
MP @ Arche Capital. prev: incubated @bittensor_, @polychain, tilt (acq. @airbnb), webmail (acq. @rackspace)
Joined April 2007
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Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
There's lots of discussion about a16z dropping the word 'crypto'.
It's actually a sign of crypto winning. It's outgrown being a standalone sector and now runs through global finance and frontier tech: payments, trading, tokenization, AiFi, and much more.
We've spent more than a decade building this industry to make it useful everywhere, and we should welcome it escaping its own category. People used to say 'internet companies' - which is a prehistoric phrase now. Eventually, calling something a 'crypto company' should feel just as redundant.
Many of us (including me) will keep the word. But the millions, and soon billions, using it every day won't care what we call it.
They'll care what it lets them do.
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
Weβre excited to announce Alex Odagiu as CEO of BNB Standard (Nasdaq: BNC), effective today.
Catch him in his first appearance as our CEO live on stage at @money2020 USA in Las Vegas at 11:00 a.m. PT, in a fireside chat with Remy Blaire of @FINTECHTVglobal.
globenewswire.com/news-releaβ¦
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
bombshell report from the OCC out today confirming what we all suspected:
between 2020 and 2025, based on a review of 100,000 complaints, Americaβs largest banks systematically denied banking to lawful businesses based on political and reputational considerations rather than objective financial risk, effectively appointing themselves arbiters of which industries deserved access to the financial system. digital assets was specifically named as one of the six most affected industries.
TLDR: we weren't imagining it. OCP2.0 was real.
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
NEW POD | BITCOIN NEWS EXCLUSIVE
We sit down with the man who broke the Ledger supply chain attack wide open.
Mark Karpelès (@MagicalTux), former CEO of Mt. Gox, and Zach Herbert, CEO of @FoundationHQ, join us to discuss the largest supply chain attack in crypto history.
πΈ Mark says he found the spy implant 3 weeks before the drain, tagged Ledger, and got no response
πΈ How a hidden cell modem read seed phrases straight off the screen and passed Ledgerβs own check
πΈ Why a passphrase didnβt save you, and what actually would have
πΈ Mark says with $5M, he could build an implant youβd need an X-ray to find
πΈ Why the hardware wallet reseller model may be dead
πΈ What the future of self-custody looks like
Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/-j9_EQuHEus
00:00 Ledger Supply Chain Attack Exposed
01:18 How Mark Discovered the Compromised Ledgers 04:29 $100 Million Stolen From Hardware Wallets
05:03 Opening the Ledger to Find the Implant
06:29 The SPI Implant That Reads Your Screen
09:56 How the Implant Steals Your Seed Phrase
13:51 The Hidden LTE Chip Phoning Home
17:00 The Timeline Behind the Attack Going Public
18:31 $86 Million Drained in 24 Hours
20:15 Did Ledger Know About This for Months?
24:00 The Malaysian Reseller Behind the Attack
26:56 How Hardware Wallet Companies Vet Resellers 30:21 Tracking the Stolen Crypto On-Chain
34:20 The Attack Spreads to Europe
36:05 Inside the Criminal Implant Supply Chain
39:10 Why Trezor Wasn't Targeted
42:08 Why Ledger Was the First Target
45:27 The Future of Hardware Wallet Security
50:20 Multi-Party Computation as the Fix
54:30 Making Self-Custody Easy for Newcomers
56:27 Why the Industry Must Professionalize
59:07 Staying Optimistic About Bitcoin's Future
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If youβre building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:
β’ Proprietary data
β’ Network effects
β’ A physical component
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
π¨ If you donβt want to open up your Ledger just yet, hereβs a list of hardware wallets and their weights:
βοΈ Hardware Wallet Weights
Ledger
β’ Nano X β 34 g
β’ Nano S Plus β 21 g
β’ Flex β 58 g
β’ Stax β 44 g
β’ Nano Gen5 β 46 g
Trezor
β’ Safe 7 β 45 g
β’ Safe 5 β 23 g
β’ Safe 3 β 14 g
BitBox
β’ BitBox02 β 12 g
β’ BitBox02 Nova β 13 g
OneKey
β’ Classic 1S β 20.5 g
β’ Pro β 65 g
β’ Pro 2 β 53 g
Blockstream
β’ Jade Core β 20 g
β’ Jade Plus β 30 g
Keystone
β’ 3 Pro β 103 g
SafePal
β’ S1 Pro β 126 g
Coldcard
β’ Q β 175 g
NGRAVE
β’ ZERO β 180 g
ELLIPAL
β’ Titan 2.0 β 158 g
β οΈ A serious warning following the @Ledger incident in Southeast Asia:
We cannot rule out the possibility that other Ledger devices, or even hardware wallets from other manufacturers, may have been compromised elsewhere in the world.
