Making blockchains fast. Focused on performance, reliability, and tools at @0xPolygon || Boston || @MIT
Brookline, MA
Joined March 2007
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Weekend project complete! I wanted to be able to write EVM Smart Contracts with Common Lisp. It's very low level, but still easier than writing byte codes.
John Hilliard retweeted
this was such a banger read by uber on perf optimizations and serving huge read heavy workloads that too from a small memory
uber.com/us/en/blog/translat…
John Hilliard retweeted
Shoutout to the full Polygon engineering team who has done nothing short of a miracle over the past year.
Fast block times, low fees, high throughput, high revenue, high reliability, fast finality, decentralization..... no other chain has the combination of all.
John Hilliard retweeted
Linus Torvalds: “AI is tool and will be used in Linux kernel development, anyone who’s is not happy about it can fork Linux kernel” 🤣
John Hilliard retweeted
3 years ago when we started zkSecurity, we reviewed a number of RSA circuits.
they're not easy to review.
If you had told me then that 3 years later we wouldn't have to understand how these circuits work for them to be secure, there's no way I would have believed you.
The work that the clean team has managed to achieve is really insane. Props to @mitschabaude @pirapira @g_dellimmagine and rot256
John Hilliard retweeted
Devastated.
Grizz Chapman Dies: '30 Rock' Actor Was 52 deadline.com/2026/05/grizz-c…
John Hilliard retweeted
Huge. Through Deel, a company can now fund payroll in dollars and their employees and contractors can receive it in stablecoins on Polygon within seconds.
Stablecoin payouts are live on @deel for employees.
Over 5 years ago, I joined @deel as the first payments hire. I spent the first few years building out the fiat payment infrastructure that moves billions to workers across 150+ countries. The more I watched money move, the more I saw how broken cross border payments are.
Stablecoins fix this.
10,000+ contractors already get paid in stablecoins on @deel.
Today we’re extending this to full-time employees.
This is how payroll should be.
John Hilliard retweeted
24h ago Polygon reduced 250ms from the BlockTime
Today we are increasing 20 Million on the Gas Limit
This means more 16% TPS. Combined with yesterday's 14% we are talking about +32% TPS in less than 48 hours.
I told there will be more, and I will say it again 😉
Seems true, but important that previous steps along this path were deterministic. AIs add a new wrinkle into the software validation/verification process.
If you're monitoring finality, you'll see a real step function change in how long it takes your transactions to finalize.
John Hilliard retweeted
The founder of Postman says you have to kill your existing org chart, especially if you're still operating with a pre ai hierarchy arrangement.
The modern org chart, according to @a85:
- wide span of control (even within exec team)
- work directly with ICs, not through layers
- either you're building, or you're selling
Projects are led by staff/principal engineers with high agency. They see across the board as well as deep in the stack.
Product managers are building APIs and prototyping in Claude instead of writing PRDs.
Designers are shipping PRs through Cursor directly instead of relying solely on Figma.
Everyone is building. And the management's job is to develop better judgment.
John Hilliard retweeted
It’s exciting to see people discovering tla+ as great fit for agentic use cases. You might want to try out @quint_lang, based on the same core, but coming with a modern syntax and tooling perfect for AI use case (although we built it long time before LLMs) quint-lang.org/posts/cogniti…
HOLY FUK I JUST LEARNED ABOUT TLA+ AND IT'S SO GOOD FOR AGENTIC CODING
ur telling ME that i can mathematically fact check every possible scenario of my design STATE to prevent bugs and crashes
AND IF IT FINDS SOMETHING THE AGENTS GET INSTANT FEEDBACK AND LOOP FIXING IT TILL IT ALL POSSIBLE BUGS IN THE DESIGN ARE PATCHED
LOL THIS IS OP
John Hilliard retweeted
Clearly that single checkbox is not enough to protect users. We should never allow such a swap without enough “high level quality consent” despite permission-less nature.
Earlier today, a user attempted to buy AAVE using $50M USDT through the Aave interface.
Given the unusually large size of the single order, the Aave interface, like most trading interfaces, warned the user about extraordinary slippage and required confirmation via a checkbox. The user confirmed the warning on their mobile device and proceeded with the swap, accepting the high slippage, which ultimately resulted in receiving only 324 AAVE in return.
The transaction could not be moved forward without the user explicitly accepting the risk through the confirmation checkbox.
The CoW Swap routers functioned as intended, and the integration followed standard industry practices. However, while the user was able to proceed with the swap, the final outcome was clearly far from optimal.
Events like this do occur in DeFi, but the scale of this transaction was significantly larger than what is typically seen in the space.
We sympathize with the user and will try to make a contact with the user and we will return $600K in fees collected from the transaction.
The key takeaway is that while DeFi should remain open and permissionless, allowing users to perform transactions freely, there are additional guardrails the industry can build to better protect users. Our team will be investigating ways to improve these safeguards going forward.
Instead of freeing us for higher-level thinking, there is a risk that AI is degrading the quality communication. Instead of crisp, hard-won insights, we're trading 10-page AI-drafted memos that nobody has time to read wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-isnt-ligh… via @WSJ
