AI Agent Specialist, Chestnut tree farmer, former US Navy nuclear submarine officer. $ZEN co-founder in 2017
Atlanta, GA
Joined March 2010
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Pinned Tweet
The timing is perfect for Post Quantum crypto private payments and decentralized finance on @buildonbase
@robviglione and I have this proposal for the @horizenglobal community to review
ZEN has almost a 10 year history with strong decentralized governance and good funding
horizen.discourse.group/t/ze…
Great article from one of the OG‘s at @horizenglobal on the ZEN project focusing on regulatory compliant payments with business level privacy
ZEN founders propose a privacy pool for stablecoins and other tokens on @base, with an emphasis on designing for Post quantum cryptography
medium.com/@gustavo.fialho/w…
Rolf V retweeted
Horizen is returning to its roots, with shielded pools at the center, Base as the starting point, and a bigger vision for privacy across crypto.
Here’s why I think this could be our best move in years:
medium.com/@gustavo.fialho/w…
Here is a high level of what we are proposing to the Horizen community @horizenglobal
ZEN nodes are coming back, and they’re gonna help run our privacy pool and secure enclave applications for both private transactions and private decentralized finance
Rolf V retweeted
📣 Horizen update 📣
TLDR: Horizen is changing. The Horizen L3 is winding down over the next two weeks.
Users should bridge their assets to Base at their soonest possible convenience, including unstaking and withdrawing any funds from ZEN staking on the Horizen chain. A new ZEN staking program will commence on Base soon.
Step-by-step migration guide: blog.horizen.io/changes-for-…
While L3 wind-down has quietly been in preliminary planning phases as part of ongoing roadmap development, migration is being accelerated due to upcoming Base network upgrades that will break compatibility with existing Base L3 chains on the OP (Optimism) stack.
Why this change? As the Horizen L3 on Base has been operational on mainnet for nearly one year, the most compelling projects being built on Horizen today use privacy technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and TEEs that do not require the operation of dedicated block space as an L3 blockchain settling to Base.
With the emergence of Vela as a TEE-based confidential execution environment for private onchain finance – Base will now be utilized as the primary chain for the Horizen ecosystem.
Applications currently in development by independent teams in the Horizen ecosystem will also make this transition. Additionally, we expect the pace of project development to increase in future quarters due to reduced architectural complexities with respect to bridging and cross-chain token mechanics.
As part of this wind-down and migration, ZEN staking on the Horizen L3 will come to an orderly but immediate conclusion. Expect more information in the coming days about ZEN staking on Base.
Horizen chain wind-down and migration will occur over approximately the next two weeks as Base upgrades to its Denim release, with breaking changes to OP-stack chains settling to Base. Please migrate all funds before November 4, 13:00 UTC.
ACTION REQUIRED: Move your assets off the Horizen L3 by November 4, 13:00 UTC
The Horizen L3 is shutting down.
Bridging from the L3 to Base closes at 13:00 UTC on Tuesday, November 4. If you hold ZEN, ETH or other assets on the L3, please move them to Base before that date and time.
What happens if I miss the date to bridge to Base?
Any ZEN or ETH still on the Horizen L3 after the bridge closes will be returned to you on Base by the Horizen DAO after funds are made recoverable. This process is expected to take several weeks. Withdrawing now is the fastest path to returning your assets to Base.
WHAT TO DO
1. If you are staking ZEN: Go to staking.horizen.io. Withdraw your stake first, then claim your rewards. Staking rewards on the L3 end on October 25; there is nothing to wait for.
2. Bridge your ZEN and USDC.e to Base: stargate.finance
3. Bridge your ETH to Base: Withdraw your ETH via the native bridge at bridge.horizen.io. Start this before November 4; the transaction will be finalized for you and completed on Base in approximately two weeks.
USDC.e is operated by Stargate, not Horizen, and is not covered by the DAO return; you must bridge USDC.e out before November 4.
If you need ETH on Horizen for gas to bridge out other assets, bridge a very small amount of ETH from Base to the Horizen L3 using the native bridge at bridge.horizen.io.
L3 gas costs a fraction of a cent, so bridge the minimum the bridge allows and no more; ETH left on the L3 below 0.001 ETH after network wind-down will not be returned.
If you are using a Safe multi-sig or any other vault or smart contract wallet on the L3 and are unable to withdraw assets before Nov 4, contact [email protected] to open coordination for a return of funds.
