Venture investing in climate | AI | crypto in emerging markets - open source, decentralized AI, DeFi, last-mile consumer apps, privacy & mobile wallets
Onchain
Joined November 2011
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- Following2.2K
- Followers2.2K
- Likes4.7K
Pinned Tweet
Crypto enabled digital wallets are helping aid move where banks can’t operate. Built by @HesabPay_ in Afghanistan, this approach is supporting cash assistance in Syria after years of war and sanctions.
nytimes.com/2026/01/24/world…
Scott Onder retweeted
Addressing systemic vulnerabilities requires collaboration across sectors.
As a founding partner of @FASEFoundation, @ProsperGlb_org joins other partners committed to a safer, more equitable, and more connected future through systemic resilience and responsible innovation.
Scott Onder retweeted
Apple is working on a new app called Harbor
Harbor turns your Mac into a private AI inference server. Run open-weight models locally on Apple silicon—your data never leaves your hardware, and nothing reaches the cloud. Connect multiple Mac computers over Thunderbolt 5 to pool unified memory, enabling large models and higher concurrency that a single computer can handle alone.
Set up in minutes, not hours Harbor automatically detects your devices over Thunderbolt 5 to form a cluster. Plug in, start, and you’re running—no manual configuration, no command line, no infrastructure expertise required.
Download and run models directly Browse, download, and load open-weight models from within the app. Harbor handles model management so you can focus on the work, not the setup.
Cluster for scale Connect two or more Thunderbolt 5-capable Mac computers and Harbor pools their unified memory into a single inference resource. Run models that exceed any single computer’s capacity, or serve more concurrent requests across your cluster.
Harbor is currently in a private preview under the Claris brand.
Scott Onder retweeted
Announcing a major milestone achieved by my team @GoogleDeepMind: we have proven key security properties of the machine code underlying the Signal messaging protocol. This is the first time the actual production code of a widely deployed protocol has been formally verified – by any method, with or without AI – and at this depth.
More than a research breakthrough, it’s a prime example of how frontier AI can be a force multiplier to counter the speed and scale of modern cyber threats.
Formal verification offers a higher standard of security; however, it’s extremely complex and time consuming, which is why in many cases it’s considered to be impractical. Similar efforts could take teams decades of combined effort. We did it in a month’s time.
Using AlphaProof Code, Google DeepMind's new agentic framework for formal verification that runs on LLMs including Gemini Carbon, we verified the Signal protocol down to the actual code running on devices. This milestone lays the groundwork for a future in which vital systems, from medical device firmware to power grid software, ship with mathematical proof that their protections work.
Reaching that future will take continued research from our community. In that spirit, we're open-sourcing our formal specifications and verification artifacts so others can build on this work.
On a personal note, this moment is of deep significance to me. I started my own research journey more than two decades ago as an intern working on checking the consistency of complex software systems. Seeing this grand challenge made practical with modern AI is extraordinary.
I'm extremely proud of my team members: Swarat Chaudhuri, Andrew Ferraiuolo, Anton Kovsharov, Tej Chajed, Sam Schlesinger, Karn Seth, Jonathan Katz, and Charles Sutton for taking on this grand challenge and delivering, and grateful to the Signal team for their partnership.
deepmind.google/blog/formal-…
👀👀
Across our projects @GoogleDeepMind, we are witnessing a genuine phase transition in the pace of scientific discovery. You will see a glimpse of this in our releases in the next few weeks.
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Scott Onder retweeted
☀️ Rise and shine, Zcash is 3x faster!
💥 NU7 Is Live on Zcash Mainnet!
🚀 Activated at block 3,543,405.
➡️ Node operators: run Zebra 7.0.0
⚡ Blocks every 25 seconds
🦓 Miners and pools: try Zebra Ándale, our fastest Zebra yet, now in alpha. ...More improvements soon!
zfnd.org/zebra-andale-the-fa…
Scott Onder retweeted
Our security researchers built an autonomous cyber vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and patching pipeline.
In a single run with an upcoming cyber model, it validated and generated patches for 948 local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel at a total API cost of $1.2 million.
Commanding Heights is an important read on digital dollars, distribution power, and whether decentralized ownership can generate durable economic value.
The benefits of abundant intelligence will accrue far outside of San Fransisco.
Spent the last year writing about capital, sovereignty, and the coming reordering of economic power.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
Commanding-Heights.com
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Ten years in, it’s great to be with the Zcash community celebrating what’s been built and what comes next. Privacy, self-sovereignty, and human agency matter more than ever.
