one theme from last cycle is US investors participating in private/public sales and getting a 1 year lock up those investors are what we call "retail exit liquidity" for the rest of the circulating supply

sign-in with ethereum is actually a terrible idea because it trains people to sign messages all the time & creates _signing fatigue_. what you actually want is the exact opposite. a sig should be considered _dangerous_ and treated as a _special event_. it should not be something users do casually as part of their normal workflow. if people get used to clicking "sign" everywhere, they stop paying attention & eventually sign things they do not understand (this happens every minute in this space btw). the right security model is to teach users that signing something is a _serious action_ that deserves a lot of scrutiny, and not to normalise it as just another login button. we should immediately stop doing this shit.

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.

Have you ever wondered just how decentralized @Rocket_Pool is? What ~1500 worldwide node operators supporting rETH looks like?? Look no further, Steely from our community built this beautiful tracker to see attestations in real time all over the world! Ethereum in motion.

Secure. Private. Decentralized. Encrypted.

Sony was founded 80 years ago today with 20 employees and a rice cooker that burnt rice. Their first product didn't work. A decade later they built Japan's first transistor radio and started shipping it to America. The Walkman. The PlayStation. Columbia Records. The most important entertainment company of the 20th century started with a kitchen appliance that sucked.

No way, I didn’t know this! Thank you so much for sharing this fun fact @noise_xyz

interesting to see how a simple ad turned into a global cultural phenomenon, wonder what other hidden gems noise beta can uncover about cultural trends and their origins

Every year on May 4th, the internet stops and does Star Wars. It's one of the most reliable cultural moments on the calendar, and it started with a pre-election good luck message to Margaret Thatcher. On May 3, 1979, her party workers ran an ad in the London Evening News: "Dear Maggie, May the Fourth Be With You." She hadn't won yet, and Star Wars had been out for two years. The pun sat unused for decades. The first Star Was-related celebration didn't happen until 2011: a trivia night and costume contest at an underground cinema in Toronto. Disney acquired Lucasfilm the following year and by 2013 it was a full corporate holiday.

thanks for having us! the Base team is genuinely one of the kindest and most helpful teams we’ve had the pleasure of working with

consumer products require constant iteration and feedback. compounding takes time the @base team inherently understands this -- taking a multi-year view on outcomes and it's why we decided to work with them on bringing @noise_xyz to life also @jeremygrinberg is a beast

May the 4th be with you all! #StarWarsDay

If you thought I’d pass up the opportunity for a Star Wars Day joke, you’re looking in Alderaan places.

Community Curated trends on @noise_xyz our first go at the top 1% of users deciding what's worth paying attention to rn trends are social, discovery should be too gg @saintniko @nstlgiaxpress @FerrariJetpack @kantianum @jerrygmii @badlydrawnbarry @fuliggineth @Killer0x_

So let me start. DeFi is the future of the World Financial System. That's my belief, and this is why we are here. This amount of absolutely preventable hacks we see in DeFi (with root causes attributable to CENTRALIZED points of failure) is enormous recently. This damages out industry, and I build for this industry. So I cannot remain silent. Imagine an average grandma (mass adoption is here?) putting her life savings on Aave. And then BOOM, she cannot withdraw her funds on Monday. Aave (the biggest DeFi protocol btw) said it's operating as intended - just rsETH got exploited. rsETH said that all code is safu - just LayerZero bridge got hacked. LayerZero (the biggest bridge securing quarter of a trillion $) said that everything operating as intended. Yet, she cannot withdraw here funds. WTF? Are we industry of clowns? But here's the thing. All issues like this should be prevented BEFORE they happen, not AFTER. Number of single points of failure should be reduced, not increased. When these points of failure are unavoidable - trust should be split. If there's a reliance on infrastructure - we should share best practices how to configure it. Not to mention that code should be very well checked - everyone gets that already. We should probably come together and develop safety standards for DeFi. How to build safely, and how to verify safety. Probably everyone should bring their best practices, and the projects, auditors and risk assessment groups should know them. Maybe we need @ethereumfndn and @SolanaFndn bringing all the ecosystem projects to participate and come up with principles, rules and recommendations of safe building. And, perhaps, we can even learn something about protecting the few remaining centralized points of failure from traditional finance who have many more of those. DeFi will win

I just vouched 0.03e for @egornomic on @ethos_network app.ethos.network/activity/v…

Sesshomaru from Inuyasha Custom for @fuliggineth