-decade old hardened primitives, because somebody is claiming they are safe. I worry that this is an inevitable consequence of the current discourse.
Because of the last 48 hours users are worrying about speculative non-existent black hats, who apparently have the capability of signing OS upgrades and forging bank credentials, from draining their wallets. To protect against speculative threats Ethereum is pulling talent and attention into base-layer primitives and technological iteration, instead of increasing demand for block space by building compelling applications users want and love.
I don’t want to dismiss the considerable advances in mathematics that AI is driving. It is important to understand the nature of these improvements. If its success in other mathematical fields applies to elliptic curves, my expectation is that AI will grind its way to finding algorithms that improve on the current state of the art. That could mean shaving off a few bits of security. It would be prudent to discuss whether we need to increase key sizes and by how much.
I can’t guarantee that AI won’t find total breaks, and neither can anyone else. My speculation as a domain expert does not make my speculation authoritative.
We should also be using AI to investigate whether searching the parameter space can yield new, more secure curves.
We can investigate whether some of these “structure = bad” hunches have any basis in reality. For example, we could use AI to see if the extra structure in Koblitz curves enables attacks beyond the small speedups we know about. This would give us actual evidence to make informed decisions.
If non-experts hear that the cryptography underpinning the digital economy could fail within months, the rational response is to withdraw all digital money (on-chain and off) and hoard gold under the bed.
I think the past 48 hours has unnecessarily undermined confidence in the entire concept of blockchains and digital money.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
What does it even mean to have $100m on Ethereum if it's just a couple of accounts holding it and you can't even swap $10k?
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Crypto was built for a world where, if assumptions changed, they changed slowly. But that comfortable "end of history" era is now over.
But that doesn't mean cryptography is over. It's easy to forget, but for most of history, cryptography was a constant arms race between offense & defense.
Justin's right to highlight the changing paradigm, and the urgent need to do something about it. It's a safe bet that cryptography will keep changing and the next decade of crypto will be defined by a shift to crypto-agility.
That agility not only enables us to keep up with increasing capabilities the attackers, but also integrate the *new and better* forms of cryptography that both quantum and AI will ultimately enable.
Cryptography, blockchains, and digital assets will continue to exist after quantum computers and AI. But there will be a reshuffling: protocols unable or unwilling to adapt (most likely due to ignorance or inaction) will not survive. The distribution of value in the future will almost certainly look very different than it does today.
We're not waiting around. @projecteleven we're working with @drakefjustin and @ethereumfndn, @solanafndn, @zcashfoundation, @ripple, @quantusnetwork, and other teams across the space to build for this future today.
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.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
1/ Ethereum Institutional has a refreshed brand and a new website.
Three months on from launch, we've rebuilt both around the work: helping institutions deploy on Ethereum.
→ A new wordmark, mark and visual system
→ A rebuilt website
→ Deployments: a searchable record of institutional deployments on Ethereum and its L2s
→ A dedicated identity for the Ethereum Institutional Forum
Our goal is unchanged: to make @ethereum the foundational layer for institutional finance.
This is an important next milestone for us in building out the institutional interface for Ethereum. More to come on that soon..
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Huge. Getting this done means at least more than 3x L1 scale, 2.5x increased contract size and a ton more useful features.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Atomic synchronous composability is no longer a promise. History made on mainnet: the first atomic cross-chain L1->L2 transaction ever 🔥 And this is only the beginning for EEZ ... 🚀 @etheconomiczone
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
How are exchanges tokenizing stocks?
- Coinbase: on Base, an ETH L2
- Robinhood: on Robinhood Chain, an ETH L2
- Kraken: on Ink, an ETH L2
And today:
- OKX + ICE, on X Layer, an ETH L2
With L2s, exchanges own the rails and connect to the largest public blockchain:
Ethereum.
NYSE parent @ICE_Markets and @okx's 50/50 joint venture, OKXICE, has notified the SEC of plans to launch a tokenized securities venue under the agency's temporary Innovation Exemption.
The proposed venue would offer retail and institutional investors 24/7 secondary trading in tokenized US NMS stocks through @Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on @XLayerOfficial, an @ethereum L2.
Access is permissioned through KYC/KYB, sanctions screening, whitelisting and wallet-bound credentials, while the underlying chain remains public and permissionless.
The tokens are intended to represent one-for-one security entitlements to underlying shares held through a broker-dealer. The notice lists 64 proposed stocks, including NVIDIA, Tesla and Apple, paired with USDC, USDG or USDT.
