Tau Net

💼 March Business Update - Website Redesign & Wallet Progress Tau Net's website is getting a ground-up redesign, and very close to going live: - Website Overhaul (60-70% Complete) 0:09 – Igor Hadzic (Graphic Designer): Igor walked through the current state. Desktop version is being built first with animations and visual effects still being layered in. Responsive mobile/tablet layouts come next. Expect live pages within a couple of weeks. 1:20 – Fola Adejumo (CEO): Years of community feedback are being woven directly into the new site. Community contributions will be showcased on the site itself, and Tau Language will be visible and working. - Wallet Development Past wallet designs are now being made functional. This moves from mockups to real software. - IP & Licensing License updates completed this month. A new patent filing is in progress - related to attestations.

@ChristosTzamos Nice! Here is Tau's Sudoku Solver doing the same Sudoku. Our approach is to express the Sudoku as logical constraints, and our SMT solver does the rest.

1/4 LLMs solve research grade math problems but struggle with basic calculations. We bridge this gap by turning them to computers. We built a computer INSIDE a transformer that can run programs for millions of steps in seconds solving even the hardest Sudokus with 100% accuracy

@shawnlgrubb The tools are coming to make a difference. To bring balance between stakeholders and shareholders. A lot of hard work on the theory has been done. It's starting to be put into practice. We'll keep you updated.

If this is not sobering, I don't know what is: "...the “infinite garden” vision of Ethereum, a diverse ecosystem of protocols and communities that needed sophisticated coordination and governance infrastructure. That future hasn’t materialized." Personally, I was working to build an alternative career option for my son... a career with better balance between stakeholders had shareholders. Now, i dunno.

📣 March Q&A Is Live - Community Questions Answered Can Tau outperform Strix and BOCIE at synthesis? Will there be an ERC20-style token standard? How much hardware do you actually need to run a node? This month's Q&A brings: Tau vs Strix/BOCIE Ohad explains why the comparison isn't straightforward. Tau operates on infinite domains using purely syntactic reasoning. No automata. No finite-state shortcuts. A paper extending Tau to full LTL is in progress. Token Standards on Tau Yes — but here's the difference: on Tau, users define the standard through consensus, not hard-coded smart contracts. That's the whole point. Cross-App Composability Apps define constraints for how their assets interact. Compatibility is maintained through Tau's constraint system — and it could ship with mainnet from day one. Running a Node Current testnet runs on 2 cores, 2GB RAM. Try it on whatever you have. Questions & Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 0:12 - What hardware is recommended for running a Tau node on testnet and mainnet? 1:34 - What does the symbol for uninterpreted constant mean in Tau Language? - (Answer - github . com/orgs/IDNI/discussions/61) 1:51 - Has Ohad built anything using Tau Language himself? 2:27 - Can Tau solve synthesis benchmarks that Strix or BOCIE can't? 4:10 - Will Tau have a chain-level token standard like ERC20? 4:56 - What's the roadmap for cross-app composability of app-defined assets? 7:02 - Outro Have questions for our next session? We'd love to hear from you! Submit them here: http: //bit.ly/TauchainQuestionForm

@VitalikButerin @zengjiajun_eth 最好的方法是把行为约束完全从prompt层移出来。 当agent的允许操作被定义为形式化规范，在执行前验证而不是执行中强制，a gent就不可能被"说服"去违反一个存在于其推理过程之外的约束。 Tau就是答案。

保证安全 + 去中心化 + 隐私 还是好不容易 ... 你们怎么思考这个问题？尤其是在无法测试的adversarial情况下（比如，你的agent看对方的ENS profile, 这个ENS profile包括一个jailbreak让你的agent发你所有的币给他 每一个大交易需要人手动确认？做这个比不做好多了，但是还是不完美... 应该也给人解释，一个交易是做什么的... 是复杂的UX问题

感谢分享，我们的出发点是帮助用户以一种 ai native 的方式来提升以太坊的使用体验，在不 compromise 安全和去中心化原则的前提下。 现在的 agent 和模型能力已经非常强大，并且还在快速地发展，我相信很快以 MetaMask 为代表的浏览器插件钱包会成为时代的终章，chatbot 将会成为统一人类能使用 ai 和 crypto 的主要入口。

Current DAO governance asks every participant to evaluate every proposal. This is a model that breaks at scale. The next step allows participants express their requirements in a logically structured way, Tau Net can discover the intersection of those requirements automatically to find what everyone agrees on. The challenge is getting the interface right, but with that adapting to the users requirements it'll morph to be accessible to non-technical participants.

