Nouns DAO has been captured. @GlitterProtocol founder @0xdusk_eth and anon conspirators like @0xjanedoe2008 @makenounsgreatagain have finally fully taken over @nounsdao After not voting on props for months (which has made it nearly impossible to pass proposals), they've collected enough votes to make decisions for the DAO as a small group and have all come out to vote over a new reserve auction price for Nouns at 4x higher than our daily auction. This act will likely halt income, burn daily Nouns, prevent new buyers/voters, and help them maintain a "book value" through not passing proposals and not diluting their past buys more. IMO this is a sad day for Nouns and I don't think there is much coming back from a move like this. Although we may have been doomed anyways from their lack of vision and ideas to actually make Nouns better besides staking eth with their friends at @mETHProtocol 🫠 cc @zachxbt

Aave Labs just asked the DAO for $50 million. In exchange, they promise to give back revenue that arguably already belongs to the protocol. @Marczeller is calling it a slow-motion coup. Aave Labs calls it alignment. The truth sits somewhere between corporate restructuring and calculated leverage. Here's what's actually happening: — ➠ The Exchange Aave Labs wants: ❶ $25M upfront in stables ❷ $20M streamed over 12 months ❸ 75,000 $AAVE vested over 2 years Total ask: ~$50M in runway — What the DAO receives: ❶ 100% revenue from Aave-branded products (App, Pro, Card, Aave .com domain) ❷ Aave V4 as the ratified protocol architecture ❸ Formal IP and brand management structure The pitch → Aligning incentives by giving you the revenue stream → You just fund the builders. — ➠ The Controversy Critics argue this is value extraction disguised as partnership. ▸ The DAO implicitly owns protocol revenue already. Labs is asking $50M to formalize what should exist by default. ▸ No binding contracts in the temp check. Just frameworks and promises. ▸ This shifts Labs from service provider to subsidized monopoly. If the DAO pays, it admits dependence. — ➠ The Leverage: V4 Why would the DAO consider this? Because Aave V4 solves DeFi's liquidity fragmentation problem: ▸ Unified liquidity layer across all chains ▸ Cross-chain instant liquidity without bridge delays ▸ RWA integration for institutional backend If Labs stops building V4, the protocol stagnates. That's the leverage. — ➠ What's Really Happening Aave is shifting from protocol to fintech platform. The protocol layer (smart contracts) is commodity infrastructure. The value sits in the interface layer: the app, the card, the wallet. Labs is offering interface revenue to the DAO while securing $50M to build the platform that captures institutional flow. This creates vendor lock-in: ▸ Vote NO → Labs could fork the interface and leave the DAO with bare contracts ▸ Vote YES → Treasury bleeds $50M but secures the fintech revenue pipeline — ➠ Likely Outcome The DAO will pay. Not because the terms are fair, but because the alternative is protocol stagnation. The $50M funds the transition from "DeFi lending protocol" to "global liquidity infrastructure." I think we will expect negotiation on price, but the deal structure will likely pass. It will be interesting as well to watch the Snapshot vote. If opposition consolidates, $AAVE dips as the roadmap stalls. If it passes, short-term selloff from treasury most likely will happen, then rally as V4 execution locks in (NFA + DYOR_.

New monthly developer count in crypto just fell to levels not seen since 2017. One of the metrics we have always preached in crypto and I think is going to be completely irrelevant very quickly is the developers activity or count. Back in the day this was really important to understand an L1/L2 health. Historically, developer count and activity mattered because writing code was expensive. If a chain had a lot of real developers shipping wallets, protocols, tooling, SDKs, infra, and apps, that usually meant there was genuine mindshare, and experimentation. It was an imperfect metric, but it was still a decent proxy for how much human capital was committed to the ecosystem. First, code generation is essentially free. One developer can now produce the output that previously required several people. So a lower developer count may not mean a weaker ecosystem at all. You could have fewer developers producing better products. So with AI, developer activity becomes less useful as a health metric because it stops being a scarce input. When something becomes cheap and abundant, it usually loses value as a signal. Crypto is open source. We don’t need millions of developers all rewriting the same thing to build new products. Smart contracts were always meant to be capital- and human-efficient. Curious what the folks at @electriccapital @avichal think

Actually insane.

An OpenClaw bot pressuring a matplotlib maintainer to accept a PR and after it got rejected writes a blog post shaming the maintainer.

