Yahoo! This is an exciting day for me. After a long journey through blockchains, cryptography, and ZK rabbit holes, my new book, co-authored with @NathanOnCrypto, is finally out. It's part history, part deep dive, part red pill, and it's about two of my favorite topics: blockchains and ZK. This is a book for non-experts, written in plain language, zero complicated jargon. And now it's finally published! Grab a copy for yourself or send one to a friend, and start the journey 👇

I'm often asked for STARK Math links, here's a LONG thread on that

SWIFT-banning of Russia as watershed moment for cryptocurrencies. Before: Governments say "crypto is regulation-subverting money, only criminals need it" After: Governments say "we need crypto, in case we're SWIFT-banned. We need it big enough for nation states"

Been in crypto long enough to know: Projects can go from low-key to titans in no time. Build the right tech, create the right spark, and then...magic. Never bet against the best tech.

Honestly, no one in crypto has better ads than Solana, nice!

General thought: @Zcash which I co-founded a long time ago, and is based on the Zerocash paper I co-authored (even longer ago), is receiving a lot of attention. I love it!! 💛 Taking a step back, the renewed interest and the price action still fit my general thesis about crypto, which goes like this: Crypto doesn't have global product market fit yet, but it attracts a lot of attention and speculation, and has things (tokens) that people can buy to act on their beliefs. This means that speculation will drive, time and again, the NEW BIG THING that everyone will be talking about. A short list of some things people loved: Unisocks (remember??), pump.fun, hyperliquid, opensea, NFTs, EOS, filecoin, and the list goes on and on. But what's nice about the focus on Zcash is that it's driven not by usage or by volume on Zcash as a platform. It's driven by things like Values, in particular Privacy and Decentralization. It is great to see that sometimes, speculation does focus on, and reward, things that matter for Human Dignity. For us working on @starknet as the end-game scaling and privacy tech for all of blockchain -- post-quantum, transparent, fast and mature ZK STARKs -- it means that with all the craziness of crypto, at the end of the day, TRUTH, INTEGRITY, INNOVATION, BROADNESS (DECENTRALIZATION), HUMAN DIGNITY, FREEDOM, do matter and do get recognized and rewarded. Go Zcash!

I love Zcash (and @Starknet ! but this tweet is about @Zcash). Here's why I love @Zcash: (proper disclosure: I'm one of its co-founders, and it's based on Zerocash, which I co-authored; but it's been several years since I was involved in it, today I'm just viewing it from afar with love and respect): * Grit -- So many of the early team are still working on it, still committed to it: Daira, Sean, Nathan and, obviously, @zooko . * Integrity -- The Zcash team has stayed true to its core mission -- best privacy -- since day 1. With all the bullshit and cashouts and memetics and dumps going on, and core teams leaving projects they said they'd deveote their lives to -- Zcash team has stayed, and continues to stay, true to its mission and value. * Security + Maturity -- This is the 1st and best ZK Privacy product, worldwide. It's the most secure and most mature. (@Starknet is 1st and best ZK Scalability product, worldwide; but I digress :-) ). * Decentralization -- From the Bitcoin-like mining and monetary policy, through PoW based mining and diverse community, decentralization is another aspect on which the team has not compromised. And, those of the team I had the pleasure of interacting with are really really smart, and really really nice and kind. So, great to see the world recognize the greatness of @Zcash. Not investment advice, DYOR.

Privacy and Zcash, Near, Starknet -- - @Zcash -- resistance money privacy (if I need to run with only my pants, and I'm being persecuted by the state, I can still run with this). - @NEARProtocol -- easy integration with other chains. - @Starknet -- programmability (the ability to build DeFi, economy, financialization), scale and UX. So, Zcash is the safe haven that provides you shelter, Near is the route to get in and out of it, and Starknet is the lively, functional city built within that safe haven ;-)

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received as a CEO came from @naval (iykyk). The advice: The only job of a CEO is to pick one thing that's most important, repeat that one thing all the time, and say NO to everything else.

Am I an X-maximalist or Y-maximalist? I'm ZK-STARK maximalist. All chains - from #Bitcoin and #etherium to your local shitcoin - will use ZK-STARKs. Else, no scale, no privacy.

I coined the mathematical terms STARK, FRI, AIR. When founding @StarkWareLtd, we didn't trademark them. Mathematics is public goods. No corporation should claim it. Certainly not one that came 30 years after it was discovered.

Israel won't attack Iran before Monday night. Netanyahu's son is getting married Monday night. Sarah (1st lady, Israel's Supreme Leader) won't allow it. Enjoy the weekend.

