Veridise Re-poster

A strict target date of December 2029 has been officially established by Ethereum to achieve quantum resistance. Interestingly, this timeline is driven entirely by the deployment schedule of the protective updates, rather than waiting to see when functional quantum computers actually emerge. Reaching this milestone will require five distinct network forks, with each phase allocated exactly 7.2 months. The development itinerary is extremely tight and leaves absolutely zero room for delays. You can review the full details at https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/09/07/protocol-priorities

External calls function as the essential foundation of on-chain code, meaning their simple presence should never be viewed as an automatic warning sign. However, there are exactly 2 specific situations that truly indicate danger. The first major issue arises whenever a state update takes place only after the call has already finished. The second risk occurs when execution control is surrendered to code that nobody has properly reviewed.

If you are curious about how $27M can exit a system through a simple reward calculation, @FormallyJon provides a clear breakdown of the situation. The true vulnerability was an underlying flaw in the accounting logic, which caused identical tokens to be registered two separate times. The system recognized the funds first as a deposit that the protocol was obligated to return, and then separately as an earned reward. Crucially, both of these balances were made available for withdrawal. While a reentrancy exploit functioned as the delivery mechanism for the attack, the flawed accounting was the actual bug.

Network upgrades on Mina can compel every zkApp to update its verification key, a demand that causes standard multisig setups to fail completely when trying to adapt. To resolve this challenge, Mina Multisig implemented an approach utilizing FROST. Before @nori_zk released this system on @MinaProtocol, Veridise conducted a thorough review of the solution, and this evaluation is currently documented on AuditHub. The software is now completely open source, making it an excellent resource for any Mina team working on wallet applications or self-custody tools.

The entire concept of being self-custodial fell apart as soon as individuals were required to deposit their assets into the spending contract for Rain. We witnessed a loss of $500K at Avici, along with $430K disappearing at Tria. In the end, any assertions about maintaining custody are completely meaningless if the routing contract you rely on happens to contain a vulnerability.

Asset managers and risk curators are now able to provide yield from just one deposit because the contracts from @Lombard_Finance accurately price Bitcoin deposits across various shards and converters. This setup allows for seamless vault migrations that successfully carry the correct share price forward. Prior to the platform scaling up with actual deposits, Veridise conducted a comprehensive review of the system.

It is completely possible to build a ZK circuit that passes all of your validation tests while actually computing an entirely unintended result. A new open source verifier called LLEQ has been created specifically to detect this exact issue, and it is officially live right now.

To identify bugs discoverable by artificial intelligence, a volunteer red team consisting of 20 to 25 developers has already examined the majority of the open-source software for Bitcoin. The reality today is that attackers no longer require years of expertise, as one cheap model is now all they need. Because of this rapid shift, an ad hoc review approach simply will not keep pace. Moving forward, provable guarantees absolutely will.

Panelists issued a warning this week regarding a significant shift in digital security. Historically, cybercriminals largely ignored a $20K wallet because the necessary effort far outweighed the potential financial return. The introduction of an AI agent completely eliminates that previous cost and benefit ratio. By leveraging this technology, a single attacker now possesses the capability to go after everyone simultaneously. Interestingly, the actual exposure was never the AI itself. The real issue is that our current wallet logic was specifically designed to defend against a human attacker.

In this week's edition of Auditor's Take, @FormallyJon highlights a fundamental principle behind every constant-product pool. These pools operate safely under a single critical condition, which is that external forces must never interact with their reserves. The moment that underlying assumption is compromised, the assurances provided by the pool collapse right alongside it.

As Ethereum developers gear up for the 2027 Hegotá upgrade, they are actively narrowing down a list of 66 proposals. While FOCIL has already secured its spot in the upcoming update, the most significant debate centers on specific EIPs. These proposals aim to equip privacy applications with a foundational layer that completely eliminates the need for trusted intermediaries. In the end, the chosen solutions will define the exact attack surface that every ZK auditor will subsequently be tasked with navigating.

In this week's edition of Auditor's Take, @FormallyJon breaks down the specific sequencing bug that recently drained Future Protocol. The core of the issue involved just three standard operations: a transfer, a sync call, and a burn. When these commands are executed in the proper sequence, everything operates exactly as intended and nothing unusual occurs. However, simply triggering those exact same steps in an incorrect order caused $4.6M to be emptied from the pool.

Executing a burn, a sync call, and a transfer in the proper sequence ensures that everything functions normally without incident. However, triggering these exact same three actions in an incorrect arrangement leads to severe consequences. This specific scenario is precisely how $4.6M was removed from the pool. For the latest edition of Auditor's Take, @FormallyJon provides a detailed breakdown of the exact sequencing bug that drained Future Protocol.

Recently, three dozen crypto firms submitted a request to AI labs asking to be equipped with the identical offensive capabilities that attackers already possess. We must keep in mind that achieving equality in search functions does not automatically equate to achieving equality in security assurance. Even though an artificial intelligence model can map out significantly more pathways than any human, it remains unable to verify the routes that it has never actually opened.

A math conjecture that stood for 87 years was recently refuted by Claude Fable 5. Interestingly, the discovered counterexample successfully clears the standard invertibility check. Because it routes three distinct inputs into one identical output, however, it remains impossible to invert.

This scenario clearly demonstrates that merely passing a verification check does not serve as an actual proof. It is precisely within this kind of logical gap that underconstrained ZK bugs exist.

Historically, security research within the ZK space has been highly compartmentalized. If you develop a specific utility for Circom, that exact same resource offers absolutely no value to Halo2 teams. Likewise, choosing to work with Noir means that Circom developers are completely left out. Because the industry has lacked a shared foundation to build upon, excellent research inevitably remains trapped inside individual environments. Fortunately, the introduction of LLZK is completely transforming this entire dynamic.

LLZK now has its own GitHub org, separate from Veridise.

Ethereum Foundation funded two rounds. Galois already contributed a backend independently.

Community projects built on the IR can live there. What would you want to see?

Here is a bold perspective on the current landscape. The most significant unresolved challenge facing ZK tooling actually has nothing to do with performance. Rather, the fundamental issue is the lack of a common foundation. Because a universal base layer does not exist, each individual ecosystem is forced to construct its own security framework entirely from the ground up. I would love to hear your thoughts on this situation. Do you share this view, or do you believe that concerns regarding fragmentation might be exaggerated?