ZK-Roller-Coaster #15

October 25th, 2023

This is the 15th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks.

Special thanks to 15th edition contributors: Hlpr, Alexander B.

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 🍿

Scroll launched their mainnet. The community is indignant if the network was really ready for the launch: “Mainnet” launch used to mean something specific: that a user could interact with a network permissionlessly in a way that didn’t require you to go through a server run by a privileged party.”

ZK and rollups research 🧙

Plonky3 is getting faster! On the M1 Macbook Air, it can prove around 750 Keccak-f permutations per second, ~5x more than Starky.
The article “ZK Score - ZK hardware ranking standard” by Omer Shlomovits and Lucy Williams.
The paper “zk-Bench: A Toolset for Comparative Evaluation and Performance Benchmarking of SNARKs” by JENS ERNSTBERGER, STEFANOS CHALIASOS, GEORGE KADIANAKIS, SEBASTIAN STEINHORST, PHILIPP JOVANOVIC, ARTHUR GERVAIS, BENJAMIN LIVSHITS, and MICHELE ORRÙ.
Succinct Labs announced the ZK light client. This primitive removes centralized multisigs with weak trust assumptions and enables the endgame of bridging via gas-efficient, fully onchain light clients.
The paper “New proof systems and an OPRF from CSIDH” by Cyprien Delpech de Saint Guilhem and Robi Pedersen.
The recording of the inaugural RollCall.
The paper “Power circuits: a new arithmetization for GKR-styled sumcheck” by Lev Soukhanov.
The paper “Shared Sequencing and Latency Competition as a Noisy Contest” by Akaki Mamageishvili and Jan Christoph Schlegel.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

Celestia introduced the Celestia Foundation.
ZeroSync implemented the first Stark-based ZK client for Bitcoin.
Aztec Labs paid $450,000 to independent security researcher lucash-dev as a part of the Bug Bounty Award.

Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡

Fhenix: The first blockchain-powered by Fully Homomorphic Encryption!
Vitalik’s article “Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol?” followed up by a summary and some thoughts from davidecrapis.eth.
Some personal views in ePBS misleading takes by Potuz.
A twitter thread about EIP-1559: “.. if the world loves EIP 1559, then i am against the world ..” by Max Resnick.

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

EigenLayer Research Fellowship (ERF).

Readings and watchings 🎞

A lightspeed podcast episode with Jon Charbonneau: SOL vs ETH endgame.
A zeroknowledge.fm episode: Return to MPC with Nigel Smart.
The Chopping Block episode: A Rough Week 3 for SBF, DCG Troubles, Fees at Uniswap.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen.
An article “How does a legendary PhD advisor consistently produce extraordinary scholars?” by Sheon Han.