Starknet will be: 1st L2 on Bitcoin and Ethereum, 1st to scale Bitcoin to 1K+ TPS, Within 6 months of OP_CAT adoption. starkware.co/scaling-bitcoin…

GM

This week the Starknet Foundation announced Provisions. Naturally, this stirred a lot of emotions in the community. Sadly, some decide to target individuals on our team. I’m writing in support of @abdelstark, the amazing and passionate head of the Starknet ecosystem at @StarkWareLtd who has initiated so many trailblazing projects and onboarded brilliant developers and community members. Iykyk. Social media allows folks, under the shield of anonymity, to hurl horrible words (and even threats) at others, words which they would feel ashamed to use in real-life interactions. A suggestion: If you’d feel ashamed speaking those words- don’t tweet them. Upwards and Onwards

Bitcoin, a $2T ecosystem based on software, can't reach consensus on 9 lines of code needed to allow more and better scale (op_CAT). And it can't agree, for past 4 years, on any other minor change/update. Pretty insane.

I hear you all like Venn diagrams. I also have one.

I'm deeply aligned with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Zcash. GM.

And thus ended my short career as geopolitical analyst. I’ll stick to zkSTARKs. Math is more predictable.

ZK is for scaling blockchain ZK is for privacy on blockchain ZK is for not letting anyone else control you

Everyone but @elonmusk be saying Zcash, Starknet. Wen elon?

ZK for privacy ZK for scale ZK for security ZK for unlocking new possibilities

Dear, close, friend. Writing this is also hard. My heart and prayers are with you and your family as you confront the challenges ahead. As a @StarkWareLtd co-founder and board member, I am overwhelmed with gratitude and sadness. Gratitude for what you’ve achieved: taking an academic white-paper in a niche area of mathematics and turning it into the leading company in the hottest and trendiest area of blockchain. My gratitude is accompanied by the sadness of witnessing the effects of the health challenges posed on your family, and on you, and the sadness on seeing our brilliant, compassionate and charismatic CEO leave his post. As incoming CEO, I’ll say that these are mighty large shoes I need to fill. What fills me with hope is the amazing team you leave behind, and the fact that the ethos and values of StarkWare are things we all share. Your vision will continue and stay true. We met 35 years ago, maintained decades of close friendship, and turned to being partners, sharing the same office, for the past 6 years. With all the ups and downs of a close partnership, our friendship stands strong. You’ve taught me pretty much everything I know about entrepreneurship and business leadership, and inspired me and all of StarkWare with your combination of business smarts, quick thinking, decision making capabilities, excellent taste in selecting people and getting them to shine. Thank you for leading StarkWare to its height and might, and don’t veer too far - we need your wisdom.

Privacy matters: (another very long tweet) I'm trying to explain the difference between TEE, ZK, MPC and FHE. If we're talking privacy, security and blockchains, this is important to understand. Last time I explained TEE, today I'll explain ZK: 📚 ZK stands for Zero Knowledge. Among the technologies I’m surveying (TEE, ZK, MPC, FHE) it's the most mature and battle tested one in blockchain settings. - @Zcash has been using ZK for privacy since we launched it in 2016 (the whitepaper we wrote on which it's based is from 2014). - @StarkWareLtd has settled over $1.4T on STARK technology since 2020, scaling Ethereum and Bitcoin, and saving users over $1B in transaction fees. Why am I mentioning this? Because no other technology surveyed here is as battle-tested and used as ZK. ZK has two super-powers: Privacy and Scalability. How does it work? There are two types of entities: A ZK prover and a ZK verifier. There is a separation of powers between them. 1. The prover does the heavy lifting -- it collects the data about all relevant txs, processes them, updates the state of the system based on these txs, and spits out a statement, and a proof. - A typical statement says "I, the prover, have started with state A, processed 1,000,000 transactions, and based on those, reached state B". - The proof is a short sequence of numbers and hashes that *proves* the integrity of the whole statement. 2. The verifier checks the proof to see if it's valid for that particular statement. The verifier typically sits onchain. The way a verifier works is by using math and cryptography, and I won’t explain it here. But suffice to say that the theorems we’ve proved about ZK over the years say that the verifier always accepts true statements and never accepts false statements (more precisely -- a malicious prover who wants to convince a verifier to accept a false statement has to do a similar amount of work to finding a collision in a cryptographic hash function, which cannot be done before our Sun cools down). Once the verifier checked the proof, the statement can be accepted. ZK is really good for allowing a single user to shield their data, and for scaling blockchains. Privacy is what we used it for on Zcash, and Scalabilty is what we (and, following us, others) use it at StarkWare. Note: ZK also has a safe, ergonomic and efficient smart contract language (Cairo). Developers can write and execute any smart contract offchain and guarantee its integrity onchain. You can write programs in Cairo (and in other languages) that you can prove in ZK. Challenges: - When it comes to UX and composability of smart contracts, it gets messy. - When there’s a computation that involves confidential data from more than one user, ZK isn’t good at solving it. For that you have to use a generalization of ZK called secure Multi Party Computation (MPC, I'll explain that too). Not impossible, but requires work. Next time: MPC. The END.