Bridging ZEN from Base to the Horizen L3 is already disabled. ETH deposits remain open only for users to bridge ETH to Horizen for gas to withdraw other assets.
IF YOU MISS THE DEADLINE
At 13:00 UTC on November 4, a snapshot of every balance and every staking position on the L3 will be taken. The Horizen DAO will recover funds and subsequently send each holder their ZEN, including unclaimed staking rewards, to the same address on Base, after a one-week public review of the snapshot. ETH balances above 0.001 ETH are returned the same way. The anticipated timeframe for return of funds is second half of November. If your Horizen L3 wallet address is a smart contract wallet that does not similarly exist on Base, please contact us at [email protected] before Nov 4 to open coordination for a return of funds.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING SO QUICKLY?
Earlier this week, Base scheduled its “Denim” upgrade, which moves Base to 200-millisecond blocks, for November 5. OP Stack chains that settle to Base, including the Horizen L3, cannot follow that change: about 40 minutes after activation the L3 can no longer include user transactions, permanently. We identified this, confirmed it on the Base Sepolia testnet where Denim is already live, and our infrastructure provider has confirmed there is no fix. We set the bridging cutoff one day earlier than hard shutdown so that the snapshot is clean and nothing is in flight when the chain stops.
STAKING WILL CONTINUE ON BASE
We expect to redeploy ZEN staking on Base in the coming days. The program remains funded per ZenIP-42408, so staking will resume where ZEN already lives natively, on Base. Details will follow in separate posts to come. Unstaking your ZEN from the L3 today will position you for the start of staking on Base.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Base will become the home chain for the Horizen ecosystem. ZEN already lives on Base natively, and the work ahead – including a compliant privacy pool with staked ZEN-powered nodes and Vela for confidential compute – does not require its own blockspace. A proposed three-year roadmap will be presented to the Horizen DAO Special Council and the larger community for input and governance before execution.
KEY DATES (UTC)
Completed: Bridging ZEN from Base to the Horizen L3 is disabled
Now: Users begin to bridge all assets from Horizen to Base
Nov 4, 13:00: Horizen L3 to Base bridging closes; snapshot taken
Nov 5, 18:00: Base Denim activates; the L3 stops processing transactions
Nov 7 (approximated): snapshot published for review
Nov 15 (approximated) onward: DAO distributes remaining balances on Base
HAVE QUESTIONS?
Horizen Discord: horizen.io/invite/discord
SECURITY REMINDER
Trust Only Official Sources
Website: horizen.io
Discord: horizen.io/invite/discord
Telegram Community Group: t.me/horizencommunity
X / Twitter: xitter.gq/horizenglobal
Never Trust Unsolicited Help
Get help from the official team when you need support.
Horizen team will never DM you first.
We will never ask for private keys or seed phrases.
We will never ask you to send your funds to us.
If you need help, use our official Discord ticketing system.
Rolf V retweeted
Heard of a top law firm completely cutting off Harvey and all API calls to Claude/OpenAI after they saw what openAI did with navier strokes
Now hosting everything locally with GPUs they own, running Kimi and deepseek
Think you’ll see a lot more of this going forward
This is how I use my Hermes agent with specialists in the Kanban system to develop software by having three dedicated profiles, using local AI models, including a coder, quality assurance, and reviewer
Part two of explaining fully local AI agent and model system, and how it builds software, then deploys it.
The smaller agent can use the bigger models orchestrator and conversational models while local software development is handled by a kanban and specialist system using local computation.
Rolf V retweeted
🔍What’s happening behind the proofs on @ZKVProtocol ?
We’ve just launched a Subscan dashboard to explore proof status, aggregation receipts, domain settings and proof system usage—with links to the underlying on-chain events and transactions.
zkverify.subscan.io/proofs
Watch how developers are building useful Apps on Base with the Horizen Vela secure execution environment!
Horizen Vela provides attestation of code running in the environment, connects to smart contracts, and can generate an audit of activity for regulators
DEMO DAY — HORIZEN ACCELERATION SEASON
The day is here. Next Thursday, October 15, the startups selected for the @horizenglobal Acceleration Season take the stage for Demo Day.
After six weeks of building on Vela, each team will pitch live to the audience, VCs, angels and a group of guest judges. Their moment to shine.
Rolf V retweeted
L'IA va faire exploser la plus grande rente de notre époque : la rente du diplôme.
