Surprise AMA 08/22/2025

Reports on the Salt Conference in Jackson with the Scaramuccis and a Federal Reserve roundtable with Governor Waller, Sergey Nazarov, Anatoly, Ilia, and Brad.

Midnight redemptions are strong at 1.6 billion tokens, and Lace will support XRP before year end after talking with Brad Garlinghouse.

The Clarity Act write up comes by end of September with hopes to pass in October, while the Fed struggles to regulate the Genius Act across three agencies.

The Cardano Foundation was barred from claiming Night tokens because it would be adversarial and its ADA ownership is unclear under Swiss control.

The Copper partnership lets exchanges using Copper as custodian support Midnight and Cardano native tokens, alongside Bitcoin.com, blockchain.com, and Brave.

The Midnight airdrop across eight ecosystems could be the largest ever, beating Arbitrum's 601,000 participants.

He had a long talk with Sergey Nazarov about bringing Chainlink into the UTXO world for Cardano, Midnight, and Bitcoin.

He spoke with Ilia of Near about the agent commerce web, intents, multi chain signatures, and account abstraction, and wants a deal.

The Cardano Foundation sits on hundreds of millions yet makes no deals, when it could simply hire account managers per ecosystem.

Considers a utility based drop instead of asset based, citing Hyperliquid's distribution, and says non participating CNTs get left behind.

Mocks Wyoming renaming its stablecoin the Frontier stablecoin, saying government should not build private industry products.

Says the Ledger fix for Midnight was tested end to end with Bob and should ship, and jokes Gemini the Google product will support Cardano before Gemini the exchange.

New SPO incentives where running a Midnight node yields five or six token revenue streams at once across the partner chains.

The Winklevoss twins do not hate Cardano, and recounts making peace with CoinDesk's Mike Casey at Salt after three hostile years.

Praises CoinDesk under new management for neutral, fair coverage of Midnight, and blames a low level Gemini employee for blocking Cardano.

Intersect was his vision for what the Cardano Foundation should have been, a members organization that just needs 600 million in assets.

Marcus attacks the budget on Twitter though 75 percent voted for it, and the Swiss takeover of the CF board felt like a changed donation deed.

IO has no relationship with LinFi and praises JJ and Jack Briggs building the Argentina office with five events in three months.

Cardano is up 156 percent and outperformed Bitcoin in 2025, going from 25 cents to nearly a dollar, but people still call it a scam under 3 dollars.

USD1 integration for Midnight and Cardano is very possible, and non EVM plays are interested mainly in Cardano as an access point to Bitcoin DeFi.

Leios is the most anticipated upgrade, a doover, and Sebastian, Phil, and Santiago will add pub sub after studying the mini protocol and libP2P Gossipsub for data availability.

The Hydra physicalization: a vending machine on Hydra implies an ATM, point of sale, smartwatch, and NFC all on Hydra, built by Sam Leathers, Adam Dean, and Kyle.

The Rare Evo completionist story of someone spending three days earning Hydra points for a Louis Vuitton purse, and imagines using it to fill conference talks.

No one is suing him because nothing happened, and his own defamation suit in Portugal would cost half a million with no payout.

Hedera's DRec inspired a dead man's switch wallet inheritance feature coming to a premium Lace, praising Leman Barrett's Hedera team.

Defamers just go anonymous and move the goalposts from 300 million theft to disliking how the refund was done.

The audit report closes a 2015 to 2025 history covering the IO contracts, the sale software, and the ADA vouchers, a complete exoneration.

The report will be damning for the CF's repeated recusal, which pretended Cardano was an immaculate conception with no founder or Genesis ADA.

Neuromorphic computing is good for inference and could power a proof of useful work marketplace to lower AI costs.

He will look into Genius Yield's token dropping 99 percent, noting Lars was involved, and that bad outcomes break his heart.

Jokes that if ADA flips ETH, Vitalik will not retire but lose his mind chasing anti aging technology.

Walks through the TAME trial, the FDA approved anti aging metformin study coordinated by Wake Forest across 14 institutions with 3000 people.

Jed McCaleb runs a space station company called Vast, and bets the market structure bill passes in October if at all.

Michael Saylor could privately yield his Bitcoin through Midnight.

He knows Eric and Don Jr Trump, was at a Riley Green concert with Eric, and prefers direct non transactional deal making.

Recommends the Agentic AI nano degree from Udacity, now part of Accenture, as one of the most valuable job skills to learn.

Lace mobile debuts in 2025 with major announcements.

The airdrop has no blacklist: 37 million addresses filtered by Chainalysis to remove OFAC and MS13, redeemed to fresh unlinked addresses.

Shows the dedicated Leios website with monthly updates on research, the formal spec, and Rust and Haskell simulations.

Feeds the Leios site to Claude and calls out its inaccurate summary, showing it correct itself to 11000 TPS potential and a seven stage pipeline.

Demonstrates JSON prompting to build a deep research prompt for Leios, which yields far better answers than plain English.

Reiterates the CF address represents undue burden and harm because it would derail governance and its ADA ownership is questionable.

Runs Google deep research to generate a 30 page report on Leios from the documentation.

Confirms he will remake the Bitcoin class once Bitcoin DeFi progresses enough to write code.

Vitalik prefers ZK rollups over optimistic ones for security, and walks the seven part ZK stack: setup, languages, witness, arithmetization, proof, cryptography, verification.

Details ZK tradeoffs: trusted setups like Groth16 versus transparent STARKs, and circuit languages like circom and noir versus Midnight's Compact.

Folding schemes and recursion in ZK, and the cryptography choices of elliptic curve, hash, or lattice with their quantum implications.

Midnight chose Plonk arithmetization and Halo 2, versus Starkware's AIR and STARKs, among 22 different ZKVMs.

An event or intent based model on Cardano needs a data availability and pub sub layer, which StarStream's delimited continuations enable via functional reactive programming.

Runs Google deep research on Leios, showing it decomposes to Praos via Paris, trading throughput for determinism, from 10 to 1000 TPS.

Pi's write up placing Leios as the centerpiece of a scaling strategy alongside Hydra, Mithril, Paris, and Genesis, versus Near's Nightshade sharding, which Leios avoids.