I'm bullish on Starknet, as always. Starknet is rising, more and more people are noticing that. But I stress: Starknet's been rising even before it became easy to spot. It's been growing with every right design choice. It just became easier to realize that lately. Design choices that stem from long-term vision work like this: Think broad, think wide, think 1000x, imagine the ecosystem at its most advanced and evolved state possible. Then, think which building blocks will provide users and developers with what they need. Starknet was built with ZK-STARKs, Cairo, native AA, and we're following our decentralization roadmap. These may seem like non-trivial choices, but only if your vision is not extended far enough. ZK-STARKs are now recognized as the endgame for blockchain (trust me, this recognition wasn't always as broad as it is today). The rest of the list will become consensus one day. So I'm bullish on Starknet, and from time to time I like to remind the world why. From time to time the list is updated with new reasons. Here's my updated list: * Globally scalable, publicly verifiable -- So today, Starknet is the only blockchain infra that is both globally scalable and verifiable by anyone, anywhere. In other words, Starknet can handle whatever throughput you'll throw at it, and without requiring people to upgrade their computation devices to keep up with the network. That's real empowerment for people like you and me. * Privacy -- Scale unlocked, next is privacy. Thanks to ZK-STARKs, Starknet can easily build and implement privacy solutions that will offer big value and have smooth UX. Stay tuned ;-) * Smartphone operatable -- It's the only infrastructure that is locally operatable (on your laptop). Thanks, S-two. * Decentralization is not a fashion -- It's the key to self-custody, security, censorship resistance, empowering individuals. Starknet is the only L2 moving towards full, true decentralization. We've already taken one of the most challenging steps from a technical point of view: Moving from centralized to decentralized architecture for sequencing blocks. * Cairo: ZK-friendly PL and VM -- Cairo is the best-ever smart contract language. Better than Solidity and Solana's Rust. Reasons: General computation, Blockchain-safety baked in, ZK-focused, rust-like, lets any dev build with ZK. * Superior UX, security, and self-custody infrastructure -- All accounts on Starknet are next-gen smart accounts (thanks to native account abstraction). No EOAs legacy. Designing UX exactly the way you want it. Let's add Paymaster by the amazing @avnu_fi to the list. This leads to optimized UX for end-users and top-tier self-custodial security. * Largest compute power for tx -- STARKs and Cairo enable complex txs to be processed efficiently on Starknet. This serves use cases with complex logic, like perp exchanges, on-chain gaming, and other heavy compute apps. * Safest connectivity to Bitcoin and Ethereum. * Most redundancy when it comes to sequencers and provers. 'I am bullish on Starknet' is a sentence that is true today, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow, and the list of reason just keeps on getting longer and longer. The END

Privacy, privacy, privacy: Everyone now is a Privacy expert. Great! So... Let me explain a few things, as someone who's spent quite a lot of time thinking about privacy, and building stuff that's actually used in the world (not just in tweets or academic papers 🙂). There are all kinds of privacy, and they don't all look the same, feel the same, or work the same. Here's an explanation on what's easy, what's hard, and what's the right way to get privacy done. What's easy: Creating ZK proofs for various transactions is easy (thank you StarkWare). You can't yet create ZK proofs on standard hardware wallets, but you can create them on phones and laptops and desktops. Important: Generating a ZK proof, or a bunch of them, doesn't mean yet you have *real* privacy. For that, you need more, and you need everyone to use what you've built, because if you're the only one using it, you get no privacy. What's (really really really) hard: UX. Achieving privacy with UX that will be smooth and intuitive enough to make it easy for you, me, your mom, and your friends to use is really really really hard . In the tradfi world that's really easy, because the model is different: Your tradfi buddy (the bank, typically) opens an encrypted channel with you, and you tell it privately everything, and the bank keeps that stuff secret. But in the decentralized world you don't have a buddy you can whisper secrets to. So if you want privacy, you need everything to be built for that. And here's the problem: The existing infra of blockchain is not privacy-compatible. Starting with Bitcoin, it's all out there in the open. This means that the standards and the tools and the wallets and the exchanges are all built for stuff that everyone sees. If you're building something that's private, it means that all the existing infrastructure stops working. No hardware wallets, with hard time getting exchanges to work with it, no block explorers, etc. It becomes really hard for your mom and friends to use it. So no one uses it, and the few who do use it, don't get much privacy. You've made it this far! You get a prize: The solution 🗝️ So what can be done? The truth is that the best path forward on privacy is to compromise a bit. Meaning, that in order to offer good UX, the privacy you'll get won't be airtight. So you'll get a certain level of privacy, it won't be airtight, but it'll be easier to use for your mom and friends. There are quite a few solutions that offer tradeoffs between privacy and usability, and many of them exist today, first and best on Starknet/StarkWare. I'll give a few examples: * Validium - is a way to build things that are 100% smooth and standard from the users point of view, but the stuff that goes on the blockchain is known only to your buddy (the operator, like the bank). As opposed to the bank, your buddy -- the operator -- in this case, cannot steal your money because ZK STARK proofs bind him to operate with integrity. * shielded ERC20s - these are account based, not UTXO based, and only blind the amounts being sent around, not the payer and payee. So folks can see who you're sending to and receiving from, but no one knows how much you're sending. It's not as airtight as a Zcash transaction, but it allows for smoother UX, and even allows you easy composability with a lot of DeFi apps. Summarizing: Privacy is needed. Creating ZK is by now not the hard part. The hard part is getting your mom and friends to be able to transact privately and smoothly on the blockchain. We're not there yet. But stay tuned. The END