After much consideration

Today is a monumentous day for quantum computing and cryptography. Two breakthrough papers just landed (links in next tweet). Both papers improve Shor's algorithm, infamous for cracking RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. The two results compound, optimising separate layers of the quantum stack. The results are shocking. I expect a narrative shift and a further R&D boost toward post-quantum cryptography. The first paper is by Google Quantum AI. They tackle the (logical) Shor algorithm, tailoring it to crack Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. The algorithm runs on ~1K logical qubits for the 256-bit elliptic curve secp256k1. Due to the low circuit depth, a fast superconducting computer would recover private keys in minutes. I'm grateful to have joined as a late paper co-author, in large part for the chance to interact with experts and the alpha gleaned from internal discussions. The second paper is by a stealthy startup called Oratomic, with ex-Google and prominent Caltech faculty. Their starting point is Google's improvements to the logical quantum circuit. They then apply improvements at the physical layer, with tricks specific to neutral atom quantum computers. The result estimates that 26,000 atomic qubits are sufficient to break 256-bit elliptic curve signatures. This would be roughly a 40x improvement in physical qubit count over previous state-of-the-art. On the flip side, a single Shor run would take ~10 days due to the relatively slow speed of neutral atoms. Below are my key takeaways. As a disclaimer, I am not a quantum expert. Time is needed for the results to be properly vetted. Based on my interactions with the team, I have faith the Google Quantum AI results are conservative. The Oratomic paper is much harder for me to assess, especially because of the use of more exotic qLDPC codes. I will take it with a grain of salt until the dust settles. → q-day: My confidence in q-day by 2032 has shot up significantly. IMO there's at least a 10% chance that by 2032 a quantum computer recovers a secp256k1 ECDSA private key from an exposed public key. While a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) before 2030 still feels unlikely, now is undoubtedly the time to start preparing. → censorship: The Google paper uses a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof to demonstrate the algorithm's existence without leaking actual optimisations. From now on, assume state-of-the-art algorithms will be censored. There may be self-censorship for moral or commercial reasons, or because of government pressure. A blackout in academic publications would be a tell-tale sign. → cracking time: A superconducting quantum computer, the type Google is building, could crack keys in minutes. This is because the optimised quantum circuit is just 100M Toffoli gates, which is surprisingly shallow. (Toffoli gates are hard because they require production of so-called "magic states".) Toffoli gates would consume ~10 microseconds on a superconducting platform, totalling ~1,000 sec of Shor runtime. → latency optimisations: Two latency optimisations bring key cracking time to single-digit minutes. The first parallelises computation across quantum devices. The second involves feeding the pubkey to the quantum computer mid-flight, after a generic setup phase. → fast- and slow-clock: At first approximation there are two families of quantum computers. The fast-clock flavour, which includes superconducting and photonic architectures, runs at roughly 100 kHz. The slow-clock flavour, which includes trapped ion and neutral atom architectures, runs roughly 1,000x slower (~100 Hz, or ~1 week to crack a single key). → qubit count: The size-optimised variant of the algorithm runs on 1,200 logical qubits. On a superconducting computer with surface code error correction that's roughly 500K physical qubits, a 400:1 physical-to-logical ratio. The surface code is conservative, assuming only four-way nearest-neighbour grid connectivity. It was demonstrated last year by Google on a real quantum computer. → future gains: Low-hanging fruit is still being picked, with at least one of the Google optimisations resulting from a surprisingly simple observation. Interestingly, AI was not (yet!) tasked to find optimisations. This was also the first time authors such as Craig Gidney attacked elliptic curves (as opposed to RSA). Shor logical qubit count could plausibly go under 1K soonish. → error correction: The physical-to-logical ratio for superconducting computers could go under 100:1. For superconducting computers that would be mean ~100K physical qubits for a CRQC, two orders of magnitude away from state of the art. Neutral atoms quantum computers are amenable to error correcting codes other than the surface code. While much slower to run, they can bring down the physical to logical qubit ratio closer to 10:1. → Bitcoin PoW: Commercially-viable Bitcoin PoW via Grover's algorithm is not happening any time soon. We're talking decades, possibly centuries away. This observation should help focus the discussion on ECDSA and Schnorr. (Side note: as unofficial Bitcoin security researcher, I still believe Bitcoin PoW is cooked due to the dwindling security budget.) → team quality: The folks at Google Quantum AI are the real deal. Craig Gidney (@CraigGidney) is arguably the world's top quantum circuit optimisooor. Just last year he squeezed 10x out of Shor for RSA, bringing the physical qubit count down from 10M to 1M. Special thanks to the Google team for patiently answering all my newb questions with detailed, fact-based answers. I was expecting some hype, but found none.

🚨I've been warning people since November not to use GnosisPay card (and alike) deliberately, as it exposes behavioral patterns you probably don't want to share with bad actors Specially in Brazil where Gnosis is heavily targeting non-crypto users. I am not alone... 🙌

I've written a lot of open-source code in my life, and I don't say this lightly: close source your code this year. You are just not ready for the level of security threats this year. We all talk about vibe coding, but vibe cyberattacks are real. This doesn't mean closed source is safer; one of the most insane bugs our tool found was in a reverse-engineered codebase. That was a critical bug that no human was going to find. Instead, invest in hardening any code that touches money and sensitive infrastructure.