This is the 3rd 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 weeks 🌶️

• Apr 6: “a project on zkSync raised 921 ETH ($1.7M) in a token sale, but funds are stuck forever in the smart contract” Apr 7: zksync reacted fast and “found an elegant solution how to unfreeze the contract”, highlighting that “Era is not EVM equivalent” and “Any smart contract that uses transfer() or send() is taking a hard dependency on gas costs, because this functions forward a hardcoded amount of 2300 gas”. However, “fallback() function can consume more than 2300 gas. Opcode gas pricing can change in future version of Ethereum, and your contract will break. This is not guaranteed to work on Ethereum!”.

ZK and rollups research 🧙

• Protocol Labs presented Testudo, an open source R1CS proof system faster than Groth16: square root size universal trusted setup, constant proof size w/ proof composition, and blazing fast for uniform circuits.

• LAGRANGE introduced Lagrange State Committees, a trust-minimized architecture for creating inductive zero-knowledge state proofs for arbitrary chains and rollups.

• EIP-3361: eth_signMessage offered by pedrouid to reduce the fragmentation of both decentralizated applications and wallets regarding JSON-RPC methods to request message signatures.

• Thread: Inception layers; reusable and extensible scaling: aka “Use Taiko as an L2 and deploy the exact codebase as an L3 on top.” followed up by explanation of "built-in" arbitrary message passing (by Matt Finestone).

• zkresearch: Towards a Nova-based VM (by oskarth, CPerezz.eth, Chiro Hiro, alephv.eth, and Nalin).

• polynya’s tweet: “crypto may have only a few years to become quantum-resistant”.

• zkresearch: Folding endgame (by levs57).

• A one-slide depiction of progress in the space of succinct (zero-knowledge) arguments ("ZK") by Srinath Setty.

• Ideas of hybrid apps and local consensus by polynya.

• welcome zkFHE: confidentially run a verifiable computation on private data in public by emiliano.oO.

• A short thread on sumcheck by Ariel Gabizon.

• ethresearch: how to use zk-vms with the Edge Computing Architectures in Ethereum (by Wanseob Lim).

• ethresearch: Proving a Chain of Hashes using plonky2 (by Garvit).

• ethresearch: Defining zkOracle for Ethereum (by msfew / Suning Yao).

• collective.flashbots: Ensuring User Protection and Rollup Revenue with Radius and MEV-Boost (by Tariz).

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

• Magi, a new OP Stack rollup client written in Rust, introduced by ncitron.eth.

• introducing Hashi: an oracle aggregator for blockchain bridges.

• EigenLayer announced the release of the testnet for the first stage of the EigenLayer protocol, which supports liquid and native restaking.

Non-ZK industry highlights 🎡

• CoW Swap, in collaboration with beaverbuild and Agnostic Relayer announced MEV Blocker, a free RPC endpoint that pays users to protect themselves from MEV across a wide variety of use cases in DeFi, NFTs, and dApps.

• MEV-Share beta is live on Ethereum mainnet.

Opportunities 🏄‍♀️

• Taiko (Type-1 ZK-EVM) is looking for Senior Blockchain Full-Stack Engineer (Solidity/Svelte), Zero-Knowledge Circuit Engineer (Rust), Business Development Manager, and Developer Relations Engineer.

• Espresso (Shared Sequencer) is looking for Ecosystem Lead and Community/Marketing Lead.

• 24th of April, a twitter chat with Jon Charbonneau.

• Get ready for Devconnect Istanbul 2023! Save the date: 13-19 Nov 2023.

• Flashbots are looking for research contributors in programmable privacy and orderflow sharing.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

• A podcast “Shared Sequencers Are Coming” with Ben Fisch from Espresso Systems.

• zkpod.ai – a fun little project that can likely be a great resource for newcomers to zk or people who want to quickly catch up on zk topics shared by Mario, Taiko ZK researcher.

• L2 peace talk – one goal, different visions by Starknet, Scroll, Polygon ZK-EVM, Arbitrum, LambdaClass, Optimism, zksync, and Consensys.

• zeroknowledge.fm podcast “how FHE and ZKPs fit together”.

• A long read “Checks and balances: Machine learning and zero-knowledge proofs” by a16zcrypto.

Fancy mathematics, cryptography, and quantum physics

• An article explaining PLONKish ZK-SNARK by ALeksei Vambol and Lisa A. | bot.

• A talk on Nova/SuperNova by Srinath Setty.

• ZK Hardware Table Stakes part 1 - MSM by Ingonyama.

• zkSummit9 videos are up!

Puzzles for curious 🧩

• Alex Stokes is wondering: who has the best “grand theory of blockchain sequencing”?

• James Prestwich from Nomad is wondering: “in what ways is shared sequencing not the same rollup?” and recaps answers in a tweet.

Thank you for reading the 3rd edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster. See you in two weeks! 🚵‍♀️

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