Proof of Track 2024-07-21

msfew

Jul 21, 2024

I’m still trying to catch up with the feed! Tons of resources pending..

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Proofcast’s teeVM: The first universal teeVM is here

Wanna remove multisigs from validating bridges?

"Multi-provers + multi-verifiers + formal verification is your answer".

OH: "What's the TPS / TVL equivalent metric that zk people gonna game?"

Answers: Total value secured; Number of proofs; Kappa (complexity to compute and prove / complexity to compute); zkVM cycle count; total constraints number.

Expander

An open-source GKR prover designed for scaling large-scale parallel computing.

Beyond ZKML

The efforts for building a privacy-preserving machine learning model solution. Starting from the naive ML, to zkML, to zk+MPC ML.

Awesome TDX

a snapshot of Andrew Miller's current intro resources list for SGX/TDX.

I've had many crypto-but-not-ZK people ask me whether we will use Jolt Risc0 or SP1

If your project needs to be programmable, then zkVM.

has anyone run solc in SP1

"an onchain registery linking deployment address and/or bytecode hash to ipfs source link in a guaranteed correct way".

Collaborative SNARKs work better with elliptic curves than hashing in MPC. ZKP inside MPC is efficient, showing only a 1x/2x slowdown due to optimized linear operations, suggesting benefits for other cryptographic primitives.

ronkathon

A comprehensive framework for running hackathons with streamlined workflows and robust participant management.

chip0

The first CHIP-8 zkvm. stark-based zkvm using plonky3 that proves execution of chip-8 roms. See also tweet.

zk-sudoku-ts

Updated zkSudoku App.

BattleZips-Circom

uses zero-knowledge proofs to bring the classic Battleship game on-chain with cryptographic verification for every move.

Air Fried Gyatt

A STARK backend for Noir. Enables people to write STARK circuits in a high-level zkDSL (Noir); Allows people who already know Noir to choose an alternative faster proving system based on their needs; Gives an example on how to build a Noir backend.

Gemstone Builders

A resource gathering type of game with a ZK rule engine and on-chain global economy.

Private UTXO Discovery

Allow discovery of UTXO (needed for private applications) without requiring the user to sync the application from scratch. This is done via Private information retrieval from an untrusted server.

CornHub

CornHub is an age-gated website for corn connoisseurs. Age verification via passport scan and the use of zero-knowledge proofs ensures access for adults only without compromising privacy.

homerolled-zk

simple zk implementations in python.

Food ML

ZKML for Culinary Categories, a deep neural net (DNN) to recognize combinations of ingredients as identifiers for a particular type of cuisine.

CornHub circuits

Noir code generate the proof of age in the mobile app.

A digestible overview of the state of FHE

The background of FHE, How FHE works?, The 5 landscapes in FHE ecosystem, Challenges and solutions of current FHE.

fancy-cryptography

Curated list of deployments of fancy cryptography.

zkSocial

"A zero-knowledge proof network to prove you liked your friends tweets. Who’s building this?".

Understanding Jolt: Clarifications and reflections

the relationship between the sum-check protocol and the Binius commitment scheme; the role of sum-check and lookups in Jolt; elliptic curves versus hashing; precompiles as they relate to zkVMs.

🔍 🧠 AI

Running Llama-3-70B at home with @exolabs_

recon

Gather background information to prompt LLMs.

web3-gpt

deploy smart contracts using natural language. w3gpt.ai.

L1B3RT45

J41LBR34K PR0MPT5 F0R 4LL M4J0R LLM5.

mlx-bitnet

1.58 Bit LLM on Apple Silicon using MLX.

benchmarks

Performance Comparison of MLOps Engines, Frameworks, and Languages on Mainstream AI Models.

AI 🤝 Crypto Tokenize everything

Tokenizing and tokenizing.

Just passed $1B in listings on gpulist

A market of idle GPUs.

Most people don't realize how many young people are extremely addicted to CharacterAI.

"they see ~2B queries a day, 20% of Google Search!!"

a very simple yet concise framework on crypto x AI from @balajis's talk

Difference: AI is top down, crypto is bottom up; AI is probabilistic, crypto is deterministic; AI is centralized, crypto is decentralized; AI is about prediction, crypto is about coordination.

delve

a ChatGPT interface for going down rabbit holes.