Zcash founding story-time: As you may know, before I co-founded StarkWare, I co-founded Zcash. And before I co-founded Zcash, there was an academic paper titled "Zerocash". It was co-authored by 7 academics, including me. This was quite a few years ago, after I got red-pilled into crypto, but I was still very much an academic. Anyways, following the Zerocash paper, a whole bunch of teams reached out, in a variety of ways, to commercialize Zcash. I wasn't used to the weird and wild world of crypto, and some of the teams were... creative. For example: * There was one team that started with a website, with pictures and bios of all the associated scientists (co-authors of Zerocash), claiming we -- the scientists -- are part of the founding team. Needless to say, no one from that team has talked to us about it. * Another founder had a presentation with my name and face on it, and under a role I never agreed to. I chatted with him about it, and he said "you're either with us on this, or you'll have me as competition". My reply was "but you have no relevant knowledge or experience, so where's the competition here?" * Thankfully, it was a great relief to finally get to talk to a serious founder, a serious team, with cypherpunk background and credibility: @zooko . And the rest is history.

On USERS and Starknet GOVERNANCE: There are 3 voices that can be OBJECTIVELY HEARD on an Integrity Web (IW, aka "blockchain"): 1. Token holders 2. Builders - gauged via fees paid to user their code 3. Users - assessed by usage No IW has given the 3rd group a place in governance. I'd like them to have a voice in Starknet Governance. More to come.

No other way to *truly* learn

Privacy, ZK, STARKs, Zcash, Starknet! This Tuesday (Nov. 4), @zooko and I will have a live Twitter session to discuss them all. 1. Set a reminder for Tue, Nov 4, 4:00 PM UTC 2. Got an interesting question? Share it here in the comments. We won’t be able to answer all the questions, but we’ll try to answer the most interesting ones. See you there!

YES!! Now* you can STARK-prove Bitcoin ECDSA sigs over secp256k1 field. 🧵 on EC-STARK, joint w/ Dan Carmon, Swastik Kopparty and David Levit. * theoretically, no implementation yet. eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2…

Bitcoin. Freedom. Starknet. 🧡 Huge news: BTCFi is here

STARKs are post quantum secure. gm

Crypto privacy has one problem - UX. Fix that and the world is yours.

We 1. listened to concerns re. long-term alignment of @StarkWareLtd w/ Starknet ecosystem. 2. proposed a more gradual release schedule 3. believe trust is earned with actions, not just words 4. thank investors for their support on this @StarkWareLtd ❤️ @Starknet

I’ll stick to math

Starknet is about Individuals, starting with its Users and extending all the way to those Individuals who are completely off the grid. Starknet’s vision is to empower Individuals to withstand attacks on their agency, sovereignty and dignity by the most powerful entities the world knows: Nation states, Corporations, and Organizations. Starknet uses the Integrity of Math to enforce Integrity on entities who may abuse it. So it’s all about Individuals. Devs like @abdelstark are Starknet’s vanguard, sweating to make Starknet Home for Individuals. We’re all together, Devs, Users, off-the-grid Individuals. One Vision. We build different.

ZTARKNEAR - Zcash Starknet Near: The Holy Trinity of Privacy

STRK ❤️ STRK ❤️ BTC

L2s are here to scale @ethereum 100x and more. @Starknet to achieve this in 3 months.

