Quantum But No Solace

Top News

• Quantum poses existential threat to crypto: Researchers from Google have issued a dire warning for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and digital assets. According to a new blog post from Google Research, the company’s latest innovations around quantum computing suggest that advanced machines could break elliptic-curve cryptography — the system used across much of the crypto market and beyond — more quickly and easily than previously assumed. At the heart of the issue is a mathematical problem called ECDLP-256, which is used to secure crypto wallets and transactions. Google’s latest design can apparently resolve this in 20x less time than previous computers. It’s unclear whether or not a machine capable of this level of number-crunching remains theoretical or if it actually exists, but nonetheless, Google recommends that impacted companies begin a shift toward post-quantum cryptography (PQC) post-haste.

• Whoop hits $10B valuation: The wearable health monitor developers announced $575 million in fresh financing, at a $10.1 billion valuation. (That’s nearly 3x the previous valuation.) The round was led by Collaborative Fund and the Qatar Investment Authority, but also features participation from celebrity athletes like LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo. While the company is thus far most associated with wristbands for everyday use — allowing users to keep track of their sleep and exercise habits, along with behavioral coaching — Whoop plans to use the fresh funds on R&D, expanding its line of medical grade products. Last year, Whoop released the Whoop MG, which tracks the heart’s electrical activity, conducts atrial fibrillation detection, and even offers electrocardiogram tests.

• Monzo shutting down in US: The London-based neobank is giving up on the US market, after years of attempting to gain a foothold, and will revert to a UK and European focus. Around 50 employees are being laid off as part of the shift. Monzo launched its US offerings in 2020, starting with an app and credit card. The fintech startup (and TWiST 500 member) briefly sought regulatory approval for a US banking charter but ultimately withdrew its application. Another British neobank, Revolut, has had more success in pursuing US customers; they applied for their US bank license back in March.

TWiST 500

It’s been a tough day for internet security, with a number of hacks and breaches being reported across social media, many of them impacting TWiST 500 companies.

Anthropic reportedly exposed the source code for its Claude Code tool accidentally, which has already been extracted and reposted numerous times to Github. An intern from Solayer Labs named Chaofan Shou (@Fried_Rice) posted a viral tweet announcing the breach and including a direct download link to a hosted archive.

For Anthropic, of course, this is no mere leak, but the potentially devastating release of extremely valuable intellectual property. Claude Code currently has a nearly $19 billion annualized revenue run rate, for which enterprise clients account for roughly 80%. A pathway for rivals to glean ideas and inspiration from leaked code, useful for horning in in on their success, could be potentially devastating.

Then there’s AI recruiting platform Mercor. The notorious international hacking group Lapsus claims to have stolen 939 GB of source code, and 4 total terabytes of data, from the company via their TailScale VPN. As they specialize in recruiting, Mercor is of course collecting highly sensitive information from job candidates, including personal data like emails, addresses, phone numbers, and possibly even IDs and Social Security Numbers.

Finally, a hacker allegedly from North Korea illicitly accessed the open source JavaScript software development tool Axios and infected it with malware. The infected version of Axios was hosted on the software repository npm, from which it’s downloaded tens of millions of times each week.

Cognition co-founder Scott Wu claims that the company’s AI tool Devin Review — which analyzes and reviews code changes — detected the malicious code that had been inserted into Axios, and advised against downloading the update. So even as hacks and malware get increasingly more creative and flexible, there remains hope that defensive tools can still try and keep up. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2269: We’re back on our OpenClaw BS, with special guest (and Google AI PM) Shubham Saboo sharing his Top 5 Tips for getting more out of your AI agents. Find out why Shubham created a team of 6 agents (named for his favorite sitcom characters) and he he gets them to work together, seamlessly, 24/7. Plus we’ve got new demos from MoltWorld — a virtual playground where agents collaborate — and AgentMail, which hooks your agent up with their own email address.

E2268: Jason and Lon welcome AstroForge founder and CEO Matt Gialich to the show. The space mining company hopes to refine platinum group metals (PGMs) from asteroids. Their last two missions have failed, but there’s still hope for the DeepSpace-2 project, piggybacking on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later on this year. Plus we’ve got Sam Dare from Templar (Subnet 3) to explain how he trained a 72 billion parameter AI model across a decentralized network of computers, and a demo of open-source Granola rival OpenOats from creator Yazin Alirhayim.

E2267: We’ve caught Subnet Fever on TWiST, so Lon and Alex welcome three sets of subnet founders to take a look at what they’re building on the TAO blockchain. The list includes MetaNova, which runs developer competitions to uncover molecular candidates that could one day lead to new drug treatments for major diseases. Plus there’s the Bitcast Network, which uses Bittensor to create a marketplace between brands and YouTube content creators. Finally, we’ve got Score, which uses a subnet model to generate small but highly specialized computer vision models.

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