Ethereum is the home of onchain finance.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Geoffrey Kendrick sees $ETH outperforming $BTC through 2030.
$4K ETH by the end of the year, $40K by 2030. "ETH BTC, which is now just above 3%, I have going back up to 8% by 2030, which is roughly where it was in the 2021 DeFi summer."
The value capture is indirect but inevitable. When TradFi arrives onchain, they want the oldest, most trusted rails.
FT @StanChart @BitcoinJesusETH @Nexo
Geoffrey Kendrick has a 70x thesis on Arbitrum.
The bet: Robinhood is only the beginning. If more brokers and financial firms launch onchain using Arbitrum’s stack, protocol revenue could jump from roughly $4-5M a month to $40-50M.
The catch? ethereum:0xb50721bcf8d664c30412cfbc6cf7a15145234ad1 still needs better value capture.
FT @BitcoinJesusETH
⏱ TIME POINTS ⏱
00:00 - Intro
01:17 - Why Standard Chartered Is Bullish on Altcoins
04:55 - Which Altcoins Will Survive?
06:56 - Milk Road PRO for $1
07:18 - The $2T Crypto Bets
12:48 - Is $100 UNI Too Low?
15:32 - Can Anyone Beat Uniswap?
18:39 - Why Aave’s Hack Made Him More Bullish
21:53 - Aave vs. Morpho
24:36 - Sky: DeFi’s Federal Bank
28:09 - Where Does Sky’s Revenue Go?
30:35 - The 70x Arbitrum Call
35:22 - Sponsor: Nexo
35:59 - Will ARB Reward Holders?
37:24 - Chainlink’s Massive Moat
40:47 - Ethereum to $40K?
43:06 - Bitcoin to $100K?
44:56 - What He’s Researching Next
46:33 - His Highest-Conviction Bet
47:23 - Wrap-Up
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Tokenizing stocks, bonds, and real estate on Ethereum does something most people are underestimating.
It massively expands the collateral base of the Ethereum economy.
Own $100K of tokenized stocks?
→ Borrow stablecoins against them
→ Stablecoin liquidity increases
→ That liquidity enters DeFi
→ More trading, lending, investing, and economic activity
→ Some portion ultimately flows into ethereum:native
This is basically how credit expands economic activity in the traditional economy.
Put a $100 dinner on a credit card and you create $100 of debt, but that same $100 becomes revenue and income for the restaurant, waiter, cooks, suppliers, etc.
Debt unlocks liquidity. Liquidity creates economic activity.
Now apply that concept to Ethereum at scale.
Stocks. Bonds. Real estate. Treasuries. Eventually +$100 Trillion worth of assets become usable collateral inside DeFi.
That dramatically increases the amount of capital that can move through Ethereum and compounds its economic activity over time.
And sitting underneath that entire economy is ETH, the asset securing it.
Yes, ETH is going to $80,000 and far far beyond it.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
The chart is right. The conclusion isn't @LorenzoARK.
Count only tokens held on-chain outside exchange wallets and the Ethereum ecosystem holds $1.14B of tokenized stocks, versus $0.66B on Solana and $0.44B on BNB. Here's the full picture, same source as your chart.
1/ Supply, not volume, is the scoreboard. Ethereum leads it.
Raw supply today (Blockworks, Oct 2): BNB $1.14B, Solana $875M, Ethereum L1 $812M. L1 alone is #3; with its L2s (Arbitrum $158M, Robinhood Chain $146M, Base $35M) it's $1.15B, #1. But $700M of BNB's total sits in exchange custody wallets (Blockworks' CEX Balance metric), mostly Binance's, versus $213M for Solana and $13M for Ethereum L1.
Surprised this hasn’t gotten more attention: Ethereum L1 is barely showing up in the tokenized equities boom.
Tokenized equities already account for 12% of spot DEX vol on-chain, yet Ethereum L1 has close to 0 market share.
Robinhood, Arbitrum and Base are doing the gruntwork obviously. But where does that leave the L1?
Tokenization is going to reshape the onchain economy, and tokenized equities are going to be the fastest-growing segment over the next 2 years.
Ethereum needs a clear vision for what belongs on L1, what moves to L2s, and how the two fit together, from security and governance to liquidity and value accrual.
More on this in my article next week.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
Crypto adoption seems fast now. But it will never be this slow again.
ZeroNoLedger.eth 🛡️ retweeted
JUST IN: $110,000,000 worth of shorts liquidated from the crypto market in the past 10 minutes.













































