Why I Established the Sun Yuchen Prize

I
Nobel invented dynamite. Most of his wealth came from it.
It is said that in 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary under the headline “The Merchant of Death Is Dead.” He read his own obituary, and a few years later drafted his will.
Today, no one calls him the Merchant of Death anymore.
“Nobel” became a neutral noun, like “volt” and “watt,” without emotional overtones, simply a unit. He gave his money to “those who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The money returned to humanity, and his name returned to neutrality with it—not through a defense, but through more than a century of award recipients.
I tell this story because I understand him. I know where money comes from, and I know where money can go.

II
The root of my wealth is mathematics.
The blockchain industry as a whole rests on cryptographic constructions and security assumptions supported by long-term research: the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves, the one-wayness of hash functions, and the difficulty of factoring large numbers. In 1985, two mathematicians independently came up with the idea of using elliptic curves for cryptography—one at a university and one at IBM, neither knowing the other. That year, no one thought the idea was useful. What they wrote on blackboards later became a $1 trillion market, and became something unprecedented: a person could have complete control over their own wealth without anyone’s permission. They themselves received not a penny.
This freedom is one of mathematics’ most underestimated gifts to humanity. I have taken a great deal from this gift. Establishing this prize is, first and foremost, repayment of a debt.

III
The Nobel Prize has no prize for mathematics. This was an oversight more than 100 years ago; perhaps there were personal reasons, or perhaps it simply never occurred to anyone.
Later came the Fields Medal, awarded once every four years to those under 40; and the Abel Prize, awarded annually for lifetime achievement. Both are excellent, but their rhythm belongs to the previous era.
The mathematical community once had another kind of prize. Erdős spent his life assigning prices to problems, from $25 to $10,000. Whoever solved one, he would write them a check. Many people framed the checks on their walls and never cashed them in their lifetimes. He died in 1996, and afterward such checks became increasingly rare.
Mathematics, meanwhile, is entering a different era. AI cannot conduct experiments, but it can derive results; AI would struggle to build a collider for a physicist, but it can try ten thousand paths for a mathematician. Today, a conjecture may take months to solve after being proposed, or it may take days. A prize awarded once every four years, faced with such speed, is like a clock that strikes once every four years hanging in an era measured in days.

IV
So the rules of the Sun Yuchen Prize are very simple.
The prize follows the problem, not the person. It does not wait for an annual meeting, nominations, or age limits.
Each problem has two attribution columns. One records the prover, and the other the formalizer—the person who puts the proof into a machine. The two can be the same person, or strangers half a world apart. Humans can qualify, AI can qualify, and humans using AI can qualify. I do not care about species in either column. The same name may appear again and again, and may appear in either column.
The money has only one trigger: the machine checks the proof from the first line to the last, without a single discrepancy. Once it passes, the names in the two columns become the recipients of that problem’s prize money. I did not invent this standard. Scholze put his most important theorem out there and asked people to put it into a machine; Fermat’s Last Theorem is currently being transferred into one line by one line.
Before the machine checks it, a human proof is not worthless. Once accepted by the mathematical community, the name goes up first, the money does not move a cent, and the status bar reads: Proven, awaiting formalization.
The money in the solving column is paid only for problems solved after they are posted. If a problem has already been solved when posted, the prover’s name is recorded as usual, but the money is paid only to the person who puts it into a machine. This prize records what happens after its establishment; it does not retroactively award prize money to mathematical history.
The division of labor is clean: the name belongs to the mathematical community, the money belongs to the machine, and the sponsor has no stake in either. Human judgment has only one task left: confirming that the problem written into the machine is that problem.
One final matter remains for me to decide: the problem list. Which problems are posted and what prices they carry are determined by my signature. Erdős wrote the prices on his checks himself, too; there will be no pretense of an exception here. But once a problem is placed on the shelf, it is locked: problems can only be added, never removed, and money can only be redeemed, never reclaimed. No one, including me, can alter it. If a problem is written incorrectly, it will still be paid, and then reposted.
All my taste goes into this one thing. Beyond pricing, I have no say at all in verification, payment, or attribution.
The result decides.

V
In this set of rules, what I like most is the word “await.”
After a problem is solved and accepted by the mathematical community, the money does not move immediately. The prover’s name goes up first, the formalization column remains empty, and the status bar reads: Proven, awaiting formalization. Whoever puts this proof into a machine, once the machine verifies it, fills the empty column with their name, and the journey of ownership over the money begins at that moment.
In other prizes, waiting is delay, procedure, a necessary evil. Here, waiting itself is a list.
Many people framed Erdős’s checks on their walls and never cashed them in their lifetimes. Money in a frame looks backward, as a commemoration; money posted on-chain looks forward, as a call for participants. An empty column is tantamount to telling the whole world: there is work here, and it has a price.
Thus, this problem list grows another thing at the same time: a public map marking everything humanity has accepted but machines have not yet accepted. This map does not exist today. It exists only in fragments, scattered across several places, never unified, and even less so ever assigned prices.
Formalizers have never lacked enthusiasm; what they have lacked is a priced blueprint for the work. Whoever fills that blank gets the money. From now on, the enthusiasm for putting long proofs into machines remains theirs, while the bill is mine. $ETH

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