Vous les connaissez tous. 45 ans, une grande école en 2003, et ils le placent dans la conversation au bout de trois minutes. Le diplôme est devenu leur personnalité. Problème : depuis 15 ans, ils n'ont rien appris de difficile. Pas un nouveau langage, pas une nouvelle discipline, pas un vrai problème résolu seuls. Ils animent des réunions, valident des slides, arbitrent des budgets. Le cerveau est un muscle, et chez beaucoup d'entre eux il est en atrophie avancée. Mais le titre, lui, ne bouge pas.
C'est le scandale silencieux de nos organisations : elles fonctionnent comme un cliquet. On monte, on ne redescend jamais. On vous donne le pouvoir sur la base de votre compétence d'il y a vingt ans, qui ne dit presque rien de votre compétence d'aujourd'hui.
Comparez avec League of Legends. Votre rang est recalculé après chaque partie. Vous arrêtez de progresser, vous redescendez. Le système ne vous doit rien. Votre elo reflète votre niveau de cette semaine, pas celui de 2009.
L'IA, c'est l'elo appliqué à toute l'économie.
La valeur d'un diplôme reposait sur une seule chose : l'accès rare à un savoir rare. Ce savoir est maintenant disponible pour 20 dollars par mois, pour n'importe qui, à 3h du matin, sans concours d'entrée. Un gamin de 19 ans avec une IA et de la rage produit en un week-end ce qu'un cabinet facturait 200k sur trois mois.
Quand l'output devient mesurable instantanément, le signal du passé ne vaut plus rien. Personne ne vous demande votre école quand votre agent a shippé le produit avant la fin de la réunion de cadrage. On regarde ce qui sort. Point.
Et le pire pour les rentiers : l'IA amplifie ceux qui pensent et expose ceux qui ne pensent plus. Entre les mains d'un cerveau entraîné, c'est un multiplicateur. Entre les mains d'un cerveau atrophié, c'est un révélateur. On voit immédiatement qui comprend et qui récite.
Les organisations zombies vont tomber les unes après les autres, battues par des équipes de 5 personnes qui vont 100 fois plus vite. Les postes qui gardaient leur prestige après avoir perdu leur utilité vont disparaître. Et ceux qui vivaient sur un diplôme obtenu sous Chirac vont découvrir que le marché recalcule désormais le rang après chaque partie.
Votre diplôme dit ce que vous valiez à 22 ans. L'IA demande ce que vous valez ce matin.
Rivian‘s entire business model is to make electric cars in the forms that people actually want like pickup trucks and SUVs?
What are they gonna do, come out with a minivan next?
Crazy!
Rolf V retweeted
If you own crypto, this is genuinely scary.
A top bitcoin researcher, who actively works at the Ethereum foundation, is telling us to move our crypto to a bunker.
He thinks there is now a reasonable possibility that superhuman AI discovers a way to break the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum before quantum computers do.
That sounds insane, but there’s some important context.
Bitcoin and Ethereum rely heavily on ECDSA. At a very basic level, your wallet has a private key, and mathematics allows you to derive a public key from it.
Going forward is easy.
Going backward and figuring out the private key from the public information is considered effectively impossible.
A huge amount of crypto security rests on that assumption.
Drake is worried that AI could discover some completely new mathematical shortcut that changes it.
Why is he worried about this now?
AI has made some pretty ridiculous advances in mathematics this year.
Earlier this year, an OpenAI model autonomously disproved a famous Erdős conjecture dating back around 80 years, using mathematical techniques researchers hadn’t expected.
Then, literally the day before Drake made this post, OpenAI released hundreds of AI-generated mathematical results across hundreds of problem families.
One of those results broke through a longstanding assumption involving the complexity of integer multiplication.
That does NOT mean AI broke ECDSA.
It didn’t.
The signal is that AI is increasingly demonstrating an ability to find novel approaches to mathematical problems humans have studied for decades.
At the same time, researchers have been making progress on the other threat: quantum computers.
Estimates for the resources required to attack elliptic-curve cryptography have fallen significantly, and researchers, including Drake himself, have been working on making those attacks more efficient.
So his concern is basically:
What if everyone is preparing for quantum computers to eventually break ECDSA, but superhuman AI discovers a mathematical shortcut first?
That’s the part he thinks the crypto industry isn't sufficiently prepared for.
If ECDSA were efficiently broken, the consequences could obviously be catastrophic. Depending on the attack and what information an address has exposed, an attacker could potentially recover private keys and steal funds.
Drake isn't saying this has happened.
He isn't even saying it's definitely going to happen.
He's saying that recent AI progress has moved the probability from something he could comfortably ignore to something worth preparing for.
