ZK-Roller-Coaster #7
Taiko Labs
0x5b79
June 20th, 2023

This is the 7th 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 second edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster produced by the Taiko community!

Special thanks to 7th edition contributors: snmyx, yona.

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 discussion about FRI and AIR efficiency and compatibility

  • A spicy twitter discussion from 2021 about FRI and AIR was suddenly continued in 2023. In 2021 it ended with Ariel’s doubts about how FRI will be complementary, for example, with the PLONK circuit, and if AIR is competitive in the long run. Several days ago, Benedikt Bünz continued the discussion within a modern context, claiming that "From a recursion efficiency, ECC-based techniques (aka folding/accumulation) is much better no? Hash based proofs aren't homomorphic." While there are opinions that Plonky2 is almost a STARK, Ariel argues "there's 2 diffs between "classic" plonk and starks - the pcs - kzg vs fri, and using preprocessed polys vs not. There's good arguments for using fri in terms of speed; in the long run, not using preprocessed polys I think will be hard to justify." Here are some details on how to alternate between friendly hash and blake while using recursive proofs.

ZK and rollups research 🧙

  • asn and arnaucube finished an implementation of Hypernova's multifolding using arkworks.

  • levochka.eth made a small review of the Protostar paper.

  • levochka.eth published an ethresearch post "Optimistic pool - a universal co-processor for Ethereum mainnet."

  • The Aztec team cut the constraints of a circuit by 99.4% with Noir.

  • Taiko published an article about the current landscape of L2 MEV and MEV consequences for different L2 designs.

  • Zac from Aztec presented Zeromorph, "the missing link we needed to make Plonk go stratospheric".

  • Sovereign presented based sequencing with soft confirmations.

  • Linea published the article "The Linea Prover for a Very Smart High Schooler."

  • EigenLayer announced the deployment of the Stage-1 EigenLayer protocol on Ethereum Mainnet. The community has doubts about "the risks restaking poses to Ethereum's security."

  • Linea announced a new research paper "Faster Montgomery multiplication and Multi-Scalar-Multiplication for SNARKs."

  • An article and twitter thread summary "Enshrined Rollups and how they work" by YQ.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

  • Taiko alpha-3 testnet was launched, with 67 unique provers and 150 unique proposers as of 16.06.23.

  • Polygon presented the set of updates Polygon 2.0 and its roadmap.

  • Arbitrum community announced gaming-focused L3 on Arbitrum.

  • L2BEAT announced "Stages," a comprehensive framework to track the evolution of L2 rollups from their early days to full decentralization.

  • The Value Prop was presented- an open database showcasing use cases for blockchain technology covering 300+ projects with positive social impact.

Non-ZK industry highlights & research 🎡

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

  • A new "The Chopping Block" episode discussing SEC, Uniswap, and Pepe Frog.

  • The second episode of The Y-Axis Pod with Tarun Chitra: Mathematics, Cryptography & Philosophy.

  • ETHPrague talks recordings.

  • A presentation "Ethereum: Designing the infinite economic machine" (a talk by barnabe.eth from the EF).

  • A twitter space recording about intents.

Fancy programming, mathematics, and cryptography

  • Ingonyama announced Ingopedia, a community-driven & comprehensive collection of info related to ZKP.

  • dcbuilder.eth shared a curated list of resources for solidity and rust learning.

  • Patrick Collins launched a free "The Ultimate, Learn Blockchain Development, Solidity, AI-Powered Smart Contract Course | Foundry Edition."

  • A blog post "The Sting Framework (SF), a new defensive layer for TEEs and other systems that enforce secrecy" by Ari Juels.

  • The COSIC seminar "Can GPUs be instrumental for accelerating advanced cryptographic algorithms such as homomorphic encryption?" by Erkay Savaş.

  • A blog post about homomorphic encryption and how it can be used to build privacy-preserving applications by Khushi Wadhwa.

  • A blog post "Recent advances in Computing discrete logs in finite fields" by Mahdi Rahimi.

Puzzles for curious 🧩

  • Kevin Yu is wondering: would anyone be interested in @gabrielpeyre type daily tweets, but mostly for cryptography and game theory stuff? Please tell Kevin: of course we are!

  • Ingonyama posted a new challenge: Design a kernel that multiplies pairs of 256-bit numbers, getting 512-bit results. The goal is to maximize the throughput of the multiplier.

  • Cami is wondering: Are there any projections for how much transaction fees will be post-4844?

  • Quintus is wondering: in a brand new blockchain (you can choose all the signature schemes etc) I need to prove that a ciphertext corresponds to a signature from a key which owns at least X amount of an asset on chain. Whats roughly the best proving time I can expect?

  • snmyx is wondering: I changed the file jpeg referenced by the smart contract, does the smart contract recognize this file ipfs server as native? Please send the answers to snmyx.eth@ethermail.io.

Thank you for reading the 7th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster. See you in two weeks! 🚵‍♀️

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