Heading to Mumbai for Devcon this November? Put Cypherpunk Congress by @web3privacy at the top of your must-go side event list. Last November in 2025 I flew to Argentina for Devcon, and Cypherpunk Congress turned out to be one of the best events I've ever attended. I spent the week exchanging ideas with cryptographers and came home with a much deeper feel for the culture that crypto grew out of. One highlight: I met people from the @EFF , the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of my all-time favorite NGOs. Founded in 1990, it has spent decades defending digital civil liberties, including suing the NSA over mass surveillance of ordinary Americans. (Fun aside: EFF has left Twitter) That week left me with a simple conviction: we should fund privacy. Maybe privacy has been dead in all but name for years. Since Snowden, since PRISM, since WikiLeaks, and arguably even earlier. Today our data is routinely scraped and fed into frontier labs to train their models. Privacy won't survive by default anymore. We have to build for it and pay for it on purpose. I'm still undecided about Mumbai Trip. But if you're going, don't miss Cypherpunk Congress.

Heading to Mumbai for Devcon this November? Put Cypherpunk Congress by @web3privacy at the top of your must-go side event list. Last November in 2025 I flew to Argentina for Devcon, and Cypherpunk Congress turned out to be one of the best events I've ever attended. I spent the week exchanging ideas with cryptographers and came home with a much deeper feel for the culture that crypto grew out of. One highlight: I met people from the @EFF , the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of my all-time favorite NGOs. Founded in 1990, it has spent decades defending digital civil liberties, including suing the NSA over mass surveillance of ordinary Americans. (Fun aside: EFF has left Twitter) That week left me with a simple conviction: we should fund privacy. Maybe privacy has been dead in all but name for years. Since Snowden, since PRISM, since WikiLeaks, and arguably even earlier. Today our data is routinely scraped and fed into frontier labs to train their models. Privacy won't survive by default anymore. We have to build for it and pay for it on purpose. I'm still undecided about Mumbai Trip. But if you're going, don't miss Cypherpunk Congress.

I've been in Singapore lately. If you want to chat about cypherpunk movement, blockchain privacy, Zcash, Ethereum, prediction markets, or any Web3 applications, whether you're an investor, developer, marketer, or involved in the ecosystem in any way, feel free to reach out. Thanks!

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.

1/ A few days ago I posted on Threads that I'd be looking into the Vietnamese stock market. Here's my take: Vietnam is in a pullback phase where the good news has been priced in and foreign capital keeps flowing out. 2/
Where they are
The VN-Index closed around 1,705 last Friday (Oct 16), down from 1,800+ in mid-September and bleeding almost every day since. 52-week range: ~1,578 to 1,937. 3/
The big event: FTSE Russell upgraded Vietnam from Frontier to Secondary Emerging on Sept 21, with passive inflows phased in over four tranches through Sept 2027. Textbook "buy the rumor, sell the news": the index fell once the upgrade went live. 4/
The core tension: foreigners kept selling the whole time the upgrade was pending, with $8B+ in net outflows since early 2025. The index-driven bid comes in small, staggered slices. Can the next tranches turn the tide? My bet: probably not. 5/
Valuations aren't stretched, at ~12–13x forward P/E. But concentration is a real structural risk: Vingroup alone is ~21% of the index, and the top 10 make up more than half. Watching the VN-Index is largely watching Vingroup. 6/
Who is Vingroup? ($VIC)
Vietnam's largest private conglomerate, founded by its richest man, Pham Nhat Vuong. Think Wanda + Evergrande + BYD in one:
• Real estate: Vinhomes ($VHM), Vincom Retail, the cash cow
• EVs: VinFast ($VFS), a perennial money-burner kept alive by the group and Vuong himself
• Plus hotels, hospitals and schools 7/
How to get exposure
• $VNM: VanEck Vietnam ETF, the largest, US-listed, has options, down ~12% YTD
• $VNAM: Global X MSCI Vietnam, only ~$30M AUM, thin liquidity
• Local leaders: VIC, VHM, HPG, FPT, VCB
• $VFS: Nasdaq-listed and directly shortable 8/
Can you short it onchain?
It seems that I couldn't find any Vietnam perps on Hyperliquid, so for now shorting mostly means going through US-listed ETFs. @mablejiang @trasiaxyz @tradexyz worth picking up? Not financial advice, just my own research.

