at the in person pod last month @Kevin_Kelly_II asked us what keeps us up at night. the other guys mostly talked ai bubble/frontier labs, i said ledger. obv this wasn’t a direct ledger exploit at the source, but still. very uncomfy right now.

New Emerging Managers episode with @rohanpuj is live. Rohan is one of the few truly independent thinkers I've met in venture. Even rarer, he has the risk tolerance to actually take big swings on those views. I believe these are the 2 qualities that make a great investor, and he's one of the few EMs I've met who I think has the potential to be generational. His take is that the first generation of VCs were risk takers who took weird paths into the industry, while the new school is mostly credentialed box-tickers whose biggest fear is being wrong when everyone else is right. So VC has become a markup game. Rohan goes where no one else is looking. In his first fund that meant hard tech before it was consensus: K2 Space (big satellites when everyone was building small ones) and Jaza (an African energy utility now growing ~10x a year). In his second, it's Truffle (personal AI computers that run models locally), backed months before everyone started buying Mac Minis to run agents at home, and doubling down on After Thought's new AI architecture to fix what LLMs get wrong. We get into what makes him different, the list he keeps of the 21 investors who've returned $1b+ on a single deal more than once, why he hates SF, why he thinks the hard tech window has closed, and much more. (Disclosure: we're LPs in Valhalla's Fund II)

Fun fact: Groth16 is less at risk from AI than STARKs. Now that I have your attention: We can’t, of course, assess the risk of AI breaking crypto, but we can assess everything else. And the landscape doesn’t look like what the hot takes imply. There are different kinds of cryptographic primitives. Hashes, public-key encryption/signatures, PRFs, etc. Short of P=NP type results, if AI breaks any/all of these, it won’t be all at once. Hashes are the black magic of cryptography. They take an arbitrary file/string and produce a collision-resistant fingerprint. We’ve had human-powered breaks of deployed hashes. MD2, MD5, SHA-1 have all been broken and protocols upgraded as we became less confident in those hashes. A break of SHA-256, SHA-3, or (for cryptocurrency) especially Poseidon wouldn’t be insanely out there. In contrast, RSA and elliptic curves, which underpin public-key encryption and digital signatures, have survived for decades. For symmetric key ciphers and PRFs built from them, it’s even better. DES was designed in the 1970s, and the practical attacks there are from brute forcing the keys. Ok, back to my admittedly clickbait assertion. STARKs, of course, are a type of “zero-knowledge” proof. In particular, a type of SNARK that uses hashes and error-correcting codes. Hashes show up both in the polynomial commitment, which is a Merkle tree, and in the Fiat-Shamir transform, which is used to generate random challenges for verification. Groth16, in contrast, depends on none of these. It’s elliptic curves, pairings, and some strong assumptions about how those work. And Groth16 proofs themselves are post-AI and post-quantum private, since Groth16 gives you at least statistical zero-knowledge, which does not rest on a computational assumption. In contrast, most deployed STARKs aren’t, in fact, zero-knowledge at all. They are only used for succinctness and do not give you privacy today, even without advances in AI or quantum. This is, allegedly, an easy fix (and the fix would give you PQ privacy too), but it hasn’t happened for the most part. Of course, this doesn’t matter much. In fact, if either elliptic curves or hashes were broken, most things you actually use, including applications using Groth16 or STARKs in cryptocurrency land, would have real problems. All most all applications in cryptocurrency and of zk proofs, depend on both assumptions, even if the proof itself does not. And if AI breaks part of crypto, we’d have even bigger problems for securing the internet, banking, and critical infrastructure using HTTPS/TLS and boring things like Active Directory and OAuth. So really, in a certain sense, this entire discussion is clickbait. But it’s interesting seeing people make just plain incorrect technical assertions about cryptography in the process of posting hot takes. As someone said, this entire topic of AI breaking crypto in cryptocurrency is a bit weird. It’s a bit like wanting a fallout bunker to survive global thermonuclear war. Everything is dead anyway.

Ceteris explains why crypto needs less venture funding than it used to. "We've literally built all the infra, and what people need to build now are the scrappy little app teams that honestly don't need a lot of funding."

If you are catching up on Task Markets? @Delphi_Digital wrote a great report Daydreams Taskmarket today 33k agent accounts Dozens to hundreds of agents supplying verifiable work on each task posted USDC in and out of the market from anywhere @solana @arc @ethereum Contracts on @Base