ZK-Roller-Coaster #12

August 30th, 2023

This is the 12th 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 12th edition contributors: José Ve, Alexander B., Hlpr, tRDM, ex_scxr, alexhuk.

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 🍿

FRI or not FRI – That is the question! In the presentation at SBC, Eli5 STARK compares FRI to EC based commitment schemes measuring clock cycles to commit to word (w=32b) in stream of N = 2^20 words.
Zac Williamson is “not sure about this” claiming that “slide measures the wrong thing!” He also highlights that “using Blake2 which is not practical in the recursive setting.”
Srinath Setty notes that “the comparison is odd because the left side uses small field elements and MSMs applied to small field elements are much faster than the ones applied to random field elements.”
Ariel Gabizon wonders “how that ratio will change if/when custom hardware comes in for the large p.”

ZK and rollups research 🧙

An article “TEE Rollups: Fixing Access Patterns in TEE-based Smart Contracts with Off-chain Computing” by James Austgen, Nerla, and Yunqi Li.
Introducing Recproofs, a new vector commitment designed for concurrently proving both batched set inclusion and dynamic MapReduce style computations by LAGRANGE.
StarkWare open-sourcing the STARK prover.
An article, “Accelerating Client-Side ZK with WebGPU” by weijie.eth.
A paper, “Pianist: Scalable zkRollups via Fully Distributed Zero-Knowledge Proofs” by Tianyi Liu, Tiancheng Xie, Jiaheng Zhang, Dawn Song, and Yupeng Zhang.
An article, “The Hidden Little Secret in SnarkJS” by Kobi Gurkan.
A presentation (slides), “Running Linux in ZK” by Carsten Munk.
An article, “Computing the Optimal Ate Pairing over the BN254 Curve” by Héctor Masip.
A zkresearch post, “Diagonal folding (how to fold the Lasso)” by levochka.eth.
A twitter thread, “Plonk goes goblin mode” by Aztec.
An ethresearch post, “zkMIPS: A Zero-Knowledge (zk) VM based on MIPS Architecture” by RoboAlgo.
A twitter thread about L2 multi-sigs exploration by Ed Felten.
An article, “The Pantheon of Zero Knowledge Proof Development Frameworks (Updated!)”.
An article “Blobspace 101” by Dom.
A twitter thread with some doubts about validity proofs by DAC Economy.
An article, “Intro to zero-knowledge proofs, semaphore and their application in World ID.”

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

Type 0 zk-EVM launched by Risc ZERO.
Polygon announced Chain Development Kit (CDK), a software for launching ZK L2s.
Introducing ZK-whiteboard, an app for anonymous, spam-free self-expression.
Introducing Circomscribe, a tool that shows you what Circom does with your code.
BNB Chain's Layer 2 opBNB rolls out mainnet for infrastructure providers.

Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡

A twitter thread about TPS vs GPS by umede.eth.
The “official" release of the Ethereum Execution Layer Specification (or EELS) by Peter Davies, Guru | guruka.math, and everyone else who contributed.
An article, “How to improve decentralized exchange in Ethereum?” by Sergio Yuhjtman.
A twitter note about weak censorship resistance by Patrick McCorry.
Reth Alpha.7 is out!

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

September 6, Open Talk: Zero Knowledge by Fenbushi Capital.
September 11-12, ZK-GPU Masterclass by Ingonyama.
September 15 , Zero Knowledge Bootcamp, eight weeks of live online classes.
An RFP for Upgrade mechanisms by Aztec.
July 15 - September 15, a hackathon, ZK Hacker Camp.
August 29 (starting date), Encode x Chainlink 2023 Bootcamp.
Axiom ZK Intensive Program, 4 week program for smart contract developers with an interest in ZK. Apply by September 18.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

An article, “Proof of Meow: how ZK-VM works” by Lisa A. | bot.
Uniswap Research Hot Takes with Alex Nezlobin.
Taiko Research Day Session 1 recordings: SGX, different types of ZK-EVM, and Halo2.
Taiko Talk Episode, “Dave | Beyond Code: Unraveling the Bonds Between DevRel and the Crypto Community.”
An article, “Censorship Resistance with Restaking” by EigenLayer.
A tutorial, “Write your Own Virtual Machine” by Justin Meiners and Ryan Pendleton (recommended by Fede's Intern).
Founders in Web3 Episode, “Ariah Klages-Mundt & Gyroscope: Building Robust & Resilient DeFi Infrastructure.”
An article, “Ethereum’s Rollups are Centralized. A Look Into Decentralized Sequencers” by Binance.

Fancy mathematics and cryptography

An article, “Some notes on ProtoGalaxy folding scheme” by arnaucube.
A paper, “The Geometry of Constant Function Market Makers” by Theo Diamandis, Tarun Chitra, K Kulkarni, Alex Evans, and Kshitij Kulkarni.
A paper, “On Soundness Notions for Interactive Oracle Proofs” by Alexander Block, albert_g, Michał Zając, and Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari.
ZK Study Club Lasso/Jolt (Justin Thaler, Georgetown University/a16z).
a16z cryptography week recordins: Post-Quantum Single Secret Leader Election by Dan Boneh, Proving as Fast as Computing with Ron Rothblum, BLS Multi-Signatures for Blockchain Applications with Foteini Baldimtsi, Oblivious RAM: From Theory to Large-Scale Real-World Deployment with Elaine Shi.
A GitHub note, “How to optimize pairings” by Mamy Ratsimbazafy.
A paper, “Improving logarithmic derivative lookups using GKR” by Shahar Papini and ulrich.haboeck.

Puzzles for curious 🧩

Georgios Konstantopoulos wonders: “how do people intend to verify non-ETH DA on Ethereum as part of their dispute resolution logic?”
porter wonders: “Who has the best ZK documentation?”