
[email protected] | Formal Verification, Compilers & Static Analysis | @WhileyLang | Researcher in Smart Contracts @ConsenSys | Opinions are my own.
Wellington
Joined May 2011
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David J. Pearce retweeted
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.
David J. Pearce retweeted
A more intentional Ethereum.
Linea is supporting the Open Intents Framework as it moves from concept to adoption.
David J. Pearce retweeted
The Linea Stack is joining the @lfdecentralized family, as Lineth.
Open source shows you what the technology does today. Open governance shows you what it will do in ten years.
Neutral by design.
Welcome, Lineth! 🎉 The Linea Stack — in production since 2023 — joins @lfdecentralized as an incubating project under its new name.
lfdecentralizedtrust.org/blo…
David J. Pearce retweeted
Linea was built to make the ZK rollup experience seamless for both developers and end users. Our mission is to scale Ethereum without breaking the developer workflow or compromising on user experience.
The next step forward is not just to prove Linea, but more.
That’s why we’re joining @boundlesshq to support The Signal - an open-source ZK consensus client for Ethereum. With The Signal, Linea developers can access trustless Ethereum state from anywhere, enabling use cases like global onchain identity, cross-L2 payments, and seamless interactions across rollups.
Together, we’re building a future where rollups don’t just scale Ethereum, they unify it.
.@LineaBuild is joining Boundless to help power The Signal - open-source ZK consensus client that distills Ethereum finality into a single proof.
Together, we are unlocking trustless ZK interoperability.
David J. Pearce retweeted
Our new fuzzer for zkVMs discovered a critical soundness bug in RISC Zero! 🔥
@RiscZero Thanks a lot for the shout-out! We're happy to contribute to making RISC Zero more safe! 🚀
Building complex ZK infrastructure? Let us help you secure it. Get in touch! ✉️
RISC Zero Security Disclosure
A missing constraint was recently discovered in the rv32im circuit. This issue affects any 3-register RISC-V instruction (including remu and divu) in risc0-zkvm 2.0.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2.
This vulnerability was reported by Christoph Hochrainer via our @HackenProof bug bounty program. We have evaluated the severity of the vulnerability as “Critical,” and paid a $50K bounty.
The issue has been patched and all partners have been migrated over to 2.1.0.
RISC Zero remains committed to providing the highest level of transparency, proactive security, and integrity.
David J. Pearce retweeted
Linea’s Arithmetization Team
Olivier Begassat (@zk_evm)
Amelie Chatelain
David Pearce
Francois Bojarski
Lorenzo Gentile
David J. Pearce retweeted
Today, after six years of R&D, Linea has achieved a world-first with prover completeness: We are the first zkEVM to directly prove 100% of EVM execution through our zero-knowledge proofs.
David J. Pearce retweeted
100% this. RISCV is actually very inefficient for ZK, there's no reason why a custom ISA shouldn't be chosen for this
Replying to @levs57
4./ Execution client then sits on top of it as a kind of an operating system kernel, handling finer details.
In fact, current execution client *is* a kind of such MMU. But arguably one can try to build much smaller, simpler one and for a different ISA.
David J. Pearce retweeted
A “sum type” is a union. A “product type” is a struct. C has had these since before 1970.
If someone uses these terms as though they were some new amazing inventions, they probably do not have much programming experience yet.
David J. Pearce retweeted
The more I build software, the more I despise dependencies. I greatly prefer people copy/pasting stuff into their own code bases or re-implement it. Unfortunately the vibe of the time does not embrace that idea much. I need that vibe shift.
David J. Pearce retweeted
Replying to @Andr3jH
That might be true of startups. I'm over 40 and I'm one of the most active coders in the world. gist.github.com/paulmillr/26…
David J. Pearce retweeted
This seems like a very well-thought-out essay regarding the author's experience using Rust for game development (I am partway through reading; it's long!)
loglog.games/blog/leaving-ru…
David J. Pearce retweeted
We are hiring! The Dept of Computing at Imperial are looking to appoint *six* new faculty members. Focus areas:
- AI+ML
- Computer Graphics +Computer Vision
- Quantum Computing + Quantum Information
- Software Engineering
Please spread the word!
imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-j…
David J. Pearce retweeted
As a prelude to the upcoming zkVM 1.2.0 release, I want to share a quick history of “precompiles” in zkVMs.
🧵⬇️
David J. Pearce retweeted
I’ve done a lot of formal methods “technical sales” - trying to scope projects for Galois clients that solve their problem and fit into a budget. I gave a talk last week on some things that I learned along the way: mikedodds.github.io/files/ta…
David J. Pearce retweeted
An interesting paper from @emeryberger et al., showing that, in contrast to prior work, (in my words) energy use across programming languages is a proxy for how long a program takes to execute, and that other factors don't meaningfully affect energy usage. arxiv.org/abs/2410.05460
David J. Pearce retweeted
Extremely excited about this. It's been hard to keep it a secret!
🎉 Thrilled to announce our #RustLab2024 opening keynote speaker: the one and only @timClicks, Tim McNamara!🦀
Author of 'Rust in Action' and Rust guru extraordinaire, Tim will kick off our conference with insights that'll supercharge your Rust journey!🚀
rustlab.it
David J. Pearce retweeted
Introducing the ZK Market Map! We’ve charted 250+ crypto projects advancing zero knowledge (ZK) tech.
This detailed map is an extension of our Crypto Market Map meant to showcase the differences between projects within ZK subsectors.
Why did we make this and why does ZK matter?
David J. Pearce retweeted
Yesterday was my last day @ethereum foundation - a place where I worked with truly great people & had a fantastic time during the last 7 years.
The powdr adventure officially starts today as @powdr_labs is now an independent org.
Excited to make ZK tooling better for everyone!
We are excited to share that 𝑝𝑜𝑤𝑑𝑟 labs is now an independent organization focused on the next generation of ZK tooling, security, and applied research.
Read the full announcement on our blog or follow this thread for a tl;dr 👇
powdr.org/blog/powdrlabs
David J. Pearce retweeted
Let's work together to formally verify zkEVMs!
verified-zkevm.org
Grant applications for Stage 1 will be opening asap.
























