ZK-Roller-Coaster #17

November 22nd, 2023

This is the 17th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks.

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 🍿

A new L2 entered the chat: Blast, Ethereum L2 with native yield for ETH and stablecoins.
This offer was skeptically met by the community, pointing to ponzi-style approach and some doubts about general economic sustainability: “[…] taking user funds and investing them, while calling it “risk-free”, is straight out of the FTX playbook […]”, “This is a very bad idea. ETH and liquid staking derivatives are different assets with different risk profiles (and rewards), and users should have a choice about which one they want to use. The same is true for different types of stablecoins” – Dankrad commented.
Some are skeptical about the future of L2s landscape: “[…] The L2 space used to be an elite community: the best researchers building complex ZK circuits, WASM interpreters & fault proofs. As it gets easier to fork & spin up an L2, we're going to see lots of degen tokenomics injected into new chains. Buckle up [...]”
A separate portion of skepticism was addressed to Paradigm, the Blast’s investor: “[…] Paradigm 100% sold its account comparing its early investments to now completely different in almost every way, the reflinks, the ponzi, the branding, practically everything…”, “[…] Did Paradigm just turn into a pump and dump sweat shop? I used to respect them so much[ …]”
Tho, some people are pretty positive, waiting for airdrop and lucrative earnings (no links for airdrop guides, sorry 💔).

ZK and rollups research 🧙

A new SNARK: based on towers of binary fields for prover-efficient verifiable computing.
A blog post by Justin Thaler delving into work just unveiled by Ben Diamond and Jim Posen (D&P) that, in his view, reshapes the landscape for hashing-based SNARKs. D&P have fine-tuned the Ligero/Brakedown polynomial commitment scheme.
A paper “Family of embedded curves for BLS” by asanso.eth.
FHE in the RISC Zero ZK-VM.
An article “How to choose your ZK-friendly hash function?” by Roman Walch (shared by sivat.eth).
A new data structure to facilitate a configuration-like state in Aztec by Santiago Palladino.
A research note “Alternate PBS: A PBS Proposal for Based Rollups” and a Twitter thread wrapping the note by Conor McMenamin.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

Weekly DeFi Roundup by Polygon.
Near Foundation announced a partnership with Eigen Labs for more efficient Ethereum rollup transactions.
ZKP2P – trust-minimized on-ramp to crypto w/o KYC in <2m.
Succinct Labs announced Succinct – a tool for the developer community to collaborate on applications, proof systems, and proving infrastructure.
Ingonyama announced ZK-Containers. Containers are one of the foundational technologies used today in cloud computing. They are frequently used in AI, for example, to deploy and scale AI workloads.
Centralized exchange OKX announced the launch of a decentralized L2 with Polygon CDK.
Lattice announced Redstone, a cost-effective L2 for on-chain games, worlds, and other ambitious applications. Redstone is a Plasma-inspired Alt-DA chain built on the OP Stack.
zkLink – ZKP-based, multi-rollup Layer 3.