CoFounder/CEO @MindNetwork_xyz @Binance incubated, @Ethereum Foundation, @Chainlink BUILD, @Consensys SCALE, @W3C, @Forbes Business Council

West Palm Beach, FL
Joined April 2009
Christian retweeted
The best way to make cryptography stronger is to try to break it. AI can actually build confidence in cryptography, argues Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh.
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Amara's law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." The financial system is moving onchain. One of the biggest shifts happening over the next decade. Especially with the adoption of agentic finance.
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Christian retweeted
Cryptography is not over. The internet is not over. Blockchains are not over. We’re just entering the 🚨danger zone🚨, that’s all. Whether quantumly or classically, major public key implementations will fall. Maybe soon. We need to move to a crypto agile paradigm instead of assuming certain functions will work for decades. All cryptographic infrastructure including blockchains has to be rebuilt around this realization. That’s it.
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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.
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Yup
A new Economic Letter highlights that stablecoin issuers' Treasury holdings have grown more than $200B in five years, helping offset the decline in China's holdings. sffed.us/4rG1Ure
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Christian retweeted
This great report by @DefiLlama is a very detailed analysis of confidential DeFi, with a deep dive on @zama . Must read if you are interested in the space! Oh, and the Zama TVL numbers have almost doubled since then, and is now sitting at ~90m shielded TVL :)
Public chains were built so anyone could check anything. Institutions noticed that included their balances, positions, and trades. Confidential DeFi is trying to hide the data and keep it verifiable. It has grown 170% in 18 months. A deep dive on @zama and encrypted settlement:
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New markets have changed what people can trade and how. In the last decade, blockchains have started lowering the cost of building markets, making it easier to experiment with net new ones.
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Christian retweeted
The Bretton Woods of Super Intelligence
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Christian retweeted
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce calls to end mass KYC data collection, warning it puts crypto holders at risk of phishing and physical attacks. Pierce says the current KYC/AML system creates massive databases of sensitive information that can be hacked, leaked, or exploited. She's pushing for zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) that could verify users meet regulatory requirements without exposing their personal information.
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🚨 LATEST: SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce says zero-knowledge proofs could verify compliance without collecting users’ personal data. She warns current KYC/AML practices create “data haystacks.”
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Christian retweeted
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 CFTC announces the agency is establishing "clear" crypto market structure rules. "It's GO TIME"
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1:10:47 “But look this raises a somewhat of an orthogonal issue that’s worth talking about which is data privacy. And I think we need much stronger data privacy laws around the data that you have with AI services. So right now the data you have in your AI chat doesn’t even reach the same level of protection as email. In most contexts, if the government wants to get your emails, they would have to get a search warrant and then have to prove probable cause in a court. But that is not the standard for AI data. The standard for AI data is you can just get a subpoena or a court order. And when you think about how personal AI is becoming; people are using AI for their lawyer, their doctor, their therapist…The idea that someone can just get your data without probable cause or a search warrant, that just seems kind of crazy to me.” I agree. Federal data privacy laws for AI would be wild because the related technology problem sets have been largely addressed by crypto + ai startups for years. What an unlock of currently untapped startup potential. AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop? OpenAI’s Math Breakthrough, Nike’s $... youtu.be/cvxjqbfLVk0?is=sDll…
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Wow. Go open source!!
Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway: 🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6% While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z⁠.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2). (Do note that's the spend for inference of the model across providers (mostly in the US), not revenue going directly to the open weight labs.)
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The next great market migration is equities onchain and Chainlink is building the infrastructure to bring global capital markets with it.
Sergey Nazarov at the inaugural CFTC Innovation Advisory Committee roundtable: “The thing that I think is going to happen next…”
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The next 10 years I’m bullish on psychiatrists who specialize in automatonophobia
Figure has introduced their new humanoid robot neural network called Helix 2.5, which the company says is capable of entering homes it has never seen before and immediately performing complex tasks with zero additional training. Figure says it tested its humanoid across 30 previously unseen homes, where it autonomously: • Made beds • Folded towels • Tidied living rooms • Navigated unfamiliar layouts • Manipulated objects it had never encountered • Self-corrected when it made mistakes "No data was collected from the homes beforehand, and the robot received no fine-tuning or adaptation for the environments or objects."
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“Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.” 🎤💧
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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