ZK-Roller-Coaster #8

July 4th, 2023

This is the 8th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks.

And this is the third edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster produced by the Taiko community!

Special thanks to 8th edition contributors: BluePillow and Alexander Belyaev!

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 🍿

“The zero-knowledge attack of the year” or “the paper demonstrated a false computation result accompanied with a valid proof”: David Wong from zksecurity.xyz published an article about “How Nova got broken.” However, not everyone understood that the attack vector had already been mitigated, and this was a kind of educational article.
A new ontology battle was initiated by Brendan Farmer from Polygon to clarify the difference between “unified liquidity” and “unfragmented liquidity network.” Brendan claims, “Unified liquidity means the ability to seamlessly interact with shared liquidity pools on other chains… Liquidity isn't really unified if cross-chain latency is several minutes or hours to generate a proof”. Alex from zksync argues that the cost of “unified liquidity” is weaker trust assumptions, so everything is not so obvious.

ZK and rollups research 🧙

A paper “Linear Time Prover SNARKs with Constant Size Proofs and Square Root Size Universal Setup” by M. Campanelli, N. Gailly, R. Gennaro, P. Jovanovic, M. Mihali, J. Thaler.
A research note “Shared Validity Sequencing” by defi guy, Uma Roy, and jtguibas.
A thread by Max Resnick: “Data Availability wars will be won by whichever team can construct the most censorship resistant bulletin board.”
An article “Decentralized Proving, Proof Markets, and ZK Infrastructure” by Figment Capital.
An article “EDEN – a practical SNARK-friendly combinator VM and ISA” by Zorp.
A personal investigation by Andrew Miller about HD wallet key derivation through Identity Based Encryption (IBE).
An article “Making AI safer with cryptography” by Rand Hindi about how to use ZK + FHE to make AI safe to use.
Ingopedia V3, an open-source encyclopedia for ZK knowledge, is now live.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

O(1) Labs submitted a proposal to Optimism Foundation for the application of their zero knowledge proof stack to OP Stack fraud proofs.
Noir's 2023 development roadmap is out.
Binance announced launch of L2 on top of BSC using OP Stack.
Polygon proposed the Polygon 2.0 architecture.
zksync announced ZK Stack, modular framework for building sovereign ZK-powered Hyperchains, based on Era’s open source code.
Polygon announced an upgrade turning Polygon PoS into a zkEVM validium.
dcbuilder.eth from Worldcoin invites to contribute to ZK trusted setup.

Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡

A paper on how auction theory changes when bidders are DAOs vs individuals by Pranav Garimidi, Maryam Bahrani, and Tim Roughgarden.
A paper update “Automated Market Making and Loss-Versus-Rebalancing” by Anthony Lee Zhang, Tim Roughgarden, ciamac moallemi, and Jason Milionis.
ENS (Ethereum Name Service) plans expansion to Layer 2 ecosystem.
A research note by 0xFable Research “everything you ever wanted to know about on-chain randomness.”
Poly Network got rekt again. Patrick McCorry suggests stopping trusting bridges that rely on multisig for their daily operation.
BlackRock files for spot bitcoin ETF, with Coinbase as a crypto custodian.

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

Twitter Spaces: "What Censorship Resistance Can Do For You”, Wed, July 5th, 11am PST.
ETH Hongkong will be held in Q4 2023.
EthconKorea2023 is BACK! Sept 1-3 in Seoul, 3-day dev conference.
UC Berkley RDI is hosting SBC-Berkeley Day - Future of Decentralization Technology and Computing Summit on Aug 27th.
DeFi event Permissionless II will be held on September 11-13th in Austin.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

Bankless episode: restaking dilemma.
Twitter Spaces record: Exploring ZK Proofs within the modular stack.
The Chopping Block episode: Azuki drop, Prime Trust, rollup wars, and shared sequencing.
philogy is learning rust (already day 6): follow his journey.
Crypto companies continue to use ZK to confirm their reserves: OKX case.

Fancy mathematics and cryptography

A paper “Publicly Verifiable Zero-Knowledge and Post-Quantum Signatures From VOLE-in-the-Head” by Carsten Baum, Lennart Braun, Cyprien Delpech de Saint Guilhem, Michael Klooß, Emmanuela Orsini, Lawrence Roy, and Peter Scholl.
An article “Quantum computer scales up by mitigating errors.”
A curated list of resources about SGX and TEE on Blockchain by Eray.
A long philosophical article on probabilistic judgments in mathematics by Timothy Gowers.
zeroknowledge.fm episode: Exploring Lurk: a New Language for Recursive zk-SNARKs.
zeroknowledge.fm episode: Error Correcting Codes & Information Theory with Ron Rothblum.

Puzzles for curious 🧩

liam zebedee is wondering: how expensive is it in EVM gas to verify a circom zk-snark proof of inserting a leaf into a mimc merkle tree?
hdevalence is wondering: what are current best practices for indexing events from tendermint/cometbft?
κασσάνδρα.eth is wondering: why does Polygon zkEVM use a STARK if it later gets converted to a SNARK anyway (when proof hits L1)? What benefit does it give if you still eventually need trusted setup (so don’t have transparency property)?