Proof of Track 2024-02-12

Feb 13, 2024

The promise and challenges of crypto + AI applications

By Vitalik. And our post on it about solving the challenge with opML and the tweet.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

plonkish_basefold

"a fork of https://github.com/han0110/plonkish, that includes an implementation of BasefoldPCS and an implementation of the Zeromorph compilation of FRI (for benchmarking purposes)".

safu-zk

A website documenting anything and everything about ZK security.

Indifferentiable Hashing

A rust implementation of indifferentiable hashing method that is proposed by Dmitrii Koshelev.

What Is a ZK Audit?

A look into the ZK audit process and techniques the leading ZK auditors employ to examine ZK circuits.

Beyond the Surface

Exploring the Advanced World of Zero-Knowledge Proofs & Recursive SNARKs. This article expands the 2022 talk on Recursive Proofs. Time flies, feels like it was just yesterday.

zkConvex

A Large-Scale Anonymous Electronic Voting Scheme Based on zk-SNARKs.

Benchmarking ZKML Frameworks

Benchmarking ZKML frameworks with ezkl on RISC0, Giza, and ezkl.

The explanations for halo2 are kinda gigabrain

Here’s a guide on understanding Halo2 for dummies.

Groth16 verifier with OP_MUL and OP_CAT enabled

A worth mentioning Groth16 verifier with OP_MUL and OP_CAT enabled in 2022.

sgx-tlsn-notary-server

tlsn notary server inside a gramine SGX enclave.

Goat-hash

The Ajtai hash function Over Goldilocks.

Reef

A zkSNARK system for proving that a committed document matches a regex.

Plonky3 performance improvements

Team fixed a performance bug, and now the performance is accelerated by about 10x in about 6 months.

The first ever SNARK proving ASIC

Built by Accseal. Optimized MSMs and FFTs.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Good framing of hash signature and blockchain

A hash/checksum proves "what", A signature proves "who", A blockchain proves "when".

Computer vs. Casino: Crypto’s culture war

Technical vs. Financial, Developer vs. Degen, and more.

The head of growth at AltLayer profited at least $200000 from insider trading BlurCrypto says

Sold NFTs right before the airdrop announcement and after the snapshot announcement. More details. Also analysis from Arkham.

Farcaster Frames

Basically better iframe on Farcaster. See: whats a farcaster frame? Examples: magic trick frame, and Doom.

Most popular TLDs for crypto projects on defillama

.finance > .com > .io > .fi > .xyz > .org...

An overview of recent non-standard Bitcoin transactions

"This is MEV."

EF Academic Grants Round 2024

Wishlist here. Interesting new topics under EF's radar.

Hackers need to fund their accounts with gas but where do they get the funds?

A year ago the answer might have been exclusively Tornado Cash, but now things have changed a bit.

When do Bitcoin Node Operators Upgrade?

An analysis of historical Bitcoin Core node versions to examine the updating behavior of node operators over the years.

ERC404

Mixes ERC20 and ERC721 to give you an NFT token with native fractionalization. Read more here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4. It achives fungibility in NFT trading. Improved version of DN404 and how DN404 works.

V0 of Intents Engine (IE)

A natural language command interface for contracts.

economic security flippening

It's a meme, but it's also a real thing.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

What counts as an L2?

At this point I'm too afraid to ask what is optimium.

can you explain to me what an L3 is without making me cry

L1/L2/L3 mostly just refers to where a chain derives its fork choice rule. L1 nodes - decide their own FCR; L2 nodes - decide FCR by looking at some other L1 (eg Optimism nodes following bridge contract deployed on L1 Ethereum); L3 nodes - decide FCR by looking at an L2.

i cannot think of something that makes less fucking sense than a million rollups

Maybe it's better than 1m smart contracts? Cause each rollup is instantiated into a server. Also Polynya's take.

Unpopular opinion: validiums w/ centralized sequencers and DA is a valid point

Pros: - Self-custodial; - No selective censorship (L1 inbox); - Privacy from public observer; - Speed. Cons: - Centralized MEV; - Possibility of liveness failure.

another example of marketing way before the actual product

Immutable criticized. The optimistic side is also not doing good.

