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Ethereum can already start preparing accounts for a post quantum world, without waiting for a hard fork.
Today, it would be just 0.07$ .
Further audits incoming. Though I squeezed in a review with Fable before Uncle Sam crashed my party. Verity formal proof included for my lean enjoyers
ethresear.ch/t/sphincs-minus…
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Jun 11
Looks like the options thing is happening already!
See also: various people thinking through and building different versions of the idea in the thread: ethresear.ch/t/building-inde…
Though I do strongly urge that if any of these get on mainnet quickly, we formally verify it first. I hope @vyperlang and/or github.com/lfglabs-dev/verit… folks ( @Fricoben) can help!
(Also, now is a good time to be thinking about robustness-optimized oracles)
firefly.social/post/x/206494…
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Jun 2
Re-posting the idea from the second half of this post a few months ago firefly.social/post/x/202266…:
(This is very relevant to the options ideas from yesterday)
Question: if we're making a synthetic stable, what should it really be stable WITH RESPECT TO? USD is actually far from the best choice.
---
What do people who want stablecoins ultimately want? They want price stability. They have some future expenses in mind, and they want a guarantee that will be able to pay those expenses. But if crypto grows on top of USD-backed stablecoins, crypto is ultimately not truly decentralized. Furthermore, different people have different types of expenses. There has been lots of thinking about making an "ideal stablecoin" that is based on some decentralized global price index, but what if the real solution is to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether?
Here's the idea. You have price indices on all major categories of goods and services that people buy (treating physical goods/services in different regions as different categories), and prediction markets on each category. Each user (individual or business) has a local LLM that understands that user's expenses, and offers the user a personalized basket of prediction market shares, representing "N days of that user's expected future expenses".
Now, we do not need fiat currency at all! People can hold stocks, ETH, or whatever else to grow wealth, and personalized prediction market shares when they want stability.
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vitalik.eth retweeted
Jun 2
Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.
On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.
But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!
As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.
Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.
Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.
Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!
The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)
Part 2: neutral atoms and qday
The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.
Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.
Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.
My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".
Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.
So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.
Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.
Part 3: post-quantum cryptography
There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.
These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.
The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.
Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.
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vitalik.eth retweeted
Jun 1
Vitalik shared his perspective on where @ethereumfndn is heading. Here is mine, another part of the same story.
The EF Mandate from the board was something I proposed late last year. Two main things prompted me. First, debates that were meant to be technical had started to become political and personal, and at times shaped by quieter incentives. Second, as EF grew, more and more versions of "what EF should be" began pulling at the core of the organization from every direction at once. I became convinced that trying to satisfy all of them would leave us achieving nothing at all. It was time for us to restate our role and underlying principles clearly, both the parts that have been clear from the start and those that have been informed by over a decade of experience.
We have said it many times: EF is one of many nodes in Ethereum. I know that is hard to hear for some, because EF was the first group, and in the early years it was essential for making things happen. But it was never meant to stay that way.
I have been in crypto since 2012, before it became an "industry." I joined Kraken in 2013, shortly before the implosion of Mt. Gox, which I helped to clean up. I am very aware of how real growth works, and also aware of the real risks of centralization. So when I became ED in 2018, I understood that Ethereum growing beyond EF would be essential to fulfill its real promise as a public blockchain. The goal I set for myself was to ensure that this happens.
The opposite path has always been untenable: Ethereum's future is too big for any single organization to bring about. So EF made deliberate choices to distribute power. We did incubate and release, like Uniswap and ENS. Support to seed a new norm, like ETHGlobal and the hackathons that are now everywhere. Funding the funders, like Gitcoin and Moloch. We always asked the same question: how does this stand on its own, without us?
Those experiments, alongside the work of countless others, contributed to where we are today. Ethereum is now far bigger than anything EF could coordinate alone. EF now holds less than 0.2% of all ETH, and the return on all of that shared work, together with extraordinary people across the ecosystem, has been beyond anything we could have built by ourselves.
That is exactly why a focused EF is possible now. The Mandate states simply the one thing EF must keep carrying: preserving and accelerating the properties and goals that keep Ethereum uniquely valuable, competitive, and worth building on. That is: CROPS - for the sake of inalienable user self-sovereignty and self-sovereign coordination. We cannot do it alone, and we do not intend to. But defining this as the north star for the mission, and coordinating with the allies who share it, is the responsibility we are keeping.
None of this means EF stops caring about adoption, for everyday users or for institutions. The opposite is true: everything we do is ultimately for the people who use Ethereum. Supporting adoption, including institutional adoption, remains part of our work, pursued in the ways that fit our mission. The value proposition of Ethereum for both everyday users and institutions rests heavily on this.
As EF becomes more focused and more opinionated, the team naturally becomes smaller and more concentrated. That is part of the choice. New leaders are already stepping into this mission and growing within it, and you will hear more from our management in the coming weeks, about what they are doing, and about the new structure and strategy taking shape.
The mission we carry is not a smaller one, but a clearer one. Special thanks to those who have stepped in to support, defend and advance it.
May 24
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.