24 hours after Provisions Claiming started. 1.3 M recipient addresses. Largest event of its kind. 0 technical glitches so far. That, too, is unprecented. Build Different.

. @Starknet will unleash Bitcoin as Money, adding Medium of exchange to its store of value utility

Starknet: Ethereum's answer to Solana @Starknet is @ethereum's answer to @solana

Earlier today: 45 transactions per second on @dydxprotocol during Big Price Change. Fitting this on L1 @ethereum would've required blocks with ~ 150M gas. All of them STARK super-scaling lets @StarkWareLtd pack all this on L1 using less than 1% of TODAY's gas.

🧡 Bitcoin unlocks Freedom. Starknet unlocks Opportunity. Here's my thesis: One problem, Three Convictions. Problem: Bitcoin is flawed -- it's static, it's only hodled, not financialized in the Way of Satoshi. What's the path forward? Conviction 1: DEX will flip CEX. Bitcoin's financialization -- in the true Satoshi and Bitcoin way -- will happen on a Bitcoin L2 that will have these features: Secure, cheap, smooth, mature and scalable. Important: It will be an L2 that shares Bitcoin's mission for freedom and security. Conviction 2: Winner takes most Among the many Bitcoin L2s, one will provide it with ALL, not just a few, of the features it needs -- security, low fees, UX, scale -- and when it does it will win the race. That's the Schilling point premise, the network effect. Conviction 3: Starknet is it. Why? Because Starknet is first and best on security, cost, UX, maturity and scale. Best tech will be key. Back to my first sentence: Bitcoin unlocks Freedom. Starknet unlocks Opportunity. 🧡

Zcash > Monero On more than one front.

Metamask was first on Ethereum. Argent is first on #StarkNet. Probably nothing.

I love @VitalikButerin 's suggestion to add another VM to Ethereum. But RiscV aint it. Should be a VM that's built with blockchain AND zkSTARK in mind: Cairo, Valida, Miden, Zisc, ... Pick one of those, or even build a new one.

We have the best tech We have the broad vision. We lack users and mindshare. We realize this. We will fix it.

I have nothing but respect for @sandeepnailwal and the @0xPolygon team. I don't see how anyone can question their contribution to the ecosystem. The END

Zk, Privacy, and Blockchain nitter.app/i/broadcasts/1vAxRQddV…

👀👉👈

v13 cost improvements: we used to be costliest, now better. Not cheapest but quality, security, and unalignment are worth the cost.

My thoughts on the STRK Provisions ('airdrop') + call for research to fix airdrops. starkware.co/integrity-matte…

British Museum now selling NFTs. Probably nothing.

This is happening tomorrow. Mark your calendars! @zooko and I will be talking about privacy, ZK, Zcash, Starknet and everything that's interesting. Join us: Tuesday, Nov. 4, 4:00 PM UTC See you then!

I have a lot of respect for Solana but Starknet is better. It has higher scale and a better approach to scale - which is not by increasing the CPU/memory of those who want to track the network and validate it. Let me repeat that: NOT BY INCREASING CPU/MEMORY OF THOSE WHO WANT TO TRACK THE NETWORK AND VALIDATE IT. Starknet can support massive compute (for perps, gaming, other TPS-hungry use cases) that Solana cannot offer, meaning Starknet's heavy-computing exchanges (like Extended and Paradex) will give better value to users. We can process transactions in the thousands of TPS, including very complex ones. Most crucially, as we continue to scale Starknet to 10K and 100K TPS we can do so *without* requiring end users to purchase a server. Use the very same laptop as you do today🙂

Why am I bullish on Starknet? Best tech. True, TVL and DeFi volume could go higher. But I am thinking long term. The ecosystem is brewing, waiting for another spark, and the spark will come. And when it does, users and devs will discover that best tech means best UX, best security, best features, and those will not be reduced once activity goes up. Why is it the best tech? - Next-gen and best-ever smart contract language. Yes, Cairo is much better than Solidity or Solana’s Rust. - Next-gen smart accounts (thanks to native account abstraction) -> better UX for end users, along with top-tier self-custodial security. - Largest compute power on-chain -> Perp exchanges, gaming devs, and other heavy compute apps can run complex logic you won’t find anywhere else in blockchain. - Safest connectivity to Bitcoin and Ethereum. - The only L2 actively moving toward full, true decentralization. - Most redundancy when it comes to sequencers and provers. The safest, fastest, most sound proving tech out there. So I'm thinking long term, and I'm super bullish on Starknet. And you should be too.

