Ben Fisch ☕️

Greylock has always been one of our most solid backers. Some of the smartest people I know, always willing to roll up their sleeves to help, and investors you can trust. Excited to see the next generation of companies they back.

At Yale Innovation Summit 2026, Aaron Schnarch, Executive Director of the Compound Foundation, joined a @Yale_Ventures panel on institutional blockchain adoption and tokenization. The discussion focused on how traditional finance moves onchain in practice — and the infrastructure required to support access, risk, liquidity, and distribution at institutional scale. Compound V4 is being built for that next phase of institutional adoption.

@bkiepuszewski @LayerZero_Core @KelpDAO @chainlink @bkiepuszewski x.com/benafisch/stat…

Or the bridge fully verifies consensus without trusted parties in the middle! also, why isn’t anyone mentioning the fact that even if the multisig RPCs weren’t comprosmised they were reading confirmations from Unichain’s centralized sequencer, which is yet another vulnerable RPC?

TL/DR of @LayerZero_Core drama: @LayerZero_Core : every app should configure their own security otherwise there will be one centralised point of failure @KelpDAO Really ? Great, hold my horses @chainlink and other bridges : that's bullshit, our centralised point of failure is 13/16 or 15/19 or sth, no way it can be hacked. Whereas 1/1 or 2/2 or 4/4 can and will. Plus it's impossible for apps to understand the security let alone manage it themselves Conclusion: Avoid MultiSig bridges altogether, ffs. Use canonical assets and intent protocols

What nobody’s talking about is the fact that even if multiple DVNs were used, they would all still have been reading from Unichain’s centralized sequencer / RPC infrastructure. That is another trusted layer, and it can be compromised or fooled in the same way. This is because nobody wants to wait ~15 minutes for Ethereum to finalize an L2 like Unichain’s state. The problem is pervasive in this industry, it runs deeper, and simply moving to CCIP doesn’t solve it. Avoiding bridge hacks like this requires waiting for Byzantine fault-tolerant finality of the source chain, plus independently verifiable state through zero-knowledge proofs and/or hardware-based enclaves. And if BFT finality isn’t fast enough everyone will take shortcuts that land us right back here.

Every crosschain message consist of 2 fundamental parts: input data and execution proof. Both must be verified to have a secure crosschain message. Correct input data (from a decentralized base layer consensus protocol) into a faulty execution proof (like a compromised full node) is no good. Incorrect input data (like a sequencer confirmation) into a correct proof system (a perfect, bug-free ZKP) is no good either. You need both and you need to verify both for every crosschain message. 1. Block confirmation depth from L2 sequencers does not give added security against a malicious sequencer. Blocks can be reorged by the sequencer any time before they land on their base layer. 2. Verifying the merkle root of block events is not sufficient. A valid, but incorrect event merkle tree can be constructed from malicious input data. (Though arguably performing this attack is more involved than faking an eth_getLogs call) 3. Synchronous composability is perpendicular. You could have a synchronously composable protocol with weak confirmations and a weak proof system, making it prone to forged crosschain messages. TEEs often get a poor reputation, and they are not perfect, but an RPC running in a TEE that also verified a decentralized block confirmation inside the enclave would seem to have prevented this particular unfortunate incident. Even better, a multisig of TEEs, where each TEE is enforced to be in a different location, cloud provider, and TEE provider could have provided arguably much stronger security for comparable offchain and onchain costs (you verify the TEE attestation once at registration time, then use an ephemeral key onwards which is cheap to verify onchain). The exact RPC binary code would have been attested to onchain, preventing malicious code injection. The end goal is a real-time multi-proof system of both TEEs and ZKPs + a real-time trust-minimized confirmation system. Until ZKPs can match TEEs on cost and latency, we can use TEE proofs up to certain notional thresholds to limit the exposure until a ZKP can be generated.

