Community invite: help craft the ZK-research digest

May 29th, 2023

We are starting an open research community to collaborate on the creation of the ZK research digest and share rare discoveries and valuable content to learn, grow and build together. Everyone is welcome to participate and appear as a contributor to the edition!

Context

In March, we started a bi-weekly ZK-Roller-Coaster – tracking and investigating the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks. Five editions have been released. You can check all of them on the Taiko mirror blog.

Invite

This week we’re crafting the 6th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster and invite everyone to join in collecting the most exciting, deep, and catchy highlights around ZK research.

How to contribute

Where to find the working document

We are collecting links for the 6th edition in this notion document . Every two weeks, we will publish a new open document to collect cool stuff for a new ZK-Roller-Coaster edition;
To edit the doc, you need a notion account (it’s free, just sign up at https://www.notion.so/).

Document structure

We have several sections in the digest:

Spice of the weeks 🌶️ – the most loud, tricky, and hype twitter hustle connected with zk.
Good examples: Apr 6: “a project on zkSync raised 921 ETH ($1.7M) in a token sale, but funds are stuck forever in the smart contract;
ZK and rollup research 🧙 (usually the largest section of the digest) – articles, threads, etc. around pure zk research.
Good examples: A short thread on sumcheck by Ariel Gabizon, ethresearch: Cross layer communication: Trivially provable and efficient read access to the parent chain by Brecht Devos;
ZK and rollup updates 🎈– news and updates from zk projects and L2s.
Good examples: Taiko announced an updated protocol design;
Non-ZK industry highlights 🎡 – news and research from core Ethereum projects (but not zk and L2s) that matter for zk and L2s.
Good examples: MEV-share announcement, geth drops support of PoW, Circle launches USDC cross-chain bridging without cross-chain bridges;
Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️ – what is happening around Ethereum (hackathon, open lecture, zk accelerator launch, etc.) that some of us can participate in.
Good examples: ETHGlobal Lisbon is 12-14th May, Ethereum.org Writers Cohort is starting May 11th);
Readings and watchings 🎞 General – zk articles, videos, and threads that might be exciting for a wide audience.
Good examples: The podcast “Will Rollups Use Shared Sequencers?”;
Readings and watchings 🎞 Fancy mathematics and cryptography – zk articles, videos, and threads that might be exciting for hardcore mathematicians, cryptographers, and researchers.
Good examples: The article “Hardware Review: GPUs, FPGAs, and Zero Knowledge Proofs”;
Puzzles for the curious 🧩 – open questions and puzzles that some of us might be excited to solve.
Good examples: Pratyush Mishra is wondering “How many custom gates do modern plonk circuits tend to have?”;

Add to the document

Drop a link in the relevant section (ex., if you want to add a new podcast from zeroknowledge.fm on Spartan, Nova, SuperNova, and HyperNova, add it to the “Readings and watchings 🎞 Fancy mathematics and cryptography” section);
Add a short description near the link (ex., https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm/status/1661480531949912066 (zeroknowledge.fm podcast on Spartan, Nova, SuperNova, and HyperNova). Otherwise, without a brief description, one link might be featured several times;
Add an author of a thread or an article (ex., Twitter thread … by Kobi);
Before adding your link, check that this thread, article, or announcement hasn’t been added yet;
If you are unsure of the most relevant section, just choose as you think. In the worst case, it might be moved to another section;
Add your name or nickname to the section “6th edition contributors” (at the top of the document). Feel free to add your twitter as well (ex., Lisa A.). Feel free to skip if, for some reason, you don’t want to be featured.