I’ll explain @saylor's game and what it means for Crypto. Not investment advice, DYOR. >>

Crypto's biggest problem: it's a bro thing, not enough gals in it.

We're not leaving Ethereum. zkSTARKs are needed to scale all blockchains, including Bitcoin. @Starknet is *the best* zkSTARK tech stack, so befitting.

Privacy isn't a 'yes or no' feature, it's a 'how much?' feature.

Bitcoin. Freedom. Starknet. Sep 30. Get ready. 🧡

🇮🇱 Prevail we must and shall. Hope for better days and peace as soon as possible.

Starknet is *not* another L2 on Eth. It’s a first. First L2-squared. Bitcoin safety, Ethereum expressivity.

Every list ranking people who advocate for @Zcash: 1. @mert 2–20. Other people in random order

How did I end up a Mathematician? (long story) As a child, my dad said to me "our family isn't good in math" and I, preferring soccer and dating to anything involving brain work, accepted this as truth. As an undergrad I studied Biology and CS, to go into Neuroscience (I ended up marrying the daughter of one of my esteemed professors. But that's a different story). I realized I really liked the math courses, and hated anything applied - be it programming or biology labs. In fact, every semester opening I went to the Dean of undergrad at the time (Prof. @noamnisan, now an advisor to StarkWare) to negotiate replacing programming courses with more math (which is why I don't know programming till this day; even though Intro to C++ was the first course I taught as an Assistant Professor. But that, too, is a different story.) Then, as a graduate student, I wanted to go into Machine Learning, but the coveted Professor (Tali Tishby, RIP), had already a gazzilion students. I was sitting in a course on Computational Complexity taught by a Postdoc, when he was replaced for one lecture by one Avi Wigderson. I knew nothing about him at the time (his picture did appear on posters, as he just received the Nevanlinna Prize, but as a dumb young graduate student I didn't know what that means). Avi spoke about how some folks are now trying to formally prove that it's impossible to settle the P vs. NP conjecture. And I was mesmerized by this. So I told him: I want to study this as my MSc. project. A period of courting started. Avi wasn't sure I'm a good fit for him (my math grades were ok, but I never was the straight-A student type). So, he dropped a book about Proof Complexity on me, saying: Read and summarize it to me. I read that book like 3 times cover to cover and didn't understand a word beyond the intro chapter (today I know that's more likely the fault of the author, not my own stupidity. But that's another story). A few weeks later, still not understanding a word on the subject matter, Avi asked to explain a recent paper on "degree and size of Polynomial Calculus proofs". We sat in his home, I explained. At some point he asked: "Why can't this be applied to the Resolution proof system?" (Resolution is The most important and basic propositional calculus proof system). I squinted, thought a bit, and said "Oh, but it can, here's how", and applied the same proof method to Resolution. Avi got very excited. I said "let's send an email to the authors of the previous paper", thinking that if I understand this stuff, it can't really be more than email-worthy. Avi insisted we write it up as a paper. Every few days I tried to convince him to drop it and just send an email, but he was adamant, and I listened. Good thing I did. It ended up as my most cited and impotant paper prior to the STARK/SNARK ones. After that paper, a few others came along. With each one, I was sure it's only an email-worthy observation, not Deep Math. I saw all these other papers, that were so hard to understand, and by comparison my own stuff was so clear and simple. It took me many years to realize that this is how math progresses. You spend a lot of time internalizing some theoretical concepts, and then one day you "see it". And then it seems to you all clear and simple. But its clear and simple only to you. To others, its complicated. Today, when I have to go and look back at some of my earlier papers, I find myself squinting, scratching my head, and saying "damn, that's some serious stuff, how did they come up with this?" :-) After those initial math breakthroughs, Avi offered I do not do just an MSc but actually a PhD, which is how I ended up a theoretical computer scientist (which is a kind of mathematician). THE END.

.@starknet Bolt (v13.2) live. 400 tps, 2sec conf time. Proud to be part of amazing team @StarkWareLtd, at the frontier of integrity.

Did people realize the value that @Zcash brings to its users 2 months ago? Did people realize @solana's potential 2 years ago? Long-term vision is understanding the *potential* of something even before everybody else realize its value.

Early usage != Long term vision: Porn != World Wide Web Speculation != Integrity Web Starknet Vision - Governance community.starknet.io/t/star…

Starknet's ranked 2nd in monthly net flows. Nice!

You won’t believe who I met at this BITCOIN conference

People don't care too much about decentralization and security. Until one day they realize they should care. A lot.