MidJourney Sref Codes and Style Reference

Make High-Quality Image Creation in Midjourney Easier.

LLM OS

LLM as the CPU.

what can you build with gpt4o that you couldn’t before?

Crowdsourced ideas, summarized.

Announcing: One Million Commits

a terabyte-scale dataset comprising a large variety of commits across GitHub for all languages and tasks.

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Unpopular opinion (or maybe popular idk): for applications we need oracles different oracles very different oracles.

Multidimensional gas pricing

I cant stop thinking about the "event EIP" when reading this by Vitalik.

NascentSecurity

A thread about Security Budgets and The Bounty Flywheel.

The main Gnosis Github contains 249 open source repositories

IR is a goldmine. The oldest repo, "Gnosis exchange" from 2017, features the famous "k=xy" pricing mechanism but was never deployed due to a mindset of requiring immutability.

Finally a Bill That Helps Our Industry

An analysis of new legislation poised to support and regulate the burgeoning crypto industry.

Where's the capital in crypto?

based on Total App Capital (TAC) Mostly on Ethereum.

THE NEW WAVE OF BITCOIN L2S ARE SIDECHAINS

"So, yeah. These new chains aren’t L2s."

We need shared sequencing not intent

Vitalik argues for a decentralized protocol (operator-free, governance-free) for fast asset transfers between L2s, prioritizing basic infrastructure. Also things like "Basic Infrastructure GUild" covering High-level languages, Cross-L2 token bridging protocols, ZK-EVMs, Light clients, Portal network and extensions.

verbatim feedback from [redacted EVM devs] regarding building with Move on Aptos

offers speed and simplicity with superior documentation, an easy-to-understand SDK, and versatile smart-contract capabilities without vendor lock-in.

Cardano has "genesis keys"

Justin Bons criticizes Cardano for extreme centralization, where IOG controls 5 out of 7 keys, enabling unilateral changes without a hard fork.

What application can be brought onchain if smart contacts can access a DB asynchronously?

Kinda like trustless async oracle. Use cases can be cross-chain governance / staking, ai agents...

crypto team green flags

does have an actual product or testnet that can be used; shipping to announcement ratio is >= 1:1; doesn't spend time on twitter talking shit about competitors and instead is focused on own product; is not reactionary; is frugal.

Building Blocks - Closed Software Competitions

less on the technical aspects of block building and more on the high-level reasons why depending so much on closed-source and out-of-protocol block production software in L1 consensus is negative for the protocol.

Censorship eviction

proposes a system where validators reject blocks that don't include mandated transactions, enhancing censorship resistance on Ethereum. Tweet discussion.

10 rules for crypto marketing & community: a systems approach

community and quality.

Staking vocab

Offline penalty: penalty when a node is offline. Very minor. A few $/day; Inactivity leak: network-wide issue. Increasingly severe for affected validators. Has happened once; Slashing: penalty for malicious behavior or double signing. ~1 ETH if isolated incident.

Technical choices in L1 design if we could start from a clean slate.

Consensus: Mysticeti from Sui with CometBFT vote extensions; Epoch based proof of stake in a ZKVM with the logic written in Rust, Use recursion for extensibility for liquid staking , restaking etc.; Data availability sampling and do fast blocks/ slow squares from Celestia; Enshrine a VM but all full nodes and validator nodes are stateless and only do DA but then also have opaque blobs for rollup DA. Vaguely like the solana endgame.

How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?

"A layer-2-centric ecosystem is sharding in a very real technical sense, but it's sharding where you can go create your own shard with your own rules." See discussion here.

What did the blobs change?

a lot of helpful information about how blobs work and what exactly they change in the rollup workflow.

Ethereum Beacon Chain Explained

In summary: LMD GHOST (fork choice) Each block ends up with 1/32 of the validators (~31,250 in total) voting for it as head; Casper FFG (finalization) Each epoch receives a justification vote from every validator, and also finalization vote from every validator.

How StakeSure works

Note on StakeSure.

