ZK-Roller-Coaster #10

August 2nd, 2023

This is the 10th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks.

And this is the 5th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster produced by the Taiko community!

Special thanks to 10th edition contributors: Alexander B., Zen.

Disclaimer: this is a collection of tweets, writings, videos, and other materials; these don’t express our opinion and may not necessarily be accurate. Please do (or continue) your own research.

Hold on tight! 🎢

Spice of the weeks 🍿

“Smart contract security is absolutely essential for Ethereum's L2 roadmap.” Martin Köppelmann explains in a twitter thread that “the majority of bridge hacks are not “bridge operators” getting compromised but bugs in the smart contract systems.” Dankrad supports this point of view, claiming “those who say “multisigs/light client bridges are good enough” also tend to ignore the other aspects of security.”

ZK and rollups research 🧙

An anti-deepfake microphone that can prove the audio was recorded on real mics and legitimately edited was built at the ETHParis hackathon by Manuj, Eito Miyamura, Radoslav Dimitrov, Alex Cheema, and Lucas Ege. The Ethereum community is excited by the attested mic zk application.
An article “Semaphore: the unsung hero behind Zuzalu Pass and Worldcoin” by shumo.
An article “AI Deep Fakes Vs. ZKP” by Ingonyama.
A note “Taiko Proving Design overview: Grímsvötn and Eldfell cases” comparing different approaches to prover decentralisation, their pros and cons by Taiko.
A twitter thread about creating succinct sumcheck-based SNARK proofs using the Grumpkin curve by Zac Williamson.
A little demo proof for a ZK protocol similar to BP by ncklr.
An ethresearch post “OPML: Optimistic Machine Learning on Blockchain” by 0x1cc and brief OPML vs ZKML comparison.
A User Guide: ZK Acceleration of Gnark using ICICLE by Ingonyama.
Experimental implementation of ProtoGalaxy using arkworks by arnaucube.
An article “Taiko Inception Layers (L3s): customized functions, compatibility, and trust-level” by Taiko.
Rádius (Shared Sequencer) proposed Madara (StarkNet sequencer), an implementation of an Encrypted Mempool.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

Wordcoin launched the token and announced plans to launch L1.
Succinct is now contributing to the OP Stack: their Remote Static Call Proof of Concept RFP has been accepted.
=nil; Foundation brought Proof Market to Sepolia.
Hyperlane (The Permissionless Interoperability layer) is now available within the OP Stack.
Photon Bridge connects the light blockchain Mina with the light nodes of Celestia, solving Mina’s data availability problem.
zkBridge proves Ethereum full nodes (~21M ETH) with 20K+ signatures/block in 10 seconds. Before, ZK provers could only prove the Ethereum sync committee (512 nodes, ~16K ETH).

Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡

Vitalik’s article “What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?”
EIP-7377 “Migration Transaction” was proposed by @lightclients. It would be a new transaction type that allows an EOA to make a one-time code deployment at their address.
A twitter thread breaking down the problem space of anonymous payments, EIP-5564, and the remaining challenges by Nocturne.
The Rate-Limiting Nullifier (RLN) protocol is production ready by the PSE team. An article about Rate-Limiting Nullifier (RLN) by Rasul Ibragimov.
MEV landscape diagram by JK.
A bunch of fresh blog posts on the flashbots community forum: “Revenue allocation in shared sequencing,” “Latency Races In PBS,” “Pre-Execution Privacy In PBS,” etc. by Quintus.

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

Capture the flag by flashbots: ctf.flashbots.net.
20 [ ] invites researchers to become guest writers in their blog.
Ethereum.org's Translatathon, a collaborative hackathon-style online event, invites participants to compete for prizes by translating the website into different languages.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

A podcast with Meher Roy about challenges getting started in the crypto industry, what Chorus One is, etc. by HOPR.
A talk “Succinct's Cross Chain Messaging & State Queries” by Uma Roy.
A step-by-step tutorial to build an Aleo app.
A twitch stream: porter is reading a paper “Automated Detection of Under-Constrained Circuits in Zero-Knowledge Proofs.”

Fancy mathematics and cryptography

An article “Lagrangian mechanics of intent solving” by Fabrizio Romano Genovese.

Puzzles for curious 🧩

Axiom gives a hoodie (same supplier as supreme btw) to anyone who can solve the puzzle with better performance.
shumo is wondering: “Any good recommendations (software/hardware configurations) for remote pair programming?”
Zac is asking: “Has anyone thought about making proofs of data availability using Dory-encoded verkle trees? The O(sqrt(n)) opening cost of the Dory PCScould be very helpful.”
dystopiabreaker is wondering: “Can you do anything good with quantum computers? i pretty much only know about bad things you can do with them”
Chris Hager is asking: “Anyone has Ethereum mempool data for the past 6-12 months (with signature / rawtx)?”