Things I've made that you can read, use, or argue with.
Essay · Substack · September 2026
AI now produces and checks proofs, the work that mathematicians' training, careers and norms were built around while verification was scarce. This essay asks what that does to the discipline: whether research priorities drift towards well-funded private labs, and who gets to decide which questions matter. It ends on a hopeful note, with amateurs able to contribute for real, and calls on mathematicians to examine their culture openly and make the case for what the field is worth.
Reading group syllabus · Draft for discussion · September 2026
A draft syllabus for a reading group on making agentic commerce trustworthy. Eight sessions work outwards from the confused deputy: principals and mental models, delegation and attenuation, identity and reputation, payment authorization and settlement, fair exchange and disputes, selective disclosure and compliance predicates, verifiable governance, and proof of being human. Classical cryptography and security engineering papers are paired with the emerging agent commerce protocols and their attack literature.
Guest lecture · Technical University of Munich · July 2026
Slides from a guest lecture for Cryptography for Distributed Systems at TUM. The talk frames agentic commerce around five prerequisites (agent identity, delegation, credential isolation, settlement, and disputes) and sets out how the competing camps behind AP2, TAP, ACP and x402 each answer them. It then turns to keeping secrets from your own agent, by way of credential isolation and zero-knowledge proofs, and closes on compute as a commodity: attestation, verification, and paying on proof.
Live dashboard · since July 2026
A running view of the market for services that agents buy. It tracks pricing bands, service categories and settlement data across Coinbase CDP Bazaar, Apify Store, x402scan and mppscan, ranking endpoints both by estimated spend and by unique payers, a demand signal considerably harder to wash-trade than raw transaction counts. Refreshed daily.
Essay · Substack · April 2026
When software agents do the buying, the products worth selling are the ones an agent cannot cheaply reproduce for itself. This essay works through what agents will actually pay for (permission to act, verified data, identity checks, insurance and reliance warranties, physical execution, raw compute) and argues that durable margin comes from network effects, accumulated context and process knowledge rather than from competing on price.