Preconfirmation & Based Resources

improving transaction execution, empowering users in the MEV dark forest, & fostering an efficient blockspace market. See also: preconf conference, based preconfs, But have we tried shorter block times on the L1?, "based XYZ" vs "restaked XYZ" is an under-discussed, Vanilla Based Sequencing, User-Defined Penalties: Ensuring Honest Preconf Behavior, Forced txs vs based sequencing, preconf-devnet-dashboard, have you heard about Based Rollups? by LimeChain, L1 preconfs will result in proposers+gateways+relays+builders+provers all merging, based preconfs vs L1 preconfs and tldr, L1 preconfs: where do you stand?, "based" vs "restaked" question, "Restaked" and "Based" are... the same thing? no, it's L1 validators if based, maybe external validators if restaked, Preconfs and shared sequencing are often talked about together, The only way based rollups will become potentially viable is if L1 block times are much lower..

Reading List Links for Crypto Intern

Assembled by brother bing.

🔍 🪙 Bitcoin

We just verified 100k bitcoin blocks using nova on optimism

Super low cost of 27,55$. See code that with folding (nova + cyclefold combo and verifying on L2). Also "not only do you get cheap verification with (CycleFold), you can choose the memory usage / prover speed that you want to match the users machines'."

Rebar Labs: MEV-aware products and infrastructure for Bitcoin

Finally see Bitcoin MEV research and products. Was going to write about it. See more: Rebar's thread, Rebar's blog.

"economic security is a meme"

Eg. You don't need to control the stake of the network to attack the network. You can attack by bribing someone controlling the node software. So it's kinda meme to look at economic security.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Introducing Gwyneth: Taiko’s Booster Rollup Initiative

L3 DegenChain 500K Block Reorg

On reorg "you can imagine L3s being twice as bad on avg, but the worst case can be much worse". See also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Rollkit the first sovereign rollup framework

Deploy any VM or application as your own sovereign blockchain in seconds.

Cursed Ticker of "ZK"

clear endgame of rollups

Vitalik: "IMO in 10 years, all rollups will be ZK and will commit blocks with finalized state roots to L1 every slot. It will take a lot of infrastructure and prover optimization to get there". Also Ye Zhang's comment: the cost will be ~zero, and design decisions (proof aggregation, prover market, prover overflow, blob integration, redesign of bridge) are needed to move from fraud-proof based rollup frameworks.

is Polygon's AggLayer roughly equivalent to Optimism's Superchain?

They're quite similar, the core idea is if you have a shared bridge where all tokens are locked then you can easily mint/burn those tokens on any connected chains. Difference: Superchain doing messaging with inboxes, while Agglayer is doing zkp aggregation. These services are non-competitive in nature. A SS set will retain its TEV from sequencer fees and MEV (no rent paid to AggLayer), and the AggLayer charges for the service of cross-stack interop + safety guarantees across those chains/stacks.

Two observations I've noticed post-Dencun/4844 for optimistic vs zk rollups

"Optimistic rollups have an urgency to post the L2 batch data to the DA layer for tx ordering guarantees" while zk rollups don't have to.

Following a transaction from L2 -> L1

An illustration of the lifecycle of a Polygon zkEVM tx.

Change my mind: L2s didn’t need tokens at all. ETH is the token they could have used conviction voting with ETH for governance.

Looks like the only token model that worked out is to use it as gas token.

Why are all the dominant rollups pursuing rollup frameworks?

"Cause there are always ppl who wanna do their own execution. And if so, you want them to remain using your own stack with Ecosystem alignment."

why are we using centralized L2s

"There's no such thing as “decentralized” L2s. They have metrics of trustlessness and security. Decentralization is L1’s".

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Pointenomics 101: Mastering the New Language of Crypto Incentives

A secretive trading firm got itself a crypto arm and a 25-year-old whiz kid to run it. Then came the $40 billion Terra disaster

HOT: An MEV Aware Intent-Centric AMM Design

Looks like AMM + RFQ.

Playing Fantasy on Blast

An intro to playing Fantasy, the social card game taking off on Blast. TBH Blast ecosystem is pretty good. Very degen, very different.

When sorted by total tokens user receives whats the correct order? Why? On AMM with fee that sell 100 / 70 / 50 / 30 then 0 / 30 / 50 / 70

A > B > D > C. Three notes: - addition of the fee makes the ‘k’ invariant increase more than liquidity; - splitting the trade 50:50 is the worst outcome; - B is slightly greater than D because of the extra liquidity from the fee.

