CEO @Americanfort_io, Life hax0r, multi-patented inventor, husband, EMT, SAR, HAM, pilot, eng, river runner, maker, skier, guitarist, hunter, longevity gym bro

Jackson Hole, WY
Joined October 2009
🔐 CAN CRYPTO PAYMENTS BE PRIVATE AND VERIFIABLE? At the Global Onchain Summit, @ZoinaShaikh speaks with @Americanfort_io CEO Michal “Mehow” Pospieszalski @MehowHacks about zero-knowledge proofs, wallet ownership, and #quantum security. 🎥 Watch the full interview below in comments👇
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🚨PRIVATE PAYPAL FOR ALL OF CRYPTO! @MehowHacks of @Americanfort_io on Crypto Banter with @cryptomanran says money shows up from an address and you don’t know who sent it. Address poisoning. Can’t prove it to an exchange or the IRS. He says they fixed the problem, and once you have that, you get private PayPal for crypto and Zcash-style compliance for everything else. Watch the FULL video: youtu.be/oE07AnaziNk
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The BIGGEST Crypto Breakthrough in Years! | Michal "Mehow" Pospieszalski | Full Interview
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We came to Singapore with one message: privacy is not a feature. It's a right, and it belongs inside the products people already use. Not bolted on, not a separate chain you have to move to, not a trade-off between staying private and staying accountable. Built in, so a name replaces an address, your balance stays yours, and the only person who can see where a payment came from is the person you paid. What we heard back this week moved us. Builders who have watched users lose money to a copied address and want that to stop. Exchanges and custodians who believe privacy and compliance should have never been enemies. People who walked up to the booth and said, "This is what I've been waiting for someone to build." That is why we do this. Every name sold this week went to a person who will never have to triple-check characters again. Every SDK conversation is a wallet that gets to protect its users without rebuilding from scratch. To everyone who stopped, listened, pushed back, and stayed for one more question: thank you. You made the mission feel less like ours and more like everyone's.
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"You’ve solved every single problem people have talked about in crypto for years." – Yes. In his recent interview with @MarioNawfal, @MehowHacks broke down American Fortress’s mission: deploying privacy engines across the top 50 chains. What does that mean for users? • The utility and confidentiality of Zcash, everywhere. • Use your handle, receive funds, and reveal nothing to third parties. • Seamless cross-chain privacy infrastructure. Watch the clip below 👇
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Crypto’s quantum future deserves more than a fear narrative. At Quantum + Privacy Day panel with @projecteleven and @quipnetwork, Mehow shared the vision behind AmericanFortress: privacy and simplicity for the chains people already use, with quantum resistance built into the ambition. Build for the upside. Prepare for what’s next.
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In 2020 we looked at where crypto privacy was heading and didn't like what we were seeing. Every serious attempt was a mixer or a coin that hid everything from everyone, and anyone paying attention could see regulators would eventually ban that. They have. From July 2027 an EU exchange can't hold an account that anonymises transactions. Dubai got there first. But the thing people actually wanted was never anonymity. A company doesn't want its suppliers and payroll readable by competitors. A person doesn't want to hand over their entire financial history every time they share an address. That's privacy from strangers, and it's completely compatible with the two parties in a payment knowing exactly who each other is. So that's what we built. You send to a name instead of an address. The name produces a fresh destination for every relationship you have, on every chain it runs on, and one encrypted signal covers years of payments between you. Nobody reading the chain can tell who you pay. Your recipient always can. Then we went further than anyone asked us to. Every payment can carry a zero-knowledge proof of where the money came from. Only the recipient can read it, and they can show it to an auditor later without exposing anything else. A bridge can demand that proof before it pays out, which means a swapped or poisoned address simply can't collect. The same proof system turned out to make existing wallets quantum safe without moving a coin, and this summer we got proving time down from over half an hour to a few seconds. $AF is the token that makes the network run. It locks name reservations, pays the people who carry the signals, and covers the tolls for resolving names and sponsoring transactions. Five years, one million lines of code and sixteen patents filing later, we’re here.
