ZK-Roller-Coaster #14

September 28th, 2023

This is the 14th 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 14th edition contributors: Hlpr and stacker1.

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 🍿

Worries around worries around liquid staking

The Messari researcher Kunal Goel shared: “The amount of ETH staked has consistently grown (as I had predicted) and shows no sign of stopping. Along with that, Lido's share too has remained high and is nearing a key threshold of 33%.”
One replied, “Hoping on social agreement holding in a trustless system is not smart. The entire premise of crypto is that it's economically guaranteed.”
Dankrad argued with the provided counter argument claiming that “No economic incentives will automatically guarantee our values such as immutability or censorship resistance -- the values of the Ethereum community do this. […] If you believe that crypto values are simply individual profit maximization, you have missed the plot and are in the wrong place. […] Yes, we do try to build our systems to be as robust as possible and to get the economic incentives aligned with our values as much as we can. But perfect alignment is ultimately impossible, for the simple reason that centralized systems are more efficient than decentralized ones.”
The Ethereum community supported the Dankrad’s view: “At the end of the day, it’s all about social consensus, or legitimacy.”

ZK and rollups research 🧙

Announcing Anon Aadhaar: a protocol for anonymous verification of Aadhaar (Indian) identities with a user base of 1.2 billion people.
A ZK quiz and a provided solution by Nico from Geometry about the completeness property of FRI.
A twitter thread by Kobi: why “nothing up my sleeve” curve points can be important.
An ethresearch post: Exploring Single Slot Finality by Polyhedra.
A blog post by protolambda from OP Labs exploring the design of the OP Stack’s FPVM and how the full fault proof system advances both technical and social decentralization in the Optimism ecosystem.
A Nintendo emulator is being built by Tonk with Noir (powered by Aztec). It allows you to play your favorite Nintendo games and prove gameplay outcomes on-chain.
A Twitter thread discussion started by Kobi: “Your L2 doesn’t inherit the social layer of your L1, and the security of upgrades to the L2 is a direct derivative of the social layer, so…”.
A paper on why using GPUs for cases where you need privacy (like ZK proof generation) may be a bad idea by Yingchen Wang, Riccardo Paccagnella, Zhao Gang, Willy R. Vasquez, David Kohlbrenner, Hovav Shacham, Christopher W. Fletcher (highlighted in a tweet by Lúcás Meier).
nullity is developing PSE's MACI (Minimal Anti Collusion Infrastructure) circuits in Noir and is looking for collaborators (beginner-friendly).
A paper, “Sigmabus: Binding Sigmas in Circuits for Fast Curve Operations” by George Kadianakis, Mary Maller, and Andrija Novakovic and a summary thread.
A research GitHub note on how sequencers generate blocks by Joohhnnn.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

Aztec announced Aztec Sandbox, a local developer testnet for smart contract privacy.
Aztec announced selected final design from Aztec’s Sequencer Selection Request for Proposals (RFP).

Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡

Zama released the whitepaper and alpha source code for its fhEVM, which will allow end-to-end encryption of transactions and state.
An ethresearch post by Diego: PEPC-DVT can keep the block secret while obtaining signatures from the DVT network, thanks to BLS Blinded Multi-Signatures.
A blog post by Emperor from Umbra Research exploring the past, present, and future of the Ethereum supply chain.
Introducing ERC-7521: Generalized Intents for Smart Contract Wallets.
A blog post by Anoma: Zexe vs. VeriZexe vs. Taiga.
A blog post by Isaac Sheff on Chimera Chains generalizing shared sequencers.
An ethresearch post on VDF: “Statement regarding the public report on the analysis of MinRoot” by the Cryptography Research Team of the Ethereum Foundation.
A blog post by Anoma: An Introduction to Intents and Intent-centric Architectures.
A paper on Optimal Dynamic Fees for Blockchain Resources: Introducing a new framework for designing dynamic fee mechanisms for multiple network resources by Davide Crapis, Ciamac C. Moallemi, and Shouqiao Wang.

Opportunities and events 🏄‍♀️

Kobi is collecting a list of public zk grants or training.
The EF announced the first round of Data Collection Grants.
Noir would like to have PLUME signatures. The grants program goes brrr.
6-week zkSync zkEVM Bootcamp starts on the 20th Nov.
A3-week Aleo Bootcamp starts on October 7th.
PSE is looking for individuals and teams to help build the next ZKML applications.
Devconnect Scholarship applications are now open (powered by Talent Protocol).
Applications to attend ZK Hack Istanbul are now open.
ZK Fellowship by zkSync: a 4-6 month, paid virtual program designed to advance the vision for zkSync, ZK Stack, and the ZK Credo through technical contributions from individuals and teams outside of Matter Labs.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

A recording of Zero Knowledge Summit 10.
A new episode of The Chopping Block: Everyone says the CFTC is the "nice" regulator compared to the SEC -- but is it true?
A podcast with Kristof Gazso on his journey from Nethermind intern to co-author EIP-4337 and founder.
An article “Hardware Acceleration for Zero Knowledge Proofs” by Omer Shlomovits from Ingonyama.
A list of ZK learning resources by Lisa A. | bot.

Fancy

An ethresearch post by asanso.eth: The return of Torus Based Cryptography: Whisk and Curdleproof in the target group.
A wild presentation “Towards Optimal Long Multiplication in GPU” by Dmytro Tymokhanov.