ZILENT

Zcash is making its most crucial components private against quantum adversaries, using cryptography that we previously hadn't dreamed of shipping in a cryptocurrency. In parallel, almost a year of design in quantum recoverability is about to pay off in our next wallet upgrades.

Now, account abstraction. We have been talking about account abstraction ever since early 2016, see the original EIP-86: github.com/ethereum/EIPs/iss… Now, we finally have EIP-8141 ( eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8… ), an omnibus that wraps up and solves every remaining problem that AA was intended to address (plus more). Let's talk again about what it does. The concept, "Frame Transactions", is about as simple as you can get while still being highly general purpose. A transaction is N calls, which can read each other's calldata, and which have the ability to authorize a sender and authorize a gas payer. At the protocol layer, *that's it*. Now, let's see how to use it. First, a "normal transaction from a normal account" (eg. a multisig, or an account with changeable keys, or with a quantum-resistant signature scheme). This would have two frames: * Validation (check the signature, and return using the ACCEPT opcode with flags set to signal approval of sender and of gas payment) * Execution You could have multiple execution frames, atomic operations (eg. approve then spend) become trivial now. If the account does not exist yet, then you prepend another frame, "Deployment", which calls a proxy to create the contract (EIP-7997 ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip… is good for this, as it would also let the contract address reliably be consistent across chains). Now, suppose you want to pay gas in RAI. You use a paymaster contract, which is a special-purpose onchain DEX that provides the ETH in real time. The tx frames are: * Deployment [if needed] * Validation (ACCEPT approves sender only, not gas payment) * Paymaster validation (paymaster checks that the immediate next op sends enough RAI to the paymaster and that the final op exists) * Send RAI to the paymaster * Execution [can be multiple] * Paymaster refunds unused RAI, and converts to ETH Basically the same thing that is done in existing sponsored transactions mechanisms, but with no intermediaries required (!!!!). Intermediary minimization is a core principle of non-ugly cypherpunk ethereum: maximize what you can do even if all the world's infrastructure except the ethereum chain itself goes down. Now, privacy protocols. Two strategies here. First, we can have a paymaster contract, which checks for a valid ZK-SNARK and pays for gas if it sees one. Second, we could add 2D nonces (see docs.erc4337.io/core-standar… ), which allow an individual account to function as a privacy protocol, and receive txs in parallel from many users. Basically, the mechanism is extremely flexible, and solves for all the use cases. But is it safe? At the onchain level, yes, obviously so: a tx is only valid to include if it contains a validation frame that returns ACCEPT with the flag to pay gas. The more challenging question is at the mempool level. If a tx contains a first frame which calls into 10000 accounts and rejects if any of them have different values, this cannot be broadcasted safely. But all of the examples above can. There is a similar notion here to "standard transactions" in bitcoin, where the chain itself only enforces a very limited set of rules, but there are more rules at the mempool layer. There are specific rulesets (eg. "validation frame must come before execution frames, and cannot call out to outside contracts") that are known to be safe, but are limited. For paymasters, there has been deep thought about a staking mechanism to limit DoS attacks in a very general-purpose way. Realistically, when 8141 is rolled out, the mempool rules will be very conservative, and there will be a second optional more aggressive mempool. The former will expand over time. For privacy protocol users, this means that we can completely remove "public broadcasters" that are the source of massive UX pain in railgun/PP/TC, and replace them with a general-purpose public mempool. For quantum-resistant signatures, we also have to solve one more problem: efficiency. Here's are posts about the ideas we have for that: firefly.social/post/lens/1gf… firefly.social/post/x/202740… AA is also highly complementary with FOCIL: FOCIL ensures rapid inclusion guarantees for transactions, and AA ensures that all of the more complex operations people want to make actually can be made directly as first-class transactions. Another interesting topic is EOA compatibility in 8141. This is being discussed, in principle it is possible, so all accounts incl existing ones can be put into the same framework and gain the ability to do batch operations, transaction sponsorship, etc, all as first-class transactions that fully benefit from FOCIL. Finally, after over a decade of research and refinement of these techniques, this all looks possible to make happen within a year (Hegota fork). firefly.social/post/bsky/qma…

AA update: The Frame Transactions EIP was moved today to Scheduled status for the Hegotá upgrade. It was proposed as a headliner and moved in March of this year to Considered status. There was strong consensus that it was important to ship Account Abstraction in Hegotá even if the specific implementation was still up for debate. There's been a lot of progress in the past few weeks as another implementation, EIP-8130, became a contender. This EIP is scheduled to be shipped on @base in September. It spurred productive conversation async and in a breakout this past Tuesday about the best way to not fracture standards across the ecosystem by shipping two incompatible Account Abstraction implementations between the L1 and L2s. The crux of the issue is arriving at a shared transaction type that both preserves flexibility and future-proofness for the L1 and allows L2s to statically analyze transactions for performance and DoS-resistance reasons. At a minimum, we should make sure that the AA scheme we adopt for the L1 is flexible enough that 8130, or any future account system, can be built on top of it so that from the user's perspective the same account can work across L1 and L2s. Authors of both EIPs, core devs, researchers, and testing teams have been working toward a solution that respects the imperative to get Account Abstraction in the next fork without delay but avoids fracturing ecosystem standards. That said - Account Abstraction _will_ ship in Hegotá, so core devs decided today to move EIP-8141 from Considered to Scheduled today. This was made with the caveat that the version of Account Abstraction that ships in Hegotá may significantly change from what's on the Hegotá Meta EIP right now: potentially the EIP number, the transaction type, etc. The move to Scheduled doesn't materially change the conversation that's been happening over the past few weeks or enshrine the current spec. When an EIP is proposed as a headliner and moved to Scheduled, it just signals an intention to make the fork schedule dependent on that feature being shipped. It's more common than not for the implementation to change significantly between being Scheduled and shipping. Big appreciation to @_chunter of @base, @Offchain, @EthLabs_org, and client teams for moving the conversation forward. Progress is ongoing and can be followed at the AA breakouts on Tuesdays at 14:00 UTC or asynchronously on Forkcast.

Hiding your coins in a bunker won't save your blockchain. Given the risks AI poses to fundamental cryptography, I propose every chain implement a "cryptographic recovery mode":

A phone can now sign a quantum-resistant Starknet transaction. We just sent a testnet transaction using a NIST-standard ML-DSA key generated and held inside the phone’s secure hardware. The network verifies the post-quantum signature onchain, without requiring a hard fork.

LATEST: 🚨 Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer says AI will exploit bugs in wallets, libraries, and systems code to steal billions long before ECDSA breaks, making existing code the priority.

🚨 JUST IN: Ethereum researcher Justin Drake calls on the crypto industry to enter "bunker mode" as AI superintelligence could threaten standard ECDSA encryption faster than expected. "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."

Quantum safety moved up the roadmap. Privacy became first-class. They belong together. An exposed key is a security problem. An exposed lookup is a privacy problem. Zilent checks your keys and hides your lookup among 7 decoys: zilent.xyz

How Zilent Scan works: Try “Active trading wallet” in Example data to explore 6 checks and 9 demo findings. Each result explains the issue and next step. Live RPC is read-only. Unavailable checks say “Not checked.” No signing or transfers. $ZILENT

Algorand has been shipping nonstop lately 🔥 • We have a new CEO, William Herkelrath • He joins our Board of Directors alongside @alexanderfowler, CSO at @NexusLabs • The major Algorand v5.0 upgrade was approved by node runners • Native post-quantum accounts are live on mainnet • You can create one now with @PeraAlgoWallet or @LuteWallet • 1.3M+ PQ transactions signed in just a few weeks • Fees now scale with resource usage • Builders get bigger contracts + new AVM capabilities • We launched AC2, an open protocol for safer AI agent approvals and credential isolation • We partnered with @FlowTraders to deepen institutional liquidity for ALGO • @PeraAlgoWallet v7 is live, their biggest update ever • Algorand ranked #2 in agentic transaction volume in August, with $244K moved by AI agents • 2.8K+ x402 endpoints are now live on Algorand • @zerosignal_ai is live on mainnet

How Zilent Scan works: Try “Active trading wallet” in Example data to explore 6 checks and 9 demo findings. Each result explains the issue and next step. Live RPC is read-only. Unavailable checks say “Not checked.” No signing or transfers. $ZILENT