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Conor Deegan

Oct 21, 2026

9:07
Maybe, Conor, you're going to...
9:09
Yeah, great.
9:10
I mean, I find myself saying this more and more these days, but I think as a cryptographer, I wanted to have one very, very quick disclaimer.
9:17
None of these schemes are broken today.
9:19
And I think the debate that's kicked off in the last two weeks, you know, 20 days or so, you know, I've seen all sorts of crazy takes across X. I think it's very important to say, to the best of our knowledge today, elliptic curves are safe.
9:31
The lattice schemes that are post-quantum are safe.
9:33
The hash-based schemes that are post-quantum are safe.

9 MINS LATER

18:07
Yehuda Lindell, the head of cryptography at Coinbase, disagreed with Justin and tweeted, quote, "'To my understanding, there is no evidence whatsoever pointing to a break of decades-old hardness assumptions like elliptic curve cryptography.'" Then he said, "'Just throwing out, AI is doing amazing math so elliptic curve hardness is in danger has no logical basis whatsoever.'" So I'm curious where you stand between Justin's stance and Yehuda's.
11:37
think about the timeframe back then when you realized it was going to be an interesting problem to look at?
11:42
and so quite frankly didn't know and that's what so what we yeah what we spent our time doing over the next two months is speaking to absolutely everyone we could we we got on phone calls we got on flights we flew to meet quantum physicists we just kind of surrounded ourselves with the problem as much as possible i knew the cryptography side i didn't know the quantum side so what we had to do was we had to figure out well are the few people we've spoken to right is our data point of one enough probably not let's go speak to the world about this problem so we just spent some time just grilling quantum physicists across colleges in the US and the UK for answers to when they think this day might happen.
12:14
And we found this theme that most people realized it probably wasn't as far away as most people think.
12:20
And this was enough for us to, you know, there's now a thread.
12:22
And I guess as like any entrepreneur, you see a thread and you're going to keep pulling it and pulling it and pulling it.
12:27
And we decided back in 2024, this was enough to start a company.
12:31
So this was the inception of Project 11.

34 MINS LATER

46:43
What have you been saying to folks who run significant fleets of IoT devices where CPU or battery or both are at a premium? It's a hard question.

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