Universal Plasma and DA challenges

This discusses "Optimistic DA" constructions like the one initially introduced by Metis two years ago or the recently proposed OP Plasma spec which will be used by the Redstone OP stack chain.

why would we need L2/3/4s?

Look at Farcaster, we do need those layers!

Can we stop saying that shared sequencing enables synchronous composability by default?

The only current way for one to "synchronously compose" between the L2s sequenced together is to operate the full nodes for all of those L2s.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Jupiter Team Fraud History

Team hustles.

Has Uniswap lost the plot and become part of TradFi?

"Uniswap touts open-source, decentralization, etc. values (and was founded based on a FOSS grant from the EF) but popularized BSL and maintains an army of vicious IP lawyers who go after even compliant uses of the small fraction of their stuff that is still open-source". And also Uniswap's recent open source move.

smolrefuel.com

Ever had tokens but no gas money to use them? This solves that. It uses permits to do a swap that requires no initial ETH, so you can get your first ETH.

Whales Market

Trade token warrents, even points, even WLs...

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

walletscrutiny

Know your wallet like you built it.

walletcompare

A sheet for comparing wallets.

some thoughts about Bitcoin after working on a Bitcoin L2

TLDR, "developing on Bitcoin is a horrible experience".

MassDropERC721

A modern, minimalist, and gas-efficient ERC-721 implementation that introduces a novel design allowing creators to mass mint tokens to specified addresses at deployment time.

who is the best smart contract audit firm as of now?

Answers: @trailofbits, @ChainLight_io, @kalos_security, @SpearbitDAO, @NethermindEth, @CertoraInc, @sherlockdefi, @LeastAuthority...

Batch Transactions (AA) and State Diffs are more powerful than you think

Saves a lot of gas for the user. Also Comparing ZK rollups.

Cairovm Codes

Online Cairo compiler. I thought it will be something like evm.codes, but it's an online playground for Cairo.

blur-v2

Blur has no public GitHub so this repo houses all contracts for Blur and Blend. Also DethCode for better viewing code of Ethscan.

Sui and Aptos

Core difference Toxic marketing driven vs engineering driven culture lol.

blobstream-starknet

Celestia -> Starknet bridge. A port of Celestia Blobstream X contracts in Cairo for Starknet.

The best Ethereum analytics sites

@l2beat, @growthepie_eth, @tokenterminal, @DuneAnalytics, @flipsidecrypto, @ultrasoundmoney, @beaconcha_in, @DefiLlama...

Transient Goodies

Transient bytes but may add more data structures soon.

reth-walk-storage

Uses the reth db to walk through all the storage slots of a contract.

open-stylus

Abstracted OpenZeppelin smart contracts written in Rust for Arbitrum Stylus.

PoWFaucet

Modularized faucet for EVM chains with different protection methods (Captcha, Mining, IP, Mainnet Balance, Gitcoin Passport and more).

🔍 🤖 MEV

UMA Oval: Capture MEV Created By Your Oracle

So basically what it does is that it allows you as the protocol to capture the redistributed MEV created by your oracle. Explanation by UMA is "Today there is a public tx (the Chainlink update) that creates fuck tons of MEV. Oval's goal is to force an auction to be run to recapture that MEV. We decided to do this by hacking Flashbot's MEV-Share because we can add essentially no additional trust assumptions over MEV-Share." More discussions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

"Sirrah" a minimalist TEE coprocessor

Kind of a mashup of Solidity and Gramine-SGX. The code release and end-to-end demo include an MEV-aware auction and a timelock decryptor.

OFAs are a bad idea

Orderflow has two sources of value, the most obvious is due to inefficient execution. This is what we see when transactions are backrunnable, or when liquidation protocols are designed to use instant liquidations instead of auctions (like Maker).

Thanks for reading!

I'm not a financial advisor. Proof Of Track is for education and information purposes only. DYOR.

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