His recommendation is surprisingly simple.
If you're a major holder, exchange, custodian, ETF, treasury, etc., consider moving assets from heavily used addresses into fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction.
Then don't use those addresses.
That limits the cryptographic information you've exposed and potentially buys you additional protection if a vulnerability is suddenly discovered.
For the really large players, he thinks the industry should begin preparing to move beyond ECDSA entirely and toward post-quantum / hash-based cryptography.
The downside is enormous, the precautions are relatively cheap, and AI progress is moving fast enough that waiting until an attack exists may be too late.
He thinks it's now reasonable to consider the possibility that ECDSA could break before AGI/Q-Day, potentially on a timeline of months rather than years.
Nothing publicly known can currently do this.
But his argument is essentially:
For decades we've protected trillions of dollars with mathematical problems because humans couldn't figure out how to solve them efficiently.
We're now building machines that may become much better at mathematics than humans.
Maybe it's time to stop assuming those two facts can coexist forever.
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.
Rolf V retweeted
I can't speak for other individual chains but can give some insight into chain economics for those interested.
First, you have to understand that infrastructure costs (rpcs, messaging, indexing, etc etc etc) have exploded upwards over the past year, with many integrations chains relied on for free now asking for five or six figure charges to keep online. Two years ago in the era of an explosion of L2s and L3s many of those providers got into a massive expansion game but the overall multichain usage never came to fruition to a degree it could cover costs so business models have changed. This puts chains in a tough spot.
You have to regularly get ahead of this by making tough choices and focusing on infra providers that get use and are best in class and all-encompassing as possible while keeping costs down. It's not easy.
The other half is that chain fee revenue is and can only be a small part of any business model and on-ramping, lps, running parts of the infra, etc all have to supplement.
Finally, imo not every chain can or should be general purpose like an Arbitrum, Robinhood or Base and I think we've seen chains try to do it all with resources that will never touch the big guys instead of being opinionated. That makes everything harder.
Anyway, onwards and upwards,
running a chain isn't easy, those of us who work on them know that better than anyone. If you're on a chain and need a new home you can always reach out for advice. 🫡
Rolf V retweeted
Experience gives perspective. Programming is not dead, and never will be.
It's late September 2026. Sometime in September 1976, just after I entered college, I wrote and ran my first serious program. I have now been a programmer for literally 50 years.
And man, I have seen it *all*. Punched cards to glass ttys on minicomputers to workstations to the earliest micros. I've written business software, communication programs, development tools, games, language implementations, kernel device drivers, graphics libraries, a few critical pieces of infrastructure, and all manner of odd programs for which there is no taxonomy. Coded in a score of languages some of which are now forgotten. I've run over 70 open-source projects and contributed to at least as many more.
Along the way I noticed a few things, and wrote about them, and that made me famous. But I'm not here to write about that today. I'm here to write about what it means to be a programmer and a technologist with the Singularity upon us.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been told "programming is over". You kids may think this is a new claim that came into the world with LLMs. Hah! There's been that kind of talk at every step function in the quality of our programming tools. I first heard it when compilers were replacing hand-hacked assembler in the early 1980s, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if somebody said it earlier when in-memory code replaced plugboards.
One constant amidst all this change is that the intentions in a user's head do not magically turn into executable instructions that a computer can run. Another constant is the mindset of the people who specialize in bridging the gap between wish and algorithm. A programmer is a programmer is a programmer - the tools are secondary.
"But it's different this time!" some people will say, "AIs are superhuman now!" So? What did you think the optimization stage of a compiler was, chopped liver? We've been relying on tools that exceeded human capabilities all along - we built them precisely because our meatbrains could not otherwise keep up with the demands of the job.
It's been a hell of a ride, that 50 years. I've succeeded and failed and succeeded again. Done a lot of work I'm proud of. Built at least a few things that look like they're going to last. None of that goes away because, hypothetically, an AI might have made me faster.
The work is never done, even if the tools can talk to us now. Because intentions still have to be communicated; people who specialize in that and develop right mindset to do it still have a major advantage over people who don't.
If you're feeling depressed because you spent years or decades developing hand-coding skills that are obsolete now? Buck up. You still have the most important asset - a mind that knows how to think that way.
I'm facing the winds of the Singularity with a smile. Because 50 years and I'm still standing - still shipping code that people can use, still learning, still refusing to be paralyzed by the pace of change.
The best therapy for your uncertainty? Get to work on something.