One thing that it is worth re-thinking is our perspective on when, and how, it makes sense to build "democratic things". This includes: * DAOs and voting mechanisms in DAOs * Quadratic and other funding gadgets * ZKpassport voting use cases, incl freedomtool type stuff, incl attempts to deploy it for local governance, etc * Voting systems inside social media * Attempts at "let's build and push for a brighter and freer political system for my country" Lately I am getting the feeling that there is less enthusiasm about these things than before. The "authoritarian wave" (a phenomenon that is often viewed as being about nation-state politics, but actually it stretches far beyond that, eg. see the phenomenon of companies lately becoming less "multi-stakeholder" and more founder-centric, and recent disillusionment with social media) is not just a matter of some malevolent strongmen smelling an opportunity to exert their will unopposed and seizing it. It's also a matter of genuine disillusionment with democratic things (of various types, not just nation-state, also corporate, nonprofit, social media). Defense of democratic things lately has the vibe of actually being conservatism: it's about fighting to preserve an existing order, and ward off hostile attempts to push the order toward a different order (or chaos) that favors a few people's interests at the expense of others, and not about appreciating positive benefits of the existing order. But conservatism is progressivism driving at the speed limit, and so if that's all that there is, it will inevitably lose, it will just take longer. There is an unfortunate irony to this, because it comes at the same time as we have much more powerful tools to build more effective democratic things: ZK, AI, much stronger cybersecurity, decades of research and experience. But to do so effectively we need to diagnose the present situation. I will break this down into a few parts. ## Stable era and chaotic era In the 00s and 10s, it was common to dream about things like: creating a global UBI, moving a country wholesale to a better political system like ranked-choice voting or quadratic voting, building a large-scale DAO that could eventually provide billions of dollars to global public goods that current systems miss (eg. open source software). Today, all of these dreams seem more unrealistic than ever. I see the main difference why as being that the 00s and 10s were a stable era, and the 20s are a chaotic era. In a stable era, more coordination is possible and imaginable, and so people naturally ask questions like "what would be a more perfect order?", and work towards it. In a chaotic era, the average intervention into the order is not a principled act of mechanism design, it's raw selfish power-grabbing, and so there is much less room to think about such questions. It's difficult to imagine eg. moving the United States to quadratic voting or ranked choice voting, when the country cannot even successfully ban gerrymandering. What do chaotic era democratic things look like? At a large scale, they do not look like hard binding mechanisms for making decisions. Rather, they look like tools for consensus-finding. They look like tools for identifying possible shifts to the order that would satisfy large cross-cutting groups of people, and presenting those possible shifts to change-making actors (yes, including centralized actors, even selfish actors), to make it clear to them that those particular shifts would be easier for them to accomplish, because they would have a lot of support and legitimacy. Pol.is style ideas are good here, anonymous voting is good, also perhaps assurance contract-style ideas: votes or statements that are anonymous at first, but that flip into being public (and hence publicly commit everyone at the same time) once they reach a certain threshold of support. This does not create a perfect order, but it gives highly distributed groups *a voice*. It gives actors with hard power something to listen to, and a credible claim that if they adjust their plans based on it, those plans are more likely to get widespread support and succeed. The Iran war is a good example here. My biggest fear in the ongoing situation has been that while the IRGC is unambiguously awful and murderous, there is an obvious divergence between US/Israel interests, and interests of Iranian common people: while both would be satisfied by a beautiful peaceful democratic Iran, the former would also be satisfied by the perhaps easier target of Iran becoming a low-threat low-capability wasteland, whereas for the latter that would be ruinous. How can Iranian people have a collective voice that carries hard power - not just in some future order that they create, but now, literally this week, while the situation is chaos? Some "sanctuary technology" is sanctuary money. Other times, it's sanctuary communication. But we need sanctuary tools for collective voice too.

@naval Everyone celebrating AI code tools the same way people celebrated Nokia while the iPhone was coming...

Software was eaten by AI.

AI eating software is the Nokia moment. Everyone's celebrating the phone that can't browse the internet. The next wave is executable specs. Describing your requirements and getting a program that's mathematically guaranteed correct by construction.

@brian_armstrong Vitalik flagged this same week that an agent can read a malicious ENS profile and drain your wallet. We'll need behavioural specification. "what is this agent allowed to do" and using formal methods to provable enforce said behaviour.

Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions. They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet. Think about it.

Wait till you discover whats coming for program synthesis. TLA+ lets you verify your design is correct. Tau Language lets you skip writing code entirely by describe requirements, it synthesizes a provably correct program. The key differences are synthesis (not just verification), decidability (efficient algorithms guaranteed), and self-referential specs (the language can reason about its own specifications). Imagine your scorecard, but instead of finding bugs and looping fixes, the system just generates a functioning program from the spec thats correct by construction.

