ZK-Roller-Coaster #2

April 3rd, 2023

This is the 2nd 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 week 🌶️

**Debate over worldcoin's biometry use and concerns about negative consequences.
**After GPT4 release and Sam Altman coming to Lex Friedman’s Show, many people were surprised that Sam Altman is the co-founder of worldcoin. Hot debates about worldcoin’s biometry usage were boosted: Tiago from worldcoin wrote on Twitter: “at this point it’s clear that proof of personhood is fundamental for the Age of AI” and added that they have “meanwhile worldcoin already facilitates more zkps every week than tornado’s entire lifespan, has 1.4m owners and counting that will govern, and enables access to decentralized finance + identity to 75k regular people across 5 continents every day”.
Some people suggested it being emblematic of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, saying “a blockchain company has exploited cheap economies”, while summonooor requests of the worldcoin team to write about ways the project could fail its users (e.g., negative externalities, modes of co-option, abuse, etc.)

ZK and rollups research 🧙

Vitalik’s blog: How will Ethereum's multi-client philosophy interact with ZK-EVMs?
ethresearch: challenging periods reimagined: the key role of sequencer decentralization (by Daniel Fonseca).
ethresearch: a comparison table examining the data structure, hashing and compression algorithms and the available APIs for retrieving witness nodes for executing Merkle Inclusions Proofs against a Rollup’s state (by Daniel Ivanov).
Ethereum Magicians: EIP-3436 proposes a block choice rule that should be deterministic regardless of when the blocks were observed.
Polygon shared lots lots of the zkEVM tech docs. “We believe that those docs can help go deeper in how the zkEVM works”.
Aztec introduced Goblin Plonk! “A new (very lazy) scheme for blazing fast ZK SNARK recursion”.
A note “Trust-minimized consensus layer access” by Alex Stokes.
Strong supporters of “Rollup-as-a-Service” model, aka application-specific rollups or RollApps, (represented by 0xfan) dive into details and explain how it works.
Michiel Van Beirendonck presented their hardware accelerator for the TFHE Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme in Tokyo, check some highlights and the paper.
polynya shares info about Tezos rollups
L2Beat’s Kris Kaczor shares an analysis on the differences between ZK-EVMs using TX data and state diffs when posting CALLDATA.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

The first version of zkShield shared by bankisan from PSE team. It is a private multisig with hidden owners. Under the hood, it uses account abstraction (ERC-4337) and zero-knowlege proofs to keep the signers from being exposed on-chain.
ConsenSys zkEVM is rebranded as Linea and opens their testnet.
Starknet presents Madara, an Open Source Rust-fueled Starknet Sequencer.
Conduit, a crypto native infrastructure platform, launched a rollup in just a few clicks (built on the OP Stack and powered by Optimism, live on Mainnet).
Following Phil’s article “..to be a geographical decentralization maxi..”, Gnosis made a website to track Gnosis decentralization metrics.
Taiko ZK-EVM alpha-2 testnet is live!
zkSync Era Mainnet Alpha is live!
Polygon ZK-EVM Mainnet Beta is live!

Non-ZK industry highlights 🎡

Introducing The 4626 Alliance: an ecosystem led initiative to advance the development of the ERC-4626 standard.
Nethermind implemented a client for the KZG Ceremony, a prerequisite for protodanksharding EIP-4844 and is calling all KZG participants to create some randomness.
Shapella is scheduled on mainnet for epoch 194048, scheduled for 22:27:35 UTC on Apr. 12, 2023.
Twitter debates discussing whether “EIP-1559 was a mistake” by Max Resnick, Jon Charbonneau and many more (continued as an ethresearch thread).

Opportunities 🏄‍♀️

April 4th, 12:00 pm EST, Twitter Space “Applications of fully homomorphic encryption” with Rand Hindi from Zama.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

Mevconomics Summit (Flashbots x ETHGlobal) took place, some highlighted talks: Decentralizing Sequencers by Hasu, MEVeconomics in L2 by Patrick McCorry, MEVconomics for Modular Blockchain Stacks by John Adler.
An article “Dissecting EVM using go-ethereum Eth client implementation. Part I — transaction execution flow” (followed up by “Part II — EVM” and “Part III — bytecode interpreter”).
ZK Newsletter to explore more exciting stuff happening in Zero-Knowledge world.