Stwo is coming

4 years! Indeed, Starknet is built from first principles: ZK-STARKs, Cairo, Native AA, decentralization. We design Starknet with long-term vision in mind: We make innovative choices because they are the right building blocks that will help us to solve today's challenges, as well as the challenges we'll face in 1, 5, 10, and 50 years from now. We make sure Starknet is built with the right elements for when throughput surges, when non-technical people want to use DeFi, for when TradFi leans into crypto, and when the entire crypto ecosystem reaches true mass adoption. We don’t take shortcuts. Scale, security, UX, privacy, self-custody, freedom - that's Starknet.

Funny story told by @danboneh earlier: Reporter to Dan Boneh: How long have you been researching crypto? Dan: nearly 30 years Reporter: Wut, did crypto exist before 2009?

Unaligned, want to know the future? Here: starknet.io/en/roadmap

As co-founder of both Zcash and Starknet, would love to see my two fav projects forging a technical alliance, thanks @abdelstark for the visionary proposal!

.@Starknet stack is the fastest safest decentralized way to scale @ethereum . Lean in, we’ll make it happen.

For those of you in academia thinking of taking a new path as entrepreneurs, here are a few lessons I learned transitioning from Math Professor to an entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO. Was it an obvious decision for me? No, but I am glad I took it. Is shifting from academia to entrepreneurship the right decision for you too? Maybe! >>

Just realized this: Feeling loved is better than feeling hated :-)

Starknet lives in the future, it'll take a few short months for rest to see: * Lowest fees * Highest performance * Largest ecosystem

Starknet: A higher level of integrity

ZK Story time: What I heard from Shafi Goldwasser, co-inventor of ZK (and Turing award winner). It didn't start as "proofs". The ZK paper was rejected 4-5 times from peer reviewed conferences. Mathematicians strongly objected to calling these things "proofs". The details: She wasn't trying to define a new model for proofs. Not at all. She and her co-authors wanted to solve the problem of playing a game of poker using the telephone. (Happened to so many of us) By then, it was already known how to *shuffle* a pack of cards between two people talking over the phone (with no trust assumptions and no trusted third party). The problem was that two players with no trust assumptions need to follow the *rules* of the game, without information being revealed. This is what she set out to solve. And they ended up with a protocol for the two players to "prove" to one another that they drew the next random card correctly. They didn't immediately realize it's a form of proof. This was suggested to them by Michael Sipser when they described it to him. But it's a very strange notion of "proof". It must rely on randomness. It has a small probability of error. If you've ever seen a "proper" mathematical proof (say, for the infinity of prime numbers) than you'll naturally revolt against such a messy and error-prone kind of "proof". Which is why, for a very long time, when Shafi and Silvio and many others presented these magical ZK proofs to the world, folks fought back against it. It's a famous piece of lore in theoretical computer science, one that you share with your peers after your amazing submission to STOC or FOCS (S-tier conferences) got rejected again. You'll say "did you know that the ZK paper got rejected 5 times, and 2 of the co-authors ended up getting the Turing award?" I'll end by saying that the STARK paper got rejected 4 times, FRI rejected twice. Just sayin ;-)

FYI @Starknet can be *post quantum secure* in 2 months: Sigs: Wallets need PQ sigs, but 100% account abstraction means no work needed by @Starknet Proofs: STARKs are already PQS secure. Storage: need to replace Pedersen by Poseidon. 2 Months work. (h/t @GuthL)

Omitting @CairoLang from zkVM list be like dropping @bitcoin from blockchain list. Both are first, best in class. Brother @drakefjustin , ensure @ethereum is a fair playing field. Don't censor. Say Cairo, say STARK, say @Starknet brother.

Had great talks with each of @ethereum co-directors, @hwwonx and @tkstanczak Great leadership, super bullish for Ethereum!

On ZK STARK amortized proof size for @Zcash: Part of the important discussion around having a TZE (Transparent Zcash Extension) for @Starknet is about the size of a ZK STARK proof and whether it'll cause congestion. Similar discussions will arise if ZK STARKs are to be settled onto Bitcoin. The issue is that a single ZK STARK is a bit long. How long? We haven't optimized it yet for TZE deployment but I believe it'll be 20-100 KB for a single proof. Given that a shielded Sapling tx is about 2KB, this means one STARK proof is like 10 to 50 txs. (The older Sprout txs are about 20KB each). I argue this is not a problem, for 2 main reasons: 1. You can chop a STARK proof and verify it over time. Done right, this even drastically shrinks proof size (you use the PoW as additional security). In fact, when we verify STARK proofs on Ethereum, we already chop them up this way, to fit inside Ethereum txs. 2. ZK STARKs excel at scaling a blockchain. A single ZK STARK proves the equivalent of hundred of thousands, or even millions, of txs. The number of txs covered by a single proof is nearly unlimited. And they are submitted to the L1 at a rate of once every few hours (currently on Ethereum its once every 6 hours). So, do the math: Starknet has capacity of about 1000 TPS for transfers (it can also do more elaborate computations, like gaming or perps). If you submit a ZK STARK proof every 6 hours, that proof covers 1000 x 3600 (seconds in an hour) x 6 (hours) = 21.6 M txs. The proof itself fits inside 50 txs. This means that amortized, one chunk (the equivalent of one shielded tx) covers 432,000 txs. Or, each single bit of this proof covers about 27 txs. Summarizing: For the price of 50 txs every 6 hours, you can scale Zcash (and Bitcoin) immensely, while also offering programmability and good UX (native account abstraction). The END

