Lukas Helminger

MPC for threshold signing ✅ Google building its own custody solution on it is yet another clear signal of the tech's maturity. MPC for critical compute 🔜 The rising star. Pioneers like @worldnetwork already running their most critical infra on MPC. More to come.

AI deepfakes have rattled the bankers. At Sibos, the world’s biggest conference for bankers, Lukas Helminger expected to talk about payments. Instead, everyone was talking about identity: how do I know the person on the call is real? @WorldNetwork's World ID for Zoom answers that with tech developed by @TACEO_IO, which can verify you without reading your iris data. TACEO already protects the iris data of over 18M+ people scanned with World’s Orbs. 🎥 @LuHelminger joins @GarettJones on the latest episode of Bluechip Dialogues.

Public blockchains show everything. That's a real hurdle for banks coming onchain. Every transfer is visible to anyone who looks. And with enough onchain footprint, they can be traced and identified. That’s holding back institutional adoption, and Lukas Helminger thinks it’s solvable. @TACEO_IO offers a compliant method to wrap stablecoins like USDC so that balances and transfers stay private, while allowing users to tap into DeFi protocols. 🎥 @LuHelminger joins @GarettJones on the latest episode of Bluechip Dialogues. Timestamps - 0:33 From mathematics to World’s iris 3:10 Making compute 100,000x faster 6:37 Academics stop when “a solution exists” 10:03 Graz’s cryptography culture 15:50 Enhancing privacy with wrapped USDC 23:08 TACEO revenue streams, early failures 25:02 Deepfakes & World ID for Zoom 31:50 Private USDC on public chains 37:33 What’s next: post-quantum, AI labs

Plaid for Government Benefits @gustaf Applying for government benefits means proving the same facts again and again across systems that don’t talk to each other. That creates friction for honest applicants and openings for fraud. Government needs a Plaid-like layer for verified income, tax, and residency data: verify once, apply everywhere. As AI agents begin handling enrollment, trusted data infrastructure becomes even more important.

We are thrilled to announce our $8M Series A to connect regulated markets to onchain finance. Predicate enables digital assets to reach every market compliantly. We do this by embedding compliance controls directly into digital assets to block high-risk and sanctioned activity at every transaction. To date, Predicate has: - Screened $1B+ in transaction volume - Evaluated 6M+ transactions against custom compliance policies - Blocked 100K+ non-compliant transactions The round was led by @bcap with participation from @Paxos, @1kxnetwork and @tribecap.

This week we're heading to the heart of European banking. The industry is settled. Moving it onchain isn't. @aisconnolly and Filip are at @mmerge_io Madrid, 27-29 Oct. Merces running live on mainnet. Catch them to see how private payments settle onchain in less than a minute!

Big personal news today: I have decided to leave @a16z, move to SF, and start a company. It's time to build :) It has been almost 10 years since I joined the firm. I met @cdixon, @bhorowitz, and @pmarca in 2017. At the time, I was an engineer at Google Brain working on robotics. I had a deep interest in open source. I knew nothing about investing. Chris meanwhile had already planted the @a16z flag at the frontier that was early crypto with investments in companies like Coinbase. But the crypto team at the firm consisted of only him, and he had the ambition to expand. His pitch to me was simple: "You should leave Google and come help me build the crypto vertical at the firm." The work we've done together since then to build out our team and support our founders has been the most meaningful work of my life. I am grateful to have spent a decade working with everyone here, supporting our founders, learning from Chris, Ben, and Marc, and living the firm's culture. It is a culture that values integrity, life-long working relationships, and the belief that we humans have the power to build our own future. Marc and Ben have built a16z into an incredible force for good in the world. Before I joined the firm, I always thought that my inevitable path was to become a founder. The truth is that I wasn't ready for it then. Somehow, this year I've gotten the overwhelming feeling that this has changed. As for what I want to build: It is early, but I care most about building infrastructure that enables open software ecosystems. I am starting with two core observations: 1. AI today is largely a single-player technology. Most uses involve one human talking with one agent in isolation from the rest of the world. That will soon change. Most uses of AI will soon be many-to-many: many humans and many agents working together. There will be at least one massive open network on top of which those uses will be built. 2. Software is now free. It can now be written just-in-time, on the spot for a single individual's hyper-targeted use case, and it can even be thrown out after a single use. This means that our entire software stack will have to change. In the limit, it will lead to a whole new kind of AI-mediated operating systems, which in turn will create an ecosystem of AI-native developers who build applications that actively rebuild themselves on the fly. If you are working on related ideas, and especially if you are in the Bay Area, hit me up. Let's chat! @bhorowitz , @pmarca, @cdixon, @eddylazzarin, @guywuolletjr, @jasonrosenthal , and our whole team — I want to thank you. Working with you has been the time of a lifetime. I am forever an a16z superfan and your ally. Onward 🫡

Impromptu meeting with @luhelminger today discussing exactly this. How is it that some companies build flying cars, while others build banking plumbing. We toured the frontier topic too, what’s needed to realise @TACEO_IO as ~the frontier cryptography lab. It’s about to get hot.