The new U.S. tariffs announced yesterday have created a notable rift within the so-called "Tech Right"—the sizable cluster of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors who have warmed up to Trump during and since the 2024 election. The new policy imposes a 10% baseline tariff on all imports, then rates increase with the size of a country's trade surplus over the US. As the fragile "Tech Right" tribe evolves in real time, we should try to understand the political-economic coordinates of what could very well be the most consequential economic policy shift in decades.
First, the new tariffs are serious: 34% on China, 20% on European Union, 24% on Japan. There are many others. These rates, effective April 5-9, represent the highest U.S. tariff levels since 1933.
Palmer Luckey is a vocal supporter, arguing that these aren't protectionist measures but tools to encourage genuinely free and fair trade. Balaji Srinivasan is opposed, predicting catastrophic supply chain disruption.
Politico notes that the tech industry lobby groups are generally in favor of reciprocal tariffs.
In 2018, Peter Thiel publicly favored Trump's tariffs, while Tim Cook opposed them. Many otherwise vocal figures in Silicon Valley have remained silent on the tariff question thus far, perhaps because it is so high-stakes and polarizing.
We'll be watching this issue with interest, as tariffs seem to be introducing a significant cleavage in an American technology community increasingly aware of itself politically.
Other News
What we're seeing.
Wall Street Giant DTCC Unveils Tokenized Collateral Platform. The world's largest securities settlement system is launching a blockchain-based platform that tokenizes collateral to enable real-time transfers and automated operations through smart contracts. Their CTO calls collateral mobility the "killer app" for institutional blockchain use, joining heavyweights like BlackRock and Fidelity in the tokenization race.
Big Tech's Data Center Boom Poses New Risk to Grid Stability. Data centers are creating a new vulnerability for America's power grid: massive, unannounced disconnections that threaten regional blackouts. Last July, 60 data centers in Virginia simultaneously dropped off the grid during a minor voltage fluctuation, creating a dangerous electricity imbalance that forced emergency measures to prevent cascading outages.
Microsoft's Data Center Pullback Signals Infrastructure Recalibration. Microsoft is delaying or canceling data center projects across six regions globally. The pullback may be driven by potential oversupply for AI workloads and shifting dynamics with OpenAI, which is now planning its own data centers. But Microsoft still intends to build over 100 data centers annually for the next four years, suggesting this is a tactical recalibration rather than a strategic retreat. We reflected on the topic of data center overhang back in October.
Research
What we're studying.
A Fiat-Shamir Transformation From Duplex Sponges (2025). Chiesa and Orrù address the challenge of turning interactive proofs into single-message proofs when real-world hashing functions have fixed sizes. Their key idea is to use a "duplex sponge," which processes data in blocks to achieve the effect of a fully flexible hash. This solution lets developers rely on simpler, more realistic assumptions about cryptographic functions without losing formal security guarantees. This could matter because it closes the gap between the theoretical literature and the fixed-size hash functions used in practice. They include an open-source Rust library.
Demystifying the North Korean Threat (2025). An interesting report from Paradigm breaks down the North Korean state-sponsored hacking operation, specifically with an eye toward crypto. Many use "Lazarus Group" as a catch-all, but there are multiple specialized units. For example, "TraderTraitor" is the most sophisticated group targeting the crypto industry and they don't attack software vulnerabilities but focus on social engineering (fake job interviews, manipulating exchange employees into signing malicious transactions, etc.)
Nockchain Technical Update
As always, we're working hard to ship Nockchain. Two notes for this week, in the meantime:
- We're adapting BIP32 for an elliptic curve with a cofactor > 1. Committing to blockchain data structures efficiently and in a standardized way involves many complex decisions, especially when smart contracts need to examine the entire chain. We created a hashable data structure that defines how we hash different structs. This structure is recursive, allowing us to embed one struct's hashable definition inside another to create larger hashable structs. This approach is conceptually similar to a Hashable Rust trait.
- Elsewhere, Nock is getting easier to use with improvements we're shipping to Jock. Hoon FFI support is coming soon, at which point we'll have hit the first Jock beta that can be used for real tasks.