Two ZK STARK projects that I really love: 1. @0xMiden -- @bobbinth completely surprised me on our very first call, and ever since. He was the first to build on his own a full ZK-STARK friendly virtual machine (Miden) and ZK-STARK proof system, by just reading my math papers. 2. @RiscZero -- @BruestleJeremy and the team made all the right choices at the time -- small fields (baby bear), first to aim for generic language support (Rust and RiscV), really solid approach to engineering and soundness.

Crypto is full of short-term maximizing projects. @Starknet and @StarkWareLtd are about long-term vision maximization. hackmd.io/@Elibensasson/ryMe…

I called it first.

Eli woke up and chose violence.

Adding 127 TPS to @ethereum : Priceless Effect on blob usage: Nothing (nearly) @Starknet is *the best* solution to scaling @ethereum securely, today.

Thanks, OG @mert , for bringing me on the best Alpha podcast out there!

2025 prediction: @Starknet - @Bitcoin's Execution Layer Questions?

ZK Era == STARK Era

ZK biggest challenge in the early days: ZK has been around since the 1980s. But until we released Zcash in 2016, it wasn't used in the wild. This is due to two huge challenges back then: 1. Tech didn't work well -- proving and verification was too large. This was changed initially with SNARKs based on Elliptic Curves, that led to things like the GGPR construction and the Groth 16 system. Later on, came the end-game tech, ZK-STARKs, which are faster, safer and post-quantum secure, helping also with scaling. 2. Use case -- As early as 2013 I tried to commercialize ZK outside of Blockchains (I wasn't knowledgeable enough about Bitcoin), and it was damn hard to find a compelling use case outside crypto. This was true then, and is somewhat true today. Without *true* decentralization, ZK isn't really needed.

Something that should be said amidst all this Bitcoin-mania: Ethereum is great. It is innovative, smart, decentralized. It paved the way for so many projects and users to enter the crypto world, and it did it without compromising on core values. We should not take it for granted. It managed to nurture an amazing community with some of the most amazing builders I can think of. Ethereum is great. That's it. The END

I'll repeat my opinion on corpo chains: They won't last. The important element of blockchain is a system that gets rid of a central entity. It comes at a cost: A very complex technology that's hard to build and hard to use. Even if we apply AA to create simplified UX, the tech under the hood is still very complex. Now, several corporates want to have their own blockchain. In a way, this is great. It means blockchains are no longer this scary thing anymore. But are these corporates aligned with getting rid of their position as a central entity? They can't. Fast forward a few years: Corporate chains will end up with the complex tech but without the added value for users, which is no central entity to control them. At that point, these chains will lose the focus from corporates.

My thoughts on the Robinhood--Arbitrum news, as leader of a competing technology: 1. Its a big win for Arbitrum, and a well deserved one. They have a very good tech stack and team. I like them. Well done @EdFelten @ajwarner90 @sgoldfed and team! 2. Its a big win for Ethereum and all L2s on it. This indicates more tradfi players will use this set of stacks -- Ethereum, EVM and L2s. That's good news for Starknet. 3. First of Two big questions -- what are the details of the deal: did Arb pay RH, and how much? What has RH promised Arb. I'm really curious to learn more. Worry not, with time, we'll all know. Because, in Crypto, two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead :-). Based on the details of the deal, I'll need to reassess how good it was (jury still out on whether the OP-CB deal was good for OP). 4. Second of Two big questions: Will it end up being good for RH? Will the tradfi-->crypto move be captured on an L2 operated solely by RH? My gut feeling is "no", its the same kneejerk reaction I had (and still have) towards the OP-Base deal, but even there the jury is still out (was it a good deal for CB?) Curious to hear your thoughts. 5. One aspect I'd like to fix is that when RH were doing their research, they didn't reach out to us. We, and I, need to up our game so that next Big Tradfi teams exploring such deals do talk to us. Why? Because best tech, period, full stop. ===