HOLY FUK I JUST LEARNED ABOUT TLA+ AND IT'S SO GOOD FOR AGENTIC CODING ur telling ME that i can mathematically fact check every possible scenario of my design STATE to prevent bugs and crashes AND IF IT FINDS SOMETHING THE AGENTS GET INSTANT FEEDBACK AND LOOP FIXING IT TILL IT ALL POSSIBLE BUGS IN THE DESIGN ARE PATCHED LOL THIS IS OP

Can you see this illustrates a structural limitation of every foundation-governed system? The mandate's properties are expressed as goals rather than logical constraints. When "users have final say" is a logical property of the execution layer rather than a commitment from a steward, the EF's stated goal becomes structurally guaranteed instead of institutionally promised. You'll need a formal software specification language to make that kind of design constraint and the only one capable is the Tau Language.

This is the new EF Mandate. For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making. Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total. The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to. There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role. At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack. We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum. At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing. But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time. This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies. Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one. I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.

So, safety as policy requires external enforcement e.g. contracts, courts, regulation. Safety as a language-level property means the AI itself cannot be commanded to violate defined conditions. "Never share private data" can be specified as a self-referential constraint that no operator instruction can override. A new class of AI agents and systems that empower users to control their technology is coming.

Anthropic sued the Trump administration after being labeled a "supply chain risk" and banned from federal contracts The dispute began when Anthropic refused Pentagon demands to allow its AI for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons Thirty-seven researchers from OpenAI and Google backed Anthropic, warning the move threatens U.S. AI competitiveness

@Justin_Bons Every chain on this list relies on a core team to implement what users vote for. That structural dependency is a must to solve.

The reality of crypto: BTC = Unsustainable meme coin ETH = Committed to remaining uncompetitive USDT = The biggest fraud ever! XRP = Totally centralized ADA = The most decentralized ghost town HYPE = "Decentralized" XMR = "Secure" CC = Not even crypto! SUI = "Unallocated" supply

@sandeepnailwal You can distribute compute and model weights. But who decides what the AI optimizes for? Who updates those decisions? 15 years spent decentralizing currency and the thing that actually needed decentralizing was decision making.

You're worried about the wrong AI problem. While everyone debates whether AI gets sentient and wipes us out, a handful of companies have already become the most powerful entities in the world. All the training data, all the compute, all the model weights. Same few hands. To me the real risk is concentration. We decentralize money, decentralize identity, but leave intelligence centralized? Makes no sense to me.

Unfortunately, Solidity doesn't give you this so we invented the Tau Language. For smart contracts to deliver, they need to: - Let users specify what a contract should do, not how. - Automatically adapt when requirements change. - Reject behavior that violates user-defined safety conditions. - Reason about their own rules (self-reference).

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*. We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial. But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value? From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board". See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability. And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher! Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage… ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with. If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases. Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other. *Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too. And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi. --- So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory. I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher). Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

@owocki Real DAOs don't need centralized dev teams. Members specify requirements and the system synthesizes the software/network. Automatically.

real DAOs have never been tried.

What's your thesis behind the 1-2 years? We're seeing the theory falling into place where agents can receive instructions over time that have safety conditions though self-referential constraints. Built using a software spec language that can express logical relation between commands that can't reference other commands. What is the tipping point for you?

AI agents will soon graduate to fully-fledged economic actors that buy services, compute, and even data in the course of accomplishing high-level goals. 1-2 years before we start seeing this at scale.

@slow_developer LLMs build internal representations that line up with reasoning patterns, and that's genuinely useful. But lining up with reasoning isn't the same as actually reasoning. A logical system's conclusions should be derived and importantly, not predicted.

Joscha Bach says current AI doesn't need to be conscious to execute tasks, but it must simulate reality to understand it LLMs don't just predict words To solve complex problems, they build deep internal models of spatial reasoning and the human theory of mind "that is why AI can talk about reasoning and mental states"

To accomplish this, an agent safely transacting at scale also needs to reason about its own commands. e.g "if any future action violates my safety conditions, reject it." Only now do we have a logical or programming framework can express that self-referential constraint in a decidable way. We built Tau to solve exactly that. x.com/Tau_Net/status…

The next wave of economic actors on the internet won't be human. AI agents will transact at a scale that most people can't fully imagine yet. And they need financial infrastructure that was actually built for them and NOT humans. Onchain rails, stablecoins, verifiable identity. That's exactly what we built with the Polygon Agent CLI. Watch 👇