ZK-Roller-Coaster #4
Taiko Labs
0x5b79
May 6th, 2023

This is the 4th 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 🌶️

  • Gitcoin announced a new approach to diversity projects: “50% of the project’s team must reflect the diversity of the community they serve”.

The community is pretty skeptical:
”Someone should just fork gitcoin.”
“Sad to see Gitcoin focus on such a distorted US-centric view of the world”
”..real inclusivity is delivering L2 support so people who can't afford to spend 50$ of tx fees to donate can participate and show support to projects..” (during this round Ethereum gas fees are pretty high community highlights that L2 support is necessary for donations);

ZK and rollups research 🧙

  • An article on PBS and how it impacts the fork choice rule by constexpr.eth and Georgios Konstantopoulos, summarised in a twitter thread by Toni Wahrstätter.

  • An article “Ethereum L1 zkEVM” by polynya.

  • ethresearch: Cross layer communication: Trivially provable and efficient read access to the parent chain by Brecht Devos.

  • zkResearch: Fast-Fourier inspired Sangria by Igor Gulamov.

  • zkResearch: Running Sangria final proof in shielded mode on untrusted 3rd party prover by Igor Gulamov.

  • A research paper “ProtoStar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special Sound Protocols” by Espresso Systems founders, twitter thread with a summary by Benedikt Bünz and, a disclaimer “this is just cool research, we are not building our own zk-rollup at Espresso” by Ben Fisch.

  • An update for the research paper mentioned above "ProtoStar: Generic …” offered by Ariel Gabizon to optimize the protocol so that they can save log(n) hashes in the recursive circuits for high-degree gates.

  • Maxim Vezenov (zk eng of Noir) shared an example of a recursive circuit in the current PoC, saying “We will be building tooling surrounding recursion to enable easy circuit interop.”

  • Twitter thread with the research on the combination of MEV and Eigenlayer by Grace Deng.

  • A version of Merkle Trees called Merkle Sum Trees was unexpectedly discovered by high_byte.

  • Twitter thread: why is it useful to understand the gist of security proofs as a cryptography engineer? by Kobi.

  • A post about the "proof overflow" problem and thread-summary by Andy Arditi.

  • ethresearch: Decentralized MEV Relays: Enhancing security with Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Brandon.

  • ethresearch: A soundness alert function for zk-rollups by Nicolas Liochon.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

  • Aztec announced Aztec – the first ever hybrid zkRollup, enabling both public and private smart contract execution in one environment.

  • Taiko announced an updated protocol design.

  • Dymension announced – an IBC-enabled EVM Rollup.

  • Franklin Templeton chose Polygon to host the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, the first U.S. mutual fund run on blockchain.

  • Polygon introduced Polygon Bridge to Polygon ZK-EVM.

Non-ZK industry highlights 🎡

  • Last chance to merge PoW private networks with Geth with a beacon network. Geth will soon drop support for PoW.

  • Circle (USDC) has launched its cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP): USDC cross-chain bridging without cross-chain bridges.

  • Details of the next Ethereum upgrade, Cancun.

  • Peter proposes terminating the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet on the 1st of June, 2023.

  • Paradigm open-sourcing Artemis, a framework for writing MEV bots in Rust.

Opportunities 🏄‍♀️

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

  • The article “Exploration of MEV Latencies”.

  • The article “SUAVE, Anoma, Shared Sequencers, & Super Builders”.

  • The podcast “Will Rollups Use Shared Sequencers?”.

  • The podcast “zeroknowledge.fm Episode 273: History of Plonk, Noir, and the building of Aztec 3”.

  • The article “How ZkEVM Could Help Power The Next Industrial Revolution”.

  • The article “Data availability sampling and danksharding: An overview and a proposal for improvements”.

  • The metacast “Top Crypto Podcasts of April 2023”.

Fancy mathematics and cryptography

  • The article “Hardware Review: GPUs, FPGAs, and Zero Knowledge Proofs”.

  • porter shared his favorite ZK books.

  • E summarizing key insights on IVC and folding schemes -Nova, SuperNova, HyperNova, ProtoStar, Sangria & Origami.

  • Thor Kampefner shared his slides from the talk on Randomness n Complexity.

  • The podcast zeroknowledge.fm “Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with ********Ariel Gabizon”.

  • Thesis talk with Titouan Tanguy on his research on “Secure MultiParty Computation: Protocols and Applications”.

  • Brandon said that Tom 7 “just figured out how to write a zkVM by writing a CPU emulator using only linear floating point instructions”.

  • Improving ECC-like sampling performance by approximate tensor factorization.

Puzzles for curious 🧩

Thank you for reading the 4th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster. See you in two weeks! 🚵‍♀️

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