This is the 17th 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 🍿
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A new L2 entered the chat: Blast, Ethereum L2 with native yield for ETH and stablecoins.
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This offer was skeptically met by the community, pointing to ponzi-style approach and some doubts about general economic sustainability: “[…] taking user funds and investing them, while calling it “risk-free”, is straight out of the FTX playbook […]”, “This is a very bad idea. ETH and liquid staking derivatives are different assets with different risk profiles (and rewards), and users should have a choice about which one they want to use. The same is true for different types of stablecoins” – Dankrad commented.
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Some are skeptical about the future of L2s landscape: “[…] The L2 space used to be an elite community: the best researchers building complex ZK circuits, WASM interpreters & fault proofs. As it gets easier to fork & spin up an L2, we're going to see lots of degen tokenomics injected into new chains. Buckle up [...]”
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A separate portion of skepticism was addressed to Paradigm, the Blast’s investor: “[…] Paradigm 100% sold its account comparing its early investments to now completely different in almost every way, the reflinks, the ponzi, the branding, practically everything…”, “[…] Did Paradigm just turn into a pump and dump sweat shop? I used to respect them so much[ …]”
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Tho, some people are pretty positive, waiting for airdrop and lucrative earnings (no links for airdrop guides, sorry 💔).
ZK and rollups research 🧙
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A new SNARK: based on towers of binary fields for prover-efficient verifiable computing.
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A blog post by Justin Thaler delving into work just unveiled by Ben Diamond and Jim Posen (D&P) that, in his view, reshapes the landscape for hashing-based SNARKs. D&P have fine-tuned the Ligero/Brakedown polynomial commitment scheme.
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A paper “Family of embedded curves for BLS” by asanso.eth.
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FHE in the RISC Zero ZK-VM.
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An article “How to choose your ZK-friendly hash function?” by Roman Walch (shared by sivat.eth).
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A new data structure to facilitate a configuration-like state in Aztec by Santiago Palladino.
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A research note “Alternate PBS: A PBS Proposal for Based Rollups” and a Twitter thread wrapping the note by Conor McMenamin.
ZK and rollups updates 🎈
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Weekly DeFi Roundup by Polygon.
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Near Foundation announced a partnership with Eigen Labs for more efficient Ethereum rollup transactions.
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ZKP2P – trust-minimized on-ramp to crypto w/o KYC in <2m.
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Succinct Labs announced Succinct – a tool for the developer community to collaborate on applications, proof systems, and proving infrastructure.
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Ingonyama announced ZK-Containers. Containers are one of the foundational technologies used today in cloud computing. They are frequently used in AI, for example, to deploy and scale AI workloads.
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Centralized exchange OKX announced the launch of a decentralized L2 with Polygon CDK.
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Lattice announced Redstone, a cost-effective L2 for on-chain games, worlds, and other ambitious applications. Redstone is a Plasma-inspired Alt-DA chain built on the OP Stack.
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zkLink – ZKP-based, multi-rollup Layer 3.
Non-ZK industry highlights and research 🎡
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RIP-7560: Native Account Abstraction.
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An ethresearch post ”The Costs of Censorship: A Modeling and Simulation Approach to Inclusion Lists.”
Opportunities and events 🏄♀️
- Postdoc opening in post-quantum cryptography in Lyon! Apply if you like either crypto, number theory, lattices, isogenies, or all of these!
Readings and watchings 🎞
General
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The recordings of ETHconomics Istanbul.
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A zeroknowledge.fm episode “Catch up on zkSync with Alex G.”
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An article “The horrific inefficiencies of monolithic blockchains” by polynya.
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An article “So, what should we do?” by polynya.
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An article “Exit games for EVM validiums: the return of Plasma” by Vitalik.
Fun of the week 🍩
Thank you for reading the 17th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster. See you in two weeks! 🚵♀️
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