ZK-Roller-Coaster #4 - Lisa A.

This is the 4th 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 🌶️

Gitcoin announced a new approach to diversity projects: “50% of the project’s team must reflect the diversity of the community they serve”.

The community is pretty skeptical: ”Someone should just fork gitcoin.”
“Sad to see Gitcoin focus on such a distorted US-centric view of the world”
”..real inclusivity is delivering L2 support so people who can't afford to spend 50$ of tx fees to donate can participate and show support to projects..” (during this round Ethereum gas fees are pretty high community highlights that L2 support is necessary for donations);

ZK and rollups research 🧙

An article on PBS and how it impacts the fork choice rule by constexpr.eth and Georgios Konstantopoulos, summarised in a twitter thread by Toni Wahrstätter.
An article “Ethereum L1 zkEVM” by polynya.
ethresearch: Cross layer communication: Trivially provable and efficient read access to the parent chain by Brecht Devos.
zkResearch: Fast-Fourier inspired Sangria by Igor Gulamov.
zkResearch: Running Sangria final proof in shielded mode on untrusted 3rd party prover by Igor Gulamov.
A research paper “ProtoStar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special Sound Protocols” by Espresso Systems founders, twitter thread with a summary by Benedikt Bünz and, a disclaimer “this is just cool research, we are not building our own zk-rollup at Espresso” by Ben Fisch.
An update for the research paper mentioned above "ProtoStar: Generic …” offered by Ariel Gabizon to optimize the protocol so that they can save log(n) hashes in the recursive circuits for high-degree gates.
Maxim Vezenov (zk eng of Noir) shared an example of a recursive circuit in the current PoC, saying “We will be building tooling surrounding recursion to enable easy circuit interop.”
Twitter thread with the research on the combination of MEV and Eigenlayer by Grace Deng.
A version of Merkle Trees called Merkle Sum Trees was unexpectedly discovered by high_byte.
Twitter thread: why is it useful to understand the gist of security proofs as a cryptography engineer? by Kobi.
A post about the "proof overflow" problem and thread-summary by Andy Arditi.
ethresearch: Decentralized MEV Relays: Enhancing security with Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Brandon.
ethresearch: A soundness alert function for zk-rollups by Nicolas Liochon.

ZK and rollups updates 🎈

Aztec announced Aztec – the first ever hybrid zkRollup, enabling both public and private smart contract execution in one environment.
Taiko announced an updated protocol design.
Dymension announced – an IBC-enabled EVM Rollup.
Franklin Templeton chose Polygon to host the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, the first U.S. mutual fund run on blockchain.
Polygon introduced Polygon Bridge to Polygon ZK-EVM.

Non-ZK industry highlights 🎡

Last chance to merge PoW private networks with Geth with a beacon network. Geth will soon drop support for PoW.
Circle (USDC) has launched its cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP): USDC cross-chain bridging without cross-chain bridges.
Details of the next Ethereum upgrade, Cancun.
Peter proposes terminating the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet on the 1st of June, 2023.
Paradigm open-sourcing Artemis, a framework for writing MEV bots in Rust.

Opportunities 🏄‍♀️

ETHGlobal Lisbon is 12-14th May.
LongHashX Accelerator is excited to kickoff the #zkSummer.
Aleo launched the initiative focused on accelerating the field of Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning, offering 280k Aleo Credits to developers eager to shape the future of ML.
Ethereum.org Writers Cohort is starting May 11th.

Readings and watchings 🎞

General

The article “Exploration of MEV Latencies”.
The article “SUAVE, Anoma, Shared Sequencers, & Super Builders”.
The podcast “Will Rollups Use Shared Sequencers?”.
The podcast “zeroknowledge.fm Episode 273: History of Plonk, Noir, and the building of Aztec 3”.
The article “How ZkEVM Could Help Power The Next Industrial Revolution”.
The article “Data availability sampling and danksharding: An overview and a proposal for improvements”.
The metacast “Top Crypto Podcasts of April 2023”.

Fancy mathematics and cryptography

The article “Hardware Review: GPUs, FPGAs, and Zero Knowledge Proofs”.
porter shared his favorite ZK books.
E summarizing key insights on IVC and folding schemes -Nova, SuperNova, HyperNova, ProtoStar, Sangria & Origami.
Thor Kampefner shared his slides from the talk on Randomness n Complexity.
The podcast zeroknowledge.fm “Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with ********Ariel Gabizon”.
Thesis talk with Titouan Tanguy on his research on “Secure MultiParty Computation: Protocols and Applications”.
Brandon said that Tom 7 “just figured out how to write a zkVM by writing a CPU emulator using only linear floating point instructions”.
Improving ECC-like sampling performance by approximate tensor factorization.

Puzzles for curious 🧩

The biggest thing in Ethereum governance (acc. to trent.eth): EIP numbering should be rethought!
Lúcás Meier is wondering “What a good way to actually get into algebraic geometry”?
Alexey Shekhirin is wondering “Did anyone measure time spent on different components of mev-boost relay during the API requests”?
Pratyush Mishra is wondering “How many custom gates do modern plonk circuits tend to have?”
leo21.sismo.eth is wondering “Is there a list of compatible networks for snarkjs Groth16 Verifier”?

Thank you for reading the 4th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster. See you in two weeks! 🚵‍♀️

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