The more robotics and manufacturing founders I talk to, the more I realize how scarce electrical engineers seem to be. As an EE myself, that’s surprising. But after years of talent gravitating toward software, maybe it shouldn’t be. AI is making code easier to write, but we’re entering an era where we need to build actual machines. You can vibe code a PCB, but electrical engineering still feels like a much bigger barrier to entry than software. I think EEs are about to become a lot more valuable.

We've built an internal system that makes hardware engineering so much easier. It has full knowledge of our stock, capabilities, and resourcing which lets me just sit here and ask it stupid questions while I'm designing.

BREAKING: @noxmetals, the YC-backed manufacturing startup, says it has reached a $25M annualized revenue run rate in less than a year. The Detroit-based startup is automating metal cutting and supply for the American industrial base.

@inflectionspace will manufacture 10,000 spacecraft per year by 2031. @matt_hanley_ and I have spent our entire careers designing and building spacecraft, and we know that the status quo doesn’t scale. We’re going to fix it.

Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework. We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics. It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again. So that’s what we’re focusing on.

Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework. We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics. It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again. So that’s what we’re focusing on.

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.

We made history. On just our second flight, we became the first commercial space company from Europe to deliver satellites into orbit. Mission 'Onward and Upward' successfully lifted off and deployed payloads into orbit. A new chapter for European spaceflight. More: isaraerospace.com/press/hist…

Many of the great VC firms and solo GPs started out with funds of $10M or less. These micro VC firms have a risk appetite which is crucial to the industry, and play an important role in seeding risk capital where larger firms cannot. "Micro VCs play a pivotal role in democratizing access to entrepreneurial finance by allowing ventures to get funding from a new type of investors. Moreover, micro VCs encourage more kinds of limited partners to access the VC industry." - Micro VC (2022) Unfortunately, the associated regulatory costs make operating at this scale incredibly difficult in the UK. Admin and compliance often consumes about $1.4M of a $10M UK fund, versus just $450k in the US. As a result of this high cost, the median fund size in the US was $20M in 2024, in the UK (with just 3% of the volume) it was $88M. So, the UK not only has lower total venture capital volume, it also has fewer small funds — the worst of both worlds. This is a major bottleneck, but there is a fix. If you're interested in hearing more, drop me a DM. (Credit to @cupazhou and @samhuleatt for the graphic below, from The Side Letter.) Micro VC paper: eiexchange.com/api/submissio…