Yahoo! This is an exciting day for me. After a long journey through blockchains, cryptography, and ZK rabbit holes, my new book, co-authored with @NathanOnCrypto, is finally out. It's part history, part deep dive, part red pill, and it's about two of my favorite topics: blockchains and ZK. This is a book for non-experts, written in plain language, zero complicated jargon. And now it's finally published! Grab a copy for yourself or send one to a friend, and start the journey 👇

Everyone agrees privacy is really important for blockchain. They're right. But more important is to have *useable* privacy. The kind of privacy you're familiar with from web2 experience. If you want to do more than just transfer tokens from one user to another (maybe swap tokens through an AMM? Borrow stables with BTC as collateral? Generate yield by staking? All these things and more), you'd love the veil and benefits of privacy. STRK20 makes all of this possible: a new protocol that will let users do all of their financial transactions (staking, borrowing and lending, swapping, etc.) under one big veil of privacy, and do so with fast finality and smooth UX. It's like your experience with apps such as Revolut and Robinhood, but self-custodial and blockchain based. STRK20 is the *first* protocol that lets you do all of this. Like other things we've trailblazed – Validium, Cairo, Smart Wallets (account abstraction), post-quantum security and formal verification – Starknet is ahead of the curve. That's what future proof blockchain looks like.

Prediction markets are so 2025. Distribution markets are the future. Read this and then check it out for yourself, or vice versa.

What would cause your non-crypto friends to onboard to crypto?

My explanation on how STARKs make errors/malicious steps detectable: Imagine a massive swimming pool. Suppose you want to make sure the water is clean, but you suspect someone poured in a single drop of dye. How would you prove it? You (or your Prover) would turn on giant turbines to mix the water over and over. If someone DID add one drop of dye, it would spread throughout the entire pool. Then you (or the Verifier) would inspect a small sample of the water. If the pool was contaminated, traces of the dye will show up in the sample. If the sample is clean, you know the water is clean. That's what STARKs do. They "mix" the data repeatedly until the tiniest error can't stay hidden.

STRK20 is Privacy for DeFi Easy for users, easy for builders.

The pace of crypto cycles < The pace of AI cycles

One of the most beautiful buildings I ever visited. And took longest to build in the modern era.

Question: how is the payout computed based on my distribution and others distribution once the outcome is known? Take inflation, the outcome will be a single number, so who pays whom how much based on the distributions? A different way of asking is: if the outcome is a single number, how do you compute the outcome distribution?

So, are you long or short Space X?

The knee jerk as he says it tells it all

Worth paying attention to ArcX. Not your weekend points app. Team's been building in crypto for years, has managed serious capital before. Now taking a real shot at structured reward markets for perp DEXes.

Terrific news!

Worst review you can receive as mathematician: Your paper contains claims that are novel and correct. Unfortunately, the novel claims aren't correct and the correct ones aren't novel. Ever got this?

Here’s how to NOT build a privacy layer today – 1. Go for fancy cryptography beyond ZK – we’re not there yet, and it’ll certainly harm point 2 (UX) 2. Throw the burden of UX on someone else, and create something that’s safe but unusable by normies (like my Mom) 3. Rely on TEEs in a decentralized setting