Octet @OctetProof

Location is the substrate for human verification: only a real person can hold a phone and be in a place. At our first startup we built GPS-free geolocation for phones by fusing inertial and radio signals, runs with NATO special forces. @OctetProof lets anyone prove location that way, without trusting GPS or any single sensor on the device.

Paul Graham @paulg

5 days ago

This is a big enough problem that there's not just one startup idea here, but several. For example, there will probably be one variant meant to filter out agents, but another meant to welcome them in an orderly way. This also seems an idea you could build more on.

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Utah passed a law that requires adult sites to know whether a user is physically in Utah. VPN or not. Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, filed a lawsuit saying that the law asks the impossible. That there is no way to really know where a device is. But that isn't true. A VPN moves your traffic. It doesn't move you. Age verification is a location problem at its core. If regulated companies want to avoid verifying the age of their entire user base, they will find a way to move on from broken and antiquated geofencing practices. Our comment ↓

agree on OLV. telemetry helps prove performance, but residual value still depends on a (future) buyer. that makes the more interesting financing object the work itself. a robot under contract is a cash flow. missing layer is a unit of account for output (eg, picks within a spec, uptime in a bounded environment, deliveries inside a geofence, ht @OctetProof) with risk priced as variance against the contract. insurance likely comes first becuse it can underwrite that variance before a real secondary market exists. inspect the release, price the lost distribution, build premium history. all that becomes credit file.

Anthony Avedissian @antavedissian

3 weeks ago

6/ Why not just lend against the robots themselves? Lenders price equipment by its orderly liquidation value: what they'd get if they repossessed it. A Toyota forklift has a known one. A new robot brand with no used market mostly doesn't. @jimbelosic explains it well 👇

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Where the record meets the physical.

Drew Arenth @drewarenth

3 weeks ago

Two words for this series. Fact. Facticity. A fact is something asserted. Someone produces it and puts it into circulation. It has an author. People love facts - because they make them! Facticity is Sartre's word for the situation you are already in: your body, your birth,

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Gambling doesn't happen in the ether. Fraud isn't instigated in a fiber optic cable. A user is not ones and zeros. @drewarenth, COO of Octet, on binding digital decisions to a real place - and why location is the final primitive.

Drew Arenth @drewarenth

3 weeks ago

I'm a farmer and I build cybersecurity technology. This piece is about why those are not two separate jobs. The digital and physical have advanced on separate vectors for decades. Physical AI is where they are (meant to be) coming back in sync. x.com/i/article/2097…

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I'm a farmer and I build cybersecurity technology. This piece is about why those are not two separate jobs. The digital and physical have advanced on separate vectors for decades. Physical AI is where they are (meant to be) coming back in sync. x.com/i/article/2097…

We looked up the "location" of an IP address to write this post. Used four different geolocation services. DB-IP said Toronto. IP2Location and ipwho.is said San Francisco. MaxMind returned "United States" with no city at all, and a very precise-looking coordinate that appears to be a field in Kansas. The furthest two are 3,644 km apart. This kind of divergence is the norm: IP databases disagree on the same address by 620 km on average. The IP address belongs to @Cloudflare. Since August 27 they have had an incident open: the commercial databases that turn IP addresses into location are returning the wrong country for WARP users. Cloudflare can't fix it, because it doesn't own those databases. That's MaxMind, IP2Location, Digital Element. Not one of them can see where you are. They infer it. Cloudflare's documentation is direct: "IP geolocation is an estimate, not an exact science. There is nothing that inherently binds an IP address to a physical location or country." Payment platforms, exchanges and licensed markets use that estimate as the signal. A user opens your app from a jurisdiction you're not licensed to serve. The lookup places them somewhere you are. You let them trade. Months later a regulator asks where that user actually was, and your evidence is a database reading that has since been corrected. Sanctions breaches are strict liability. A phone can settle it directly. Is this device inside this region, right now. Signed by a key that never leaves the chip. Verifiable offline. No coordinates leave the device. The location check doesn't have to be a guess.

Will be going on @MTSlive soon to talk about the provekit.org v1 announcement and how zero knowledge cryptography will reshape privacy, digital identity and World in the age of AI.

knower @knowerofmarkets

4 weeks ago

We are live and covering some big stories today: - openai's recurrent depth & looped transformer design decisions for coming astra models, as well as the discourse that's followed from this - the release of gemini 3.8 flash, as we take a closer look at the model's capabilities

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Better doesn't mean blocking more people. It means letting the right ones through. Our best users hit a VPN block and go to a competitor. — Ecosystem lead, L2 network

My @OctetProof co-founder Suvrit Sra just released "GPT, the Counterexample Machine". 15+ counterexamples to publicly posed conjectures, found by AI over 12 months. One killed a conjecture he posted on MathOverflow in 2017!

Proofs remove the need for "trust me." In fact, proofs remove the need for "me" at all. The work stands on its own or fails on its own, and either way it can be checked independently. The world is full of opinions. When it matters, we don't need opinions. We need proofs. @benjamintfels Fels elegantly summarizes @optiML work here. I'm lucky to be building simple products alongside complex minds and technologies at @OctetProof

Benjamin Fels @benjamintfels

4 weeks ago

My @OctetProof co-founder Suvrit Sra just released "GPT, the Counterexample Machine". 15+ counterexamples to publicly posed conjectures, found by AI over 12 months. One killed a conjecture he posted on MathOverflow in 2017!

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I couldn't possibly think of a better reason to integration real world proof of location. Immutable - cryptographic - hardware attested - locally derived. I want @HyperliquidX in the USA and we can help. @OctetProof

Jeremy @Jeremybtc

4 weeks ago

North Korea's state hackers just laundered over $30 MILLION through Hyperliquid, right as the platform is trying to enter the US The Lazarus Group sold Bitcoin on Hyperliquid, flipped it into Ethereum and Solana, then scattered it across chains and exchanges to cover the trail

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Ironvale is invented. The mechanism is not: under ITAR, giving a foreign national access to controlled technical data is an export, whether or not anything ships.

Your "US persons only" control is probably a sentence in a policy document.

This one isn't a forecast. Five people pleaded guilty in 2025 to hosting company-issued laptops in US homes so North Korean workers appeared local — 136 US companies affected, $2.2M generated for the regime. DOJ has charged more than 40 people across these schemes.

Someone on your payroll is probably not where your records say they are.

Este no es un pronóstico. La OFAC llegó a un acuerdo con Kraken por 362.158,70 dólares por 826 operaciones de usuarios que parecían estar en Irán. El factor agravante: los controles de geolocalización se aplicaron al registrarse, pero no a la actividad posterior. La exposición máxima era de 272 millones.

Su geobloqueo probablemente se ejecutó una vez, al registrarse. Compruebe cuándo fue la última.

This one isn't a forecast. OFAC settled with Kraken for $362,158.70 over 826 transactions by users who appeared to be in Iran. The aggravating factor: geolocation controls applied at onboarding but not to later transactional activity. Maximum exposure was $272M. ofac.treasury.gov/media/929541/d…

Your geofence probably ran once, at signup. Check when it last ran.