Buying directly from the manufacturer is certainly safer than buying from a reseller, but even that cannot guarantee 100% security.
Supply chains can be infiltrated. Employees can be compromised, bribed or deliberately planted by attackers.
There is currently no evidence of a worldwide compromise, but the incident demonstrates how dangerous supply-chain attacks can be.
Never confuse a trusted brand with guaranteed security.
Stay vigilant. Self-custody comes with responsibility. π
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
Right now the best near-term solution I can think of is active anti-tamper in hardware wallets (which we have in @FoundationHQ Passport Prime) and maybe more complete epoxy/potting solutions to completely encase the internals in a 3D-mesh.
Longer term it would be great if a company could make a comprehensive display driver chip that allows for encryption, so that attackers cannot connect to the screen's ribbon cable and "see" what the screen is displaying.
I am unaware of any chip that offers this today. Cc @tropicsquare might be a worthwhile endeavor.
This looks like this could be exactly what I'm investigating. Anyone affected, please contact me or open your ledger and send me pictures so we can confirm if there's a bug in there (pictures: ledger board on top, spy implant below).
xitter.cf/Ledger_Support/status/β¦
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
Doomerism has now hit cryptography...
Unfortunately, on reflection, I think this is a very sober call. No reason to be taking unnecessary risk with all of the rapid progress happening in mathematics. The risk is not quantum, but just conventional mathematics overturning unproven cryptographic hardness assumptions.
It's UTXO-mode for a while.
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 ErdΕs 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.
Most AI tools live in their own tab. You go there, get your answer, and bring it back to your team.
Kohai lives in the same workspace as your team. Same context. Same goals. You set the direction, your Kohais execute, and your team reviews and refines.
Work is multiplayer. AI should be too.
π
kohai.co
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
INTEL: KYC should collect less personal data and use zero-knowledge proofs to verify compliance without revealing names, income or addresses, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce says
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
The race for AGI
Script: Sherpa by Pocket FM
Video: Seedance 2.5
π€ Made with AI
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
TPN Bench update
We started reaching out to devs, labs, and teams about TPN Bench, and the response in the past 5 days has been 200+ people asking when they can run their models.
@huggingface recently crossed 3M models, and around 3000 new ones are uploaded every day.
We're pulling data from every publisher daily, and about 99.5% of them publish models with no benchmarks on the model card, that's thousands of models a day that nobody has measured.
Every upload without a score represents a potential TPN Bench user, and we'll keep reaching out.
Imagine if something at work comes up that you donβt like and donβt want to work on, so you just cancel work for a few months and go home. But you still get paid. Thatβs congress.
This is a huge milestone for @FoundationHQ, for self-custody, and the industry.
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
Forward (@FWDind) has put forth an updated proposal to acquire SkyAI (@skyaico) at a 50% premium
globenewswire.com/news-releaβ¦
Will Wolf βπ» π retweeted
Switch to open source. It's time for a new foundation.
09.15 | 10AM ET
foundation.xyz/switch


