Espresso was one of the top seven protocols discussed at Digital Asset Summit 2026, alongside USDC, Solana, Morpho, Hyperliquid, Ethereum, and Bitcoin. In our keynote together with @awscloud , we gave a demo of real-time cross-chain collateral management live on Espresso mainnet. The system reprices millions of positions every 0.3 seconds and can enforce actions across chains at a fraction of the cost of running the same workload on other state-of-the-art chains. Institutions such as @The_DTCC @EuroclearGroup Clearstream and @BIS_org have described collateral mobility as a “killer app” for institutional blockchain adoption. At the same time, they have emphasized that network fragmentation is becoming one of the biggest barriers to adoption and to building at scale. The future of finance will be multichain, which makes real-time interoperability essential. On our DAS panel with DTCC, Nethermind, and BNB Chain, I spoke about how Espresso Network addresses this problem. Any chain integrated with Espresso Network can coordinate with others in real time. The network already supports many leading Web3 enterprises today and is well suited for institutions exploring tokenization and stablecoins, as well as market infrastructure providers using blockchain technology for collateral management and related use cases.

A global data layer that every institution can write to/read from consistently, with fast finality, enables secure coordination across independent chains & financial systems. Espresso Network provides this. Great panel with @The_DTCC @Nethermind and @BNBCHAIN at @blockworksDAS

@LineaBuild Accelerating proofs is a great step but you can’t have real-time finality so long as you are settling to Ethereum, a slow consensus. Ethereum finality is 15 minutes.

The Linea prover just got cheaper, faster and lighter. Our cryptography team just released Small Fields. Let's have a look 🧵

Real-time finality isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential for mass adoption, especially at the institutional level. Finality comes from a base layer, but that base layer doesn’t have to be Ethereum. Our world runs on interoperable sovereign systems; crypto will be no different. Espresso & Ethereum each have their own strengths, and are built to work together. @ellierdavidson on the main stage at @EthCC

"Fragmentation breaks financial systems. The user base splinters across multiple chains, rather than the virtuous circle of greater acceptance and greater use." @benafisch @EspressoSys

Demoing real-time collateral management live on customized chains deployed to Espresso mainnet 2:05pm today at DAS Millions of positions recalculated every few hundred ms at a fraction of the cost it would take on Ethereum, Base, etc.

Through its partnership with Opera, Celo quietly became the most adopted L2 chain by DAU and strongest transport layer for USDT: 4.23M weekly active users, 65+B stablecoin volume annually. And imminently Celo will have real-time payment finality powered by Espresso Network!

Every financial application will become its own chain. Robinhood has a chain. Stripe has a chain. When every bank, brokerage, and clearinghouse runs its own chain, they need speed, security & a high degree of customization. That's the world Espresso is built for. ft. @jillgun

Longtail Pro. The most performant cross-chain DEX, powered by @EspressoSys. Coming soon. Bookmark this.

Fun fact: 10 years ago while working on an early enterprise blockchain company, I flew to NYC for a meeting with the DTCC I spent the prior 5 years working on Wall Street and knew the DTCC was the ultimate ledger & would be the lynchpin for any meaningful institutional adoption.

Join us tomorrow as we celebrate Espresso’s upgrade to proof-of-stake. I’ll be chatting with @benafisch about Espresso’s mission and why L2s need a purpose-built base layer, then talking with @circle_crypto about why @LitecoinVM chose Espresso for finality. Should be a good one.

The Espresso Network's proof-of-stake upgrade was triggered today on mainnet at block 10,960,201. Epoch 1 has begun. In another 79,799 blocks (~2 days at current 2-second block times), Espresso becomes a fully operational PoS consensus network. Track it: explorer.main.net.espresso.network

Major milestone for Espresso Network. Transitioning to proof-of-stake after a year+ of running on a globally distributed network of fixed nodes. Espresso is the only Layer 1 purpose-built for Layer 2 chains—the future of web apps—and thus a backbone for the web of commerce.