What happens to pearl-2:native when the AI bubble bursts? Does it go into a recession and rise from the ashes years later, similar to how zcash:native did?
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
Day 4: the Guardian architecture
This is how Miden makes crypto safe for regular people. The core goal is to make sure that a compromised key does not lead to a catastrophic loss of funds.
This is already live in @joinbread (with sick UX) and here's how it works 👇
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
Doomerism approach is never a helpful framing, even if it starts with "calmly" and with best intentions.
What we need is risk assessment, practical timelines, and actionable plan.
AI is starting to overturn some of the long-held assumptions on mathematical complexity. At the same time risk of more intelligence applied to these problems yielding new surprising results is growing. But so far, we haven't seen practical security timelines for elliptic cruves materially changing. It's important for crypto space to keep vigilance and flexibility, but speculating about specific "months" timeline creates an unnecessary panic.
Going "bunker mode" is not practical nor a safe approach given how complex it is in operations. We can have better approaches here, for example by recording recovery PQC keys in parallel on application level.
Better approach is making sure that blockchains and tooling around them is designed with cryptographic agility in mind, allowing to evolve cryptography and let users easily update without sacrificing user experience.
NEAR account model was design with this in mind from the start - ability to manage and rotate keys, add and remove supported cryptography.
NEAR already supports post-quantum ML-DSA and we are planning to add hash-based cryptography too over time.
User can just rotate keys on your accounts without needing to move anything or have a complex operations.
Industry should accelerate post-quantum readiness, not because we have updated timelines, but because upgrading cryptography should be a routine operation, not a crisis response.
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.
I think Justin Drake's latest alarmism/vagueposting is going to do a ton of damage in multiple ways. It's basically a huge self-own for their own advocacy work on quantum stuff.
Threats from quantum/AI are real, and teams throughout this industry are making considered decisions about how to respond to those risks in a practical way, and to help their users navigate the uncertainty.
Some of those teams have really good cryptographers with an excellent grasp on the decisions they can make, others have to take their cues from trusted experts. There are so many dimensions to optimize along! And due to the complexity involved, it's almost impossible to explain this stuff to non-cryptographers.
Experts have to be cognizant of all this, and of their responsibility to be levelheaded.
After the fog clears up and people learn from their cryptographer friends what is actually going on, they're going to discover this was (at best) an unintentional marketing stunt and a lot of trust will be lost. And nobody will really know what to do...
This is a shame, because they are directionally correct. It actually meant something when they sounded the alarm before. They've just gradually descended into unhinged predictions without feedback to discourage it.
Can anyone, I mean seriously anyone, justify this debacle? It permanently colors all the legitimate concerns/predictions about classical crypto going forward. By their own admission, there was no new information that drove this. I think Justin Drake should explain how he thought this was the right approach, even if he genuinely believed what he was saying.
Baffling.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
The funds from the $3.8M NEAR Intents hack were sent back in full.
We are stopping the investigation.
Please use bug bounties instead of disrupting the services.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
i think the controversy around this is probably a misunderstanding about what NEAR is for new people discovering it
it is privacy that the vast majority of users desire in tradition payments/finance - for their transactions to not be seen/followed on a public blockchain
NEAR Intents is not ZK privacy like ZEC/XMR - it is not built for money laundering etc. and they say explicitly they can work with government agencies on investigations
its the sort of privacy that can go mainstream - but its not the sort of privacy that hides you from the government
NEAR is permissionless programmable money.
Permissionless means nobody needs permission to own and transfer assets, or deploy contracts on NEAR.
It does not mean every application or liquidity provider must process every transaction.
SHIELD is how NEAR Intents applies this in practice: shared, real-time risk intelligence that lets participants identify hacks and other incidents and choose not to facilitate stolen funds. Partners can both consume and contribute incident data.
In the Bitget hack, SHIELD identified $50M+ in attempted flows through NEAR Intents and helped stop funds during execution.
Open financial infrastructure does not require us to make theft easy. Instead of hiding behind "it's permissionless, what can we do" while sitting on pause button, we should be creative in solutions that are addressing underlying problem.
We can have permissionless protocols that have intelligent defense. This is what we are building with SHIELD and invite everyone to join to make SHIELD industry-wide.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
Crypto space really has a choice - grow the f up or get sidelined with random regulations.
Saying we can not do anything when we are programming decentralized system is just untrue.
Banks run AI for fraud detection but are inherently centralized and require KYC. At the same time KYC doesn't solve any of real problems as we know.
We have better data and talent to create systems that don't require KYC and actually deter criminals while giving full freedom to real users.
By working together we can totally weed out crypto of criminal activity. Criminal TAM is way smaller than all of economy moving onchain we are targeting.
Decentralization != disorganization
"Shielded Bitcoin" is 2018 Zcash with all of Bitcoin's baggage.
I feel bad for the authors. It's a solid take on Zcash's initial design, hamstrung by Bitcoin's refusal to meaningfully upgrade. The irony is that the people hyping it are the reason it's hamstrung.
Every private transaction pays a non-private BTC fee, which severely complicates privacy.
Proofs need a trusted setup because newer schemes won't fit in OP_RETURN.
And even if you fixed that, the peg runs on actual moon math that hasn't been published yet: witness encryption. Which is legitimately awesome if it works, but a massive amount of complexity and, unless I'm missing something, inherently trusted setup.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
1GG9pvrCLcTNBqwoLTKih3d9eSuNPX4aAd porting big slugs of a 55 Bitcoin balance held since 2014 to Zcash. Nice.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
Bitcoin is not Bitcoin Core.
Bitcoin is an idea described in the whitepaper. Bitcoin Core is an implementation.
Zcash is a privacy-enabled implementation of the same idea. Zcash is private Bitcoin.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
Ed Snowden just mentioned Zcash as a solution to the surveillance risks of Bitcoin!
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
I understand and that’s why I said standby. If this needs to be done, I will do it first and bear the consequences. But I won’t act out of emotion or without a plan. And not until we have devised a clear path to victory.
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Ron Freeman MD retweeted
How long do We The People keep paying taxes?
Seven properties, a Mercedes G-Wagon, sneakers worn by Kobe Bryant and a Mickey Mantle rookie card worth $1.5 million. All of these things were bought with taxpayer money.
Paul Randall pleaded guilty in one of the largest Medicaid fraud schemes in the California history – diverting more than $270 million in tax dollars.
Ron Freeman MD retweeted
I'm really excited about BitCoin. It BitCoin itself doesn't turn out to be one of the best inventions ever, then its successor will be.