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The Quantum Alliance is here 🤝 An open standards body defining “quantum-ready” for blockchain. Proud founding contributor with @KeystoneWallet, @thevault_soft, @hackenclub, @PQabelian, @midnightfdn, @QuantusNetwork, @intmaxIO, and @Americanfort_io → quip.network/blog/postquant-…
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Mehow retweeted
Replying to @drakefjustin
Bunker mode we have already finished at AmericanFortress.io. You can read the paper on the IACR here ... eprint.iacr.org/2026/1508 .. that paper had the 30 second compute and it focused on correctness. We're now doing it in 3 seconds with no GPU acceleration. So it works on your phone. Shortly will be sub second.
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We have recently published a full paper on how to avoid mass migration and yet achieve the „bunker mode” effects - through ZK proofs of seed provenance. That has been discussed a few years back by a group of researchers, but the practical issue was these proofs took 30mins to compute on a strong machine. In our latest implementation we took it down to 3 seconds on a phone, without GPU acceleration. Read full paper here: eprint.iacr.org/2026/1508
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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Mehow on the @token2049 main stage today. Public blockchains put every transaction on display. The tools built to fix that: mixers, privacy coins, shielded pools, hide you, and then the exchanges you actually need treat you as a risk. Transparent to the world, or private and locked out, that's been the choice. A payment should be private to the world, readable only by the recipient, and able to prove where the money came from when an auditor or exchange asks, without exposing the rest of the sender's history. AmericanFortress™ is the missing primitive: a payment that is simple, private, safe and carries its own proof. Readable only by the recipient. Provable to an auditor without exposing the rest of your history. Compliant without viewing keys. #TOKEN2049
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Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge Proofs solved: From 33 minutes to 3 seconds. We optimized the math and made proving time fast enough to run on your phone. Watch the breakdown 👇
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At @0G_labs Dev Day, @MehowHacks laid out the AmericanFortress™ vision: private payments that carry their own proof. Verify who paid without exposing an entire wallet history. Built for people and AI agents. Coming to 0G first.
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Pay someone once on a public blockchain and they can see how much money you have, who paid you last week, and what you bought this morning. Forever. Your bank doesn't work like that. Nobody's bank works like that. Your records are private until someone with a reason asks. Tonight at House of AI event we co-hosted with @0G_labs in Seoul, @MehowHacks showed how to bring that standard to crypto: a payment that is private, and that can still prove who sent it when it matters. You pay a name, like @alice, and the transaction stays private. If an exchange or an auditor ever needs to check a specific payment, you prove that one payment and nothing else. Your history stays yours. Coming to 0G first.
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Mehow retweeted
Packed a dark purple room in Gangnam with @Americanfort_io just to agree that the next billion users aren't human and they will probably trade against us anyway Thank you, Seoul. #KBW2026 🇰🇷
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.@MehowHacks, CEO of @Americanfort_io, will be speaking at Quantum & Privacy Day. Michal was one of the white-hat hackers the U.S. government hired to audit electronic voting machines. AmericanFortress is a private by default transaction layer. October 8 | Tower Club, Singapore Join us in Singapore: luma.com/jtof4o9b
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If you're at @kbwofficial, be sure to come to House of AI we're co-hosting with @0G_labs for @MehowHacks' keynote: "Compliant Privacy in Public Blockchains: The Missing Primitive, coming to 0G first" 📍 Big Place, Yeoksam 🗓 Thu, 1 Oct · 5-9 PM KST Register here: luma.com/house_of_ai_kbw2026
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"Who sent you this money?" In private crypto, the honest answer has always been: I can't prove it. On this @RoundtableSpace, @MehowHacks broke down how we solve it: every private transaction carries a zero-knowledge proof of sender. The recipient can cryptographically verify where the money came from, without either side going public. That one primitive does a lot of work: → Proof of source of funds that holds up to scrutiny → Address poisoning caught before it costs you → Laundering patterns flagged, without surveillance of everyone else And here's the part TradFi should sit with: viewing keys show you a wallet, not the history of the funds in it. A cryptographic proof of sender is stronger evidence than most banks can produce. Privacy from observers. Proof between parties. That's the whole design.
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The proposed fix for the ~7M quantum-vulnerable BTC is to freeze it. @MehowHacks answer at @SALTConference: don't. Build migration that still works after Q-Day, and nobody has to take anybody's coins.
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Two thirds of all crypto is exposed to this. If your public key has ever touched a chain, a large enough quantum computer can work backwards to your private key and spend what's left. On Solana, nobody even has to go looking, every address is a public key, sitting there in the open. @MehowHacks at the @SALTConference on the problem the industry keeps deferring.
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