Uniswap V2 V3 V4

Uniswap V2 = “spot” account for LPs, impermanent loss is a bug; Uniswap V3 = impermanent two-sided margin account for LPs, impermanent liquidation is a feature; Uniswap V4 = impermanent two-sided margin account for any use case.

Why are all these low float / high FDV coins down bad?

Haseeb explores theories about why recent Binance listings of low float, high FDV coins are struggling, debunking VC dumping and retail rage quitting, and suggesting market repricing as the core issue influenced by geopolitical tensions. Discussion: Unpopular opinion: it’s the founders that choose the cheap scam route. Also 0xngmi built compare-fdv tool at defillam. Also The current structure of token launches is feeding a 'down only' paradigm where prices will get rekt. Also New launches (part 1) - private capture, phantom pricing.

how much equity to give advisors is a hard question.

"If advisor, 0. Invest or rest."

imo this is gonna be the hardest issue for eigenlayer

"If you look at revenue earned by crypto apps, there's very few that generate enough revenue to maintain a high enough APR to maintain eigenlayer TVL. Even with huge success (replacing WBTC), that's only 0.015% APY." Detailed writeup about building a btc bridge with AVS. Discussion here. Sreeram's response: "you dont need the economic security to be greater than TVL (10B in the example). You only need the economic security greater than weekly-cross-bridge-transaction-volume (WTV). This is because the stake is only protecting all the transactions inside the fraud proof period."

my simplest way of explaining @berachain

imagine lido was enshrined into ethereum; now imagine when you staked tokens, these provided liquidity into ethereum apps; and imagine this was the only way to get governance tokens you can always sell.

How to Raise Your First Fund

A tactical playbook to kickstart your investing journey and set you up for success.

Crystal Clear Lattice

Inside the mind of a $100 million fund manager.

Optimizing Your Token Distribution 2023

"the most comprehensive report in the industry around how to optimize your token distribution". See also Bring ICO's Back: Distributed Token Launches (DTL's).

🔍 🤖 MEV

can someone eli5 how CoWswap works and why some people say it is the optimal way to trade on dexes? And why is there no MEV

"It’s “no MEV” because the MEV searcher bots are the ones providing the service. Cowswap forces the MEV bots into an auction, which transfers the MEV value back to the swapper"

how MetaMask smart transaction feature work under the hood

Using permissioned list of builders. See also.

Stop Calling It MEV

Bitcoin MEV resources.

Uri's thread on why MEV is negative-sum game

Too risky with possible hard fork for additionally 0.3% apy. Peter saying "MEV became an issue, so instead of trying to find solutions against it, we've glorified it". This is such a lazy take: Dankrad Feist argues that MEVboost was necessary to prevent big staking pools from monopolizing yield post-Merge, and calls for better solutions for toxic MEV without sacrificing chain success or solo stakers. So much MEV talk on the timeline...: Stephane implies reintroducing sharding to Ethereum to reduce MEV by prioritizing local consensus over global consensus, arguing that smaller networks lead to less contention and more decentralization.

Helius charges 0% fees on staking rewards

Helius uses revenue from its developer products to sustain operations, allowing it to offer staking without additional fees. See more about operational cost, additional rev stream from L2 in the discussion.

CEX/DEX arbitrage transaction fees block times and LP profits

"As the block time is decreased, an increased share of the nominal LVR is spent on transaction fees; Changes in Ethereum’s block time (either increase or decrease) are expected to affect the profitability of AMM LPs, but in many situations, other factors are more important, including the transaction fees".

pbs-snapshot

Take a simplistic snapshot of PBS on Ethereum.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

compiled a (partial) list of domains connected to square space that would be at risk of being hacked rn

if a swap is a tenth of a cent it's basically free and can be paid for by watching ads or waiting for yr PoS yield

evm

A Symbolic Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode interpreter, parser and decompiler, along with several other utils for programmatically extracting information from EVM bytecode.

raycast-eips

look up ethereum proposals and read them in raycast.

Betherscan

A chrome extension that adds more data to Etherscan. Dev data like transactions root, mix hash, logs bloom...

The contract with the longest name in ