ZK-Roller-Coaster #11

August 16th, 2023

This is the 11th 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 11th edition contributors: Alexander B., Thisu, Hlpr.

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 🍿

ZK-EVM wars in progress!

This time Polygon Zero blamed zksync on Twitter “Significant parts of the recently released Boojum library–developed by Matter Labs, the team behind zksync – are copy-pasted from the Plonky2 proving system developed by Polygon Labs. Plonky2 is open source, but Matter Labs did not give appropriate attribution.” zksync co-founder, Alex, replied to the Polygon’s complaint, claiming “today’s accusations are unfounded, misleading, and extremely disappointing coming from a team I highly respect”, providing facts “Both Plonky2 and Boojum are implementations of the RedShift construction (PLONK + FRI)” and RedShift was introduced by The Matter Labs team before Plonky2, “Only ~5% of the Boojum code is based on the code of Plonky2”, “For the reused code, a clear attribution is provided in line #1 of the main file of the module”, etc.

Huge debates around fraud proofs!

TL;DR “If you want to prioritize a roadmap that will take years to build a prover, you don’t have to launch a rollup.” Huge critique was addressed to Optimism fraud proofs absence from other rollups and scaling solutions. Core issue are (i) are they even going to build a prover (i.e., add fraud proofs), (ii) an optimistic rollup without fraud proofs is not secure, but they are scaling marketing launching rollups like Base (by Coinbase) that ends up being insecure as well.

ZK and rollups research 🧙

A twitter thread “L1DELEGATECALL could also be helpful to help connect L1 and L2s and make it look more like a single parallelized execution environment.” by Brech Devos.
The PSE team announced p0tion V1, a new toolkit to simplify Groth16 zk-application development. The goal is to make Phase 2 Trusted Setup ceremonies more efficient and scalable.
A twitter thread “BLS Training Wheels — Mitigate ZK bugs with Consensus” by jaosef.eth.
Aztec pulled a tool for Noir that allows proving on the browser.
An article “Rollups are Real.” by davidecrapis.eth.
A twitter thread "Rollups-as-a-Service are going to zero.” by neel.
A twitter thread wrapping up a twitter spaces “Decentralized and permissionless proving design” by Lisa A. | bot.
Fuel introduced Optimistic / ZK Hybrid Proving.
A twitter thread “Does ZK imply privacy in the current context?” by Zero Knowledge Validator.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

=nil; is building a solution to secure Lido Finance staked Ethereum liquidity with a zkOracle that enables trustless data access to in-EVM historical data.
RISC Zero is coming to Ethereum.
Fluent: The zkWASM Execution Layer for Ethereum.

Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡

Check the reorg.pics dashboard that provides a clearer overview of reorgs and the entities involved – such as CL Clients, Validators, Relays, and Builders.
Ongoing debates aroung SGX and it’s reasonability for different use cases.
A research note “Liquid Staking Derivatives cannot safely exceed consensus thresholds” by dannyryan.
An ethresearch post “No free lunch – a new inclusion list design” by Mike Neuder.
The Fireblocks research team has uncovered BitForge, a set of vulnerabilities in some of the most widely adopted MPC protocols, that allow an attacker to retrieve a private key from a single device.
PayPal launches a stablecoin in latest crypto payments push.

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

A 3 months online cryptography intern program by LambdaClass. Applications are open now!
Aztec Grants Wave 3 is announced.
November 16 – 17, Programmable Cryptography Conference as part of Devconnect by PSE and 0xPARC.
September 22 – 24, ETHGlobal New York hackathon.
September 21, zkSummit in London by Aztec: hands-on learning and building with Aztec's Layer2 zk-rollup.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

An interview with Arbitrum team covering their new BOLD protocol.
The podcast “The mysteries of Rust's memory safety, fearless concurrency, and why it became the backbone of Aleph Zero's blockchain.”
The Zcash Podcast to recap the #Zcon4 conference in Barcelona.
An interview with John Reynolds on using blockchain tech without sacrificing privacy, how apps can be more private, and their road to the Aleo mainnet.
An article “The Lifecycle of a ZK Proof”.
A recording of Twitter Spaces “Decentralized and permissionless proving design”.
An episode of the “Seen and Unseen podcast” with Vitalik.
zeroknowledge.fm podcast Episode 288: Quantum Cryptography with Or Sattath.
A twitter thread “zkEVMs are bringing Ethereum to the masses” by thirdweb.

Fancy mathematics and cryptography

A new folding paper “CycleFold: Folding-scheme-based recursive arguments over a cycle of elliptic curves” by Abhiram Kothapalli and Srinath Setty.
A visual explainer for the memory-checking procedure used by Spark, Spartan's sparse polynomial commitment scheme (used in Lasso) by moodle zoup.
Nova’s folding performance for sha256 reproduced by others (i.e., not by the paper authors).
A twitch stream “Attacking hash functions” by porter.
Notes on folding/accumulation schemes and how these constructions are related by Nat Bunner.
Two new papers Lasso (a new lookup argument with a much faster prover) and Jolt (builds on Lasso to offer a new paradigm in zkVM design) by Srinath Setty, Arasu Arun, Justin Thaler, and Riad Wahby.
A new paper on cross-domain MEV by Conor McMenamin.
A new paper “Towards a Quantum-resistant Weak Verifiable Delay Function” by Thomas Decru, Luciano Maino, and Antonio Sanso.
An article “Cycles of curves: what are they and do we need them?” by Wyatt Benno.
A twitch stream “Identity-based encryption” by porter.
An article “SUMCHECK Quickie” by Dankrad Feist.
An article “An incomplete guide to Folding: Nova, Sangria, SuperNova, HyperNova, Protostar.” by Lisa A. | bot.