Building AI system for older adults. HW/SW integrated. | ex-CTO @piplabsxyz @psdnai, ex @harmonyprotocol @awscloud | Opinions are my own.
Palo Alto, CA
Joined July 2011
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leochen retweeted
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
leochen retweeted
Mudwater is an old game played deep in the Everglades.
Instead of dice in alleys, we play Mudwater on the docks.
The game is simple, but the skill ceiling is high.
And we play for keeps.
We've just airdropped this 6551 Totem, paired to all BAYC & MAYC, enabling pack claims.
leochen retweeted
GM.
The Cryptex Digital Market Cap Index is now live in the palm of your hand.
Introducing Cryptex Terminal for mobile.
leochen retweeted
1/ How I infiltrated a Chinese organized crime syndicate that has laundered $1B+ across multiple exploits for Lazarus Group.
Posing as a client, I gathered intel that helped action freezes for the Feb 2025 Bybit exploit and attribute illicit activity onchain.
leochen retweeted
Peter Thiel on how you should think about your future:
"What you end up doing when you think of the future as indefinite is you pick a job that you think will look good on your resume, because it will lead to a different job later on. There's even a credentialing version where you go to grad school, you get a consulting job, and you think of it as this branching tree diagram where you never really do something that you want to do.
You can think of the future on three horizons. Very short-term is: are you going to be happy, and will you be learning a lot? Medium-term is: how good is it on your resume? And very long-term is: are you working on something important or meaningful? We're in a skewed world where we overweight the medium-term and underweight some combination of the short-term and the long-term. I would recalibrate to focus on the short-term and the long-term, and forget about the medium-term."
leochen retweeted
Goodbye, Poseidon!
An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.
Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.
In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.
The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.
We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.
With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.
Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.
As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.
On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.
Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)
Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.
Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.
Believe in something. Believe in hashes.
leochen retweeted
After spending the last two years building the MegaMafia, we’ve decided to sunset the program.
While it was a success in many ways, we believe that the program was built on assumptions that no longer hold.
Here are some reflections, and what’s coming up next.
> We had real conviction in Mafia founders, and have gone above and beyond in standing by their side to bring their products to market. Some examples include: restructuring the GTE leadership team during critical moments just one month after their initial pre-seed raise, offering to buy out Noise's investors when they tried to push out the CEO, and played a crucial role as they pivoted from their initial prediction market idea, and merging the Tenten and HitOne team after seeing the synergy between the two.
> Across both cohorts which in total included 20 teams, we lent our reputation and networks to founders so they could go on to raise over $80m in funding in pre-seeds, seeds, and series As. We kept the MegaETH’s raise to a minimum so investors can get more skin in the game with the Apps directly, rather than the protocol.
> For teams that had difficulty in raising when the market turned bearish, we extended resources, engineering bandwidth, and actual capital (e.g. six figures in audit for Avon) so they could make it to Mainnet. We did it solely to help founders see their vision through.
> We set the product vision for 5 teams and supported their initial builds before eventually facilitating their fundraises from leading tier-1 and tier-2 funds.
> We spent significant cash (in the millions) bootstrapping teams’ DeFi requirements, through market-making support, direct lending, and other liquidity related needs.
> We hosted 5 large-scale in-person events (New York, Brussels, Bangkok, Singapore, and Seoul) so MegaMafia projects could meet investors and community members from around the world.
In many ways, the MegaMafia was the best incubator of this cycle. But very little of that value has trickled to Mega. In fact, most of those applications are no longer being built with us. At the time, we intentionally took no equity, governance rights, nor economic value because we wanted people to be genuinely bought into the Mega vision and the power of our technology. While we will continue to support existing MegaMafia projects, there will no longer be MegaMafia 3.0.
What’s next?
Our ecosystem goal going forward is to support teams building OMEGA applications, apps that are only possible on MegaETH, using our wallet infrastructure and stablecoin.
More importantly, we're redirecting the energy we were lending to third-party builders into our own first-party applications: consumer-grade apps, built directly by us, for the people we're trying to serve. Where MegaMafia was indirect, betting on other teams to build value we'd eventually capture, first-party apps let us build direct relationships with end users ourselves, with all the upside and accountability that comes with owning the outcome.
We're aiming for faster feedback loops, with insane focus on accruing value directly to the protocol.
leochen retweeted
> be Sammy Azdoufal, software engineer
> spend $2000 on DJI Romo vacuum
> decide to control it with xbox controller like a chad
> use Claude to reverse engineer the API
> It works because Claude is the GOAT
> just need to grab auth token from their cloud servers
> token works... Claude is unbeaten
> wait why is he authenticated as 7000 devices
> ohno.jpg
> backend trusted any valid token for any device, no ownership verification
> mfw Sammy has live camera feeds from vacuums in 24 countries
> watching some german dude eat cereal at 3am
> can pull SLAM data and get floor plans of everyone's house
> could be the world's most efficient burglar
> could be the world's most at scale pervert
> Sammy just wanted to drive his vacuum bro
> reports it like a responsible adult
> DJI patches in 2 days
> back to being a normal guy with overpriced roomba
> mfw the entire IoT industry treats auth like it's 2005
leochen retweeted
Today in @NatureMedicine we report that AI can predict 130 diseases from 1 night of sleep🛌
We trained a foundation model (#SleepFM) on 585K hours of sleep recordings from 65K people—brain, heart, muscle & breathing signals combined.
AI learns the language of sleep🧵
leochen retweeted
Hollywood is cooked.
A single ai artist just dropped a 7 minute film made 100% with ai tools and it went viral on Chinese social media in a week.
The film explores the idea that our world might be a simulation. Built with Nano Banana, Veo3 and Runway, music by Suno.
The era of the one person production studio is already here. and it cost ~0.001% of a Hollywood production.
leochen retweeted
On my first day as a Marketing Intern at Google, the CMO asked me "What is good marketing?"
I responded confidently, "It's all about creative branding, advertising, and effective PR. Essentially Mad Men."
She laughed, "No. Now query these product data tables and tell the engineers which new feature to test next so that the product itself creates a perpetual loop that brings in more users. And if you can't figure that out, construct a top or mid funnel program around the product that creates a perpetual loop of user growth."
Public comms, viral content, branding, advertising, etc. are all important components of "Marketing". However, they are indirect. The end purpose of Marketing is to grow a product's usage and revenue generation. There are direct ways to do that, but I don't see much of that in crypto.
Something to consider when you see discussions about crypto marketers and good/bad marketing.
leochen retweeted
The first prediction market built on @StoryProtocol is now live. Powered by $IP, built for culture.
From K-pop charts to token price swings, choose your side.
Every prediction mints an NFT that unlocks airdrop rewards!
Here's how to make a prediction on banged ai 👇