Base now ranks second among all networks by DeFi TVL, behind only Ethereum mainnet, with $6.22B locked across applications on the network, per @DefiLlama. Four of the ten largest networks by DeFi TVL are Ethereum-based: mainnet, Base, Arbitrum and Robinhood Chain. Ethereum is the home of onchain finance.

so about the $86m ledger drain. everyone’s screaming “ledger got hacked” again. i spent the evening digging and it’s dumber and scarier than that there’s a shop in malaysia called cryptobilis that sells hardware wallets. ledger has it listed as an official authorized reseller since at least 2022, for malaysia, indonesia and the philippines. legit shop, real devices, years of normal customers this spring the founders sell it. the deal comes with an NDA: they can’t tell anyone about the sale until october 19 by august the company registry shows one owner with 100%. some guy from heilongjiang, china the shop keeps running like nothing happened. the site, the name and the “authorized by ledger” badge all stay up then on oct 8 @MagicalTux posts photos of a ledger he cracked open. hidden under the screen there’s an extra little board with an LTE modem and an eSIM. it just watches the display. you set up your wallet, your 24 words show up, and they get sent out over mobile data. ledger’s genuine check doesn’t catch it because the actual ledger chip is real. his device came from malaysia that post does 120k views 22 hours later someone sweeps everything. 203 BTC hits two addresses in literally one block. ~$58m USDT moves on tron in the same hour. i added up all the wallets: ~$91m about 7 hours after that ledger says “we’re investigating” and asks cryptobilis to pause sales cryptobilis is still on ledger’s site as an authorized reseller to be fair, nobody has officially tied the new owner to the bugged devices yet, and ledger hasn’t confirmed how it happened. but read it as a business plan: get authorized, sell real stuff for years, quietly sell the company under an NDA, keep the badge, ship devices that phone home, then drain everything the second someone notices and was ledger even told the shop got sold? nobody’s said so “authorized reseller” means ledger trusted whoever ran the shop back in 2022. says nothing about who runs it today bought your hardware wallet anywhere but the manufacturer? open it up today, ledger literally has a guide for that. then move to a fresh seed on a device bought direct wonder who’s going to answer for this: the chinese frontman from heilongjiang, the shop’s previous owners, or ledger itself @Ledger clearly needs to keep a much closer eye on who they call official resellers, and take way more responsibility for who sells their devices and how

I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography. The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices. (and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation) So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math. The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be? This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-. For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption. And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10. To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety. And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all. Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems. For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size). Concrete TLDR, my own personal views: * Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all * For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ... * For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism. * If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**. * For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money"

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.

Was drained for $4m+ USD this morning at 4:30am while I was asleep Not sure how it happened yet, but I'm in Singapore and met a lot of new people Thank you to the teams and individuals who are helping with the investigation. Will share more when I can

I like blockchain tech quite a bit because it extends open source to open source+state, a genuine/exciting innovation in computing paradigms. I'm just sad and struggle to get over it coming packaged with so much braindead bs (get rich quick pumps/dumps/scams/spams/memes etc.). Ew

Wang Hong and Deng Yu recently won the Fields Medal. As it happens, I have been following Deng Yu on Zhihu （the equivalent of Quora in China) for quite a while. After revisiting his Zhihu posts, I discovered that he is a feminist and even a veteran member of Baihehui (a website for lesbians), which is quite interesting considering he is a man. In many of his answers, he describes his favorite yuri-themed anime, his views on feminism, and the books he enjoys. Reading through his work, he strikes me as a truly sensitive and thoughtful person. It has reinforced my belief that great scientists inevitably possess a deep sense of humanism. It is that very humanistic inquiry that fuels the intense curiosity needed to pursue the ultimate truths of science.

hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)