Justin Drake

And the strategy that we're taking is actually to collaborate with the Bitcoiners.

So in the Bitcoin land, there's a couple individuals, Mikhail Kudinov and Nick Jonas.

They're both part of Blockstream and they're both hash-based signature experts.

And we're basically working with them to make sure that whatever we develop in Ethereum land is also applicable to Bitcoin.

And if Bitcoin and Ethereum uses that standard, then the whole industry presumably will also use the standard.

So I have a few thoughts here.

We take security extremely, extremely seriously.

And overall, what I expect will happen is that

the solution that we deploy is going to be orders of magnitude more secure than what we have today with ECDSA.

Now let me try and explain this.

So ECDSA is based on elliptic curves, which are these fancy structured mathematical objects.

And it is possible that some clever mathematician comes up with an algorithm to break the discrete log using some very fancy mathematical trick that humanity was not aware of.

And this is the kind of thing that has happened in the past.

We have better and better algorithms for factoring, for example, and for discrete log.

And one possibility with the advent of AI is that we just have mathematicians that are 100 times smarter than human mathematicians that discover this hidden structure, niptic curves, and can break up the cryptography.

And so the cryptography that we're building is not only post-quantum, it's also post-AI.

And...

Going back to one, the other thing that I said is that it only relies on hash functions.

So if you take basically any signature scheme, it will rely on two things.

One, the hash function, and then two, an optional additional hardness assumption, which might be the discrete log, or in the case of lattice-based signatures, like these structured lattices.