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Jun 1
One of the many things I dislike about the style of "make AI go well" discourse from frontier AI companies is how nationalist the whole thing has gotten.
In the 2010s, it was: "we're here to benefit all of humanity"
In the 2020s, "we're here to benefit all of 4% of humanity"
And even the Good People are buying into this frame completely😢
And they expect humanity to go along, because "come on, be a realistic adult, it's either us or Chiiina" or something like that
(And on the EU side, you get "[X] with European values", which too often seems to mean "the same stuff they're doing, but with Us instead of Them in charge")
Very big-dog-small-dog energy, morally speaking.
Jun 1
NEW: Bernie Sanders proposes the government take 50% of OpenAI & Anthropic to give the public a “direct ownership stake.”
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vitalik.eth retweeted
We’re currently putting a significant effort into improving leanSpec.
The goals are simple:
• Simplicity
• Clarity
• Correctness
We are leanifying LeanSpec.
If you have ideas around design, structure, or devex, now is a great time to reach out and help shape the project. 👇
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Jun 1
Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt
ethresear.ch/t/building-inde…
What if the use options as the base of defi, instead of CDPs and liquidations? So instead of extreme price movements creating a sharp and global "you get liquidated" effect, instead your exposure to the index diverges quadratically from your preferred exposure in a smoother way?
A key benefit is getting rid of the need for instant oracles, and instead making everything work on top of "slow oracles" (ie. the type that prediction markets use)
This design has a significant downside - the need to do regular rebalancing - and an open question of whether and how this rebalancing can be made slippage-resistant enough. But it's worth considering and trying IMO. I would feel much safer holding algostables inside something like this, than in something that depends on an oracle that has to give real-time answers (and therefore could be tricked into giving wrong real-time answers with no time for human recourse).
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Jun 1
See also: the bottom half of this earlier post
firefly.social/post/x/202266…
Moving away from fiat currency, and toward price stability through each person and institution getting their own customized basket.
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Jun 1
See also: my criticism of the idea that ZK alone, even if well implemented, is sufficient to make "identity verification" pro-freedom: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…
(And some alternative ideas for how to solve underlying goals)
Jun 1
The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. But the risk is that member states (the countries are supposed to create their own versions of the open-source EU app) use it to introduce identity verification that makes it impossible to post anonymously on social media.
The idea behind “completely anonymous” is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.
This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag. By that point, an infrastructure will already have been rolled out; people will have gotten used to it, and it will be harder to roll it back.
More details on mullvad.net/blog/age-verific…
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vitalik.eth retweeted
Jun 1
The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. But the risk is that member states (the countries are supposed to create their own versions of the open-source EU app) use it to introduce identity verification that makes it impossible to post anonymously on social media.
The idea behind “completely anonymous” is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.
This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag. By that point, an infrastructure will already have been rolled out; people will have gotten used to it, and it will be harder to roll it back.
More details on mullvad.net/blog/age-verific…
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Jun 1
This is why:
* Self-sovereign identity, data and money (so you control your account, not a third-party provider)
* CROPS AI (so other people cannot do this to *your computer* vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… )
May 31
meta gave their AI support agent the ability to modify your instagram account. no identity verification. people figured this out and accounts are being taken over right now
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📢📢📢 we are now devnet5 interop!!! 🚀🚀🚀
which is the culmination of the PQ consensus stack that we have been building and iterating on for @ethereum mainnet.
PQ signatures are different from BLS signatures, the current signature machinery of ethereum. But BLS signatures are not Post Quantum secure because breaking elliptic curve cryptography is not an exponential problem for Quantum Computers. But ethereum is being build to last centuries not just decades.
To that end @leanEthereum has been working on PQ signature cryptography using hash based signatures which are one time signatures (OTS), and not plainly aggregatable. Not only that they are huge (~1.5kb).
So this entire challenge started the "devnets" initiatives of leanEthereum. Herein come's the "leanVM" the ZK rail which can aggregate such signatures and makes the entire PQ strategy possible. We have already been through devnet0 to devnet4, and now devnet5!!!
Devnet5 is monumental in that regard, entire block will carry just 1 signature, all aggregated across packed attestations, block signatures (and anything else that will comeup when we backport the spec to mainnet ethereum)
However this is one side of the puzzle, to maintain a stable node, one should be able to repack the attestations from a side branch especially if it moves justification and finalization. and Voila again with leanVM magic, we are able to split the attestations that we need to repack from the combined block signature and repack/re-aggregate them into a new block proposer wants to propose.
This places leanVM as the centrepiece in the entire ethereum post quantum strategy. and the current aim of all the devnets we have been running is to bring a production level performance and demonstration of the capabilities. There are 8 clients that participate in these devnets each bringing value to the table to add stability and robustness (and chaos lol).
Because we know:
"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip"
Goal of all leanEthereum clients is to remove them, one "slip" at a time (or multiple slips at a time lol). Spec isn't good enough, we need production performance, Spec and production design/performance are unequivocally tied. this isn't just a POC network, this is a proposal for ethereum mainnet!
Thats why we have been rigorously running devents, slowly scaling the validators and subnets and discovering and alleviating the issues so that we end up with a production grade PQ signature scheme that ethereum deserves and needs. And this focus is now gonna magnify 1000X now that we believe we are on a spec that can deliver PQ for mainnet.
And mind you, the time of need is gonna strike soon. We not only intend to solve this conundrum for ethereum but propose to even upstream to bitcoin so that we have a PQ standard this entire space deserves.
And all that based on a humble but extremely powerful leanVM that makes the hashbased cryptography workable for the production grade systems like ethereum and bitcoin.
PS: we are currently heavily focused on debugging and scaling devnet4 spec devnets while we have already started to run sims and preliminary interops for devnet5.
So stay tuned for further progress that we leanEthereum teams have been cranking out with a steady but heavy dose ☕️.
May be all matrix is just ☕️☕️☕️
🎉🎉🎉 devnet5 spec merged 🚀🚀🚀:
block with just a single aggregated signature proof
github.com/leanEthereum/lean…
this brings @leanEthereum full circle on the "PQ stack" for consensus to upstream it to mainnet PQ centric L* hardfork
It includes a very neat feature for splitting the block signature proof for re-bundling it on a side branch even without requiring the constituent signatures that were aggregated!
all thanks to awesome EF researchers working on leanVM 🦾🦾🦾
now time to build devnet5! comeon lean teams time to harden and show production stability and scale
fyi: devnet4 runs are already on for scaling the validators to harden subnets & aggregators
lets grind on!
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May 29
Vyper devs continue doing impressive things. Highly encourage people (and their bots) to take another look at the language.
introducing vyupgrade
it automatically rewrites old vyper contracts into modern vyper, then proves the rewrite is safe by checking it compiles under both source and target versions, diffing the abi, method ids and storage layout.
it supports all syntax changes from 0.2.1 to 0.4.3, as well as picking up dependencies and modules like snekmate.
some rewrites are not inherently safe and need your judgement. the tool flags those and shows you exactly what to look at.
$ uvx vyupgrade contracts/
github.com/banteg/vyupgrade
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vitalik.eth retweeted
May 29
We built a simulator for the fast confirmation rule, and replayed a years worth of blocks and attestations on Mainnet.
Across 800,000 mainnet slots, roughly 96 out of every 100 slots would have been fast-confirmed within 12 seconds.
Zero false confirmations.
Read more below!
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🛡️ The results for the @thedaofund’s Ethereum Security QF Round are LIVE!
This historic round is closing with a HUGE last minute contribution:
@wintermute_t has added $200K to the matching pool 🔥
Wintermute is a well known liquidity provider, and one of the leading supporters of Ethereum security, in fact exactly a year ago today they donated $1M to @_SEAL_Org.
This year they teamed up with TheDAO, @Quantstamp & several other community partners to allocate over $1.6M worth of funding to Ethereum Security Public Goods 👇
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vitalik.eth retweeted
May 28
It is, but 96 GB is a good canonical "cap" on how much RAM it's practical to get locally: the RTX 6000 has 96, macbooks and top-end AMD laptops have 128 unified (and you want to leave 32 for other stuff), DGX spark has 128
In general I think the local LLM and GPU space should get better at fitting itself into standardized form factors at different sizes.
Learn from eg. the way airlines standardize max sizes for various carryon items and all the manufacturers build around that and stay 1% under the limit.
Just pick a few numbers (eg. 2 GB, 8 GB, 24 GB, 96 GB, 256 GB, 1 TB), agree on them industry-wide, and build all the hardware and models around those numbers.
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May 28
More people should know about the Interfold.
It's basically what I've been yelling at people to build with the MACI ideas ( ethresear.ch/t/minimal-anti-… ) for almost a decade, and now it exists, in a generalized form.
The idea is: a privacy protocol optimized for things like voting (and other use cases eg. secret-ballot auctions). The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, and people send in their votes onchain, using a ZKP to prove eligibility. An arbitrary computation on the votes gets run inside FHE, and then threshold-decrypted.
From what I can tell (the docs are good docs.theinterfold.com/CRISP/… ), it gets pretty optimal security guarantees:
* Voter anonymity can be made unconditional if eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs
* Censorship resistance is guaranteed by ethereum (votes can be posted directly onchain, and there's a proof that all posted votes are taking into account)
* The correctness of the outputted result can be ensured via ZK over FHE
* Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty; unavoidable given present-day technology
The main limitation is that today "ZK over FHE" is only properly available for additive vote tallying, as it's too expensive for computations that involve multiplication or other more complicated manipulation at the moment. There's work in progress on slashing-based / optimistic computation for such situations.
(And of course ideally in the long term we'd figure out obfuscation so you can get rid of the M-of-N committees😃)
May 21
The Interfold Launch Primer starts today.
Over the next several weeks, we'll explain the system, the network, ciphernodes, and the path to participation.
First: How Interfold works, from private inputs to collective outcomes.
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vitalik.eth retweeted
May 27
I see a lot of prediction market apps defaulting to sports markets to compensate for activity.
@Trueo_ we deliberately avoid sports.
It’s a saturated market and there’s little room for differentiation.
I have nothing against sports betting, but it’s just not our thing.
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