Zcash enables anyone, anywhere to store value and to transact privately and securely. Zcash is the most important project in the world, because self-sovereign money is a requirement for human rights and for a durable and thriving civilization. ⤵️
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AI is a cooperative game. Realizing its potential requires workers, communities, and businesses to have a meaningful stake in the upside. The more people can participate in building AI and share in the value it creates, the stronger the foundation for progress.
“AI holds the promise of providing both the productivity boost and the tools to pave the way for discoveries that can address many of the problems weighing down aging, debt-ridden societies across the world,” write @alexolegimas, @elerianm, and James Manyika.
foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
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Scott Onder retweeted
We believe access to capable open-source cyber models is our constitutional right as Americans under the 2nd Amendment.
It is our duty as technologists and patriots to help protect the digital infrastructure that powers the world's largest economy.
As such, we’re serving our cyber models “at-cost”, in US data centers only, with ZDR enabled by default.
We do not plan to make money serving these models.
If you run a company that is considering how to best protect against cybercrime, reach out to me or @atbeme. We’d be happy to advise.
KYC required. Apply below.
deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017-cyber is now available on @inference_net.
This is the first of several highly capable cyber models we'll release over the coming weeks.
We believe it is our duty as technologists to help people protect themselves and their digital properties from the current onslaught of cybercrime ravaging much of the world.
As such, we’re serving our cyber models “at cost”, in US data centers only, with ZDR enabled by default.
KYC required. Apply here inference.net/models/deepsee…
Scott Onder retweeted
Meet Dessa, our AI model trained from scratch on nothing but speech.
We believe speech is the natural interface for technology. So we built Dessa.
And we’re inviting AI safety researchers to explore Dessa.
Learn more: block.xyz/dessa
Scott Onder retweeted
Crypto grew up in the Dark Forest, and the entire world is about to find itself there
Scott Onder retweeted
🚨 Zebra 7.0.0 is out - NU7 comes to Mainnet.
All Mainnet operators MUST upgrade before height 3,543,405 (~Nov 5) to stay on the consensus chain. 6.4.x stops itself days before activation - don't wait.
⚡ 25-second blocks
🔁 Network Sustainability Mechanism
🛡️ 5 security advisories fixed
👇️ zfnd.org/zebra-7-0-0-release…
What excites me about David’s vision is the emphasis on making privacy practical and accessible in everyday life. Strong technology is essential, but real-world adoption is what ultimately matters. Looking forward to working with @alchemyDC to advance both. And grateful to Alex for his leadership in getting us here.
Yesterday the Zcash Foundation board named me Executive Director. Thank you to Alex for steady leadership through a tumultuous stretch, and to everyone who has reached out this week.
The job as I see it has two halves: 1) keep the infrastructure fast, secure, and boring. 2) make privacy something ordinary people use without having to think about it.
I don’t think privacy is a feature, and I don’t think it’s a niche. It’s the room a society needs to think, speak, associate, and change its mind. Any system people depend on for daily life should give them that room by default. That’s the standard I’ll hold our work to.
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Proud to help pass the baton from one strong leader to the next.
Thank you, Alex Bornstein, for your steady, collaborative leadership through a tumultuous stretch and for bringing the ecosystem together.
Excited to welcome @alchemyDC. His technical depth and longstanding commitment to Zcash make him the right leader for this next chapter. Onwards. 🛡️
The Zcash Foundation Board of Directors has appointed David Campbell as Executive Director.
Thank you, Alex Bornstein, for leading with a constant focus on bringing the Zcash ecosystem together. Welcome, David, a longtime member of this community.
zfnd.org/zcash-foundation-na…
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Scott Onder retweeted
I’m with Tren. You can’t leave out Brian Arthur (and Cormac McCarthy). share.google/ULnITYgBXJMSp5e…
ok here is my tl;dr for "network effect" intellectual history
- in 1974 Rohlfs from Bell Labs gives a simple model around communications networks based on subscribers and their interactions
- in 1985 Katz and Shapiro try and generalize, but this looses the implicit concept of a network (and I find to be largely tautological and useless)
- in 1994 Liebowitz & Margolis point out Katz and Shapiro's work is sorta braindead and start to classify things better (this is a great paper, I recommend reading it)
- in 2000 Rochet & Tirole pull out two sided marketplaces as a separate category
- meanwhile, the business press adopts various forms of this discussion branching off at various places along the way, which results in a bunch of different working definitions.
... and thus we've constructed the business jargon tower of babel
Scott Onder retweeted
Stablecoin-backed cards make make global balances instantly usable at 100M+ businesses. We're looking forward to working with @plasma to advance the space.
We're bringing together Stripe's fiat and crypto infrastructure to make it easier for businesses to build stablecoin-backed cards that work across currencies and markets.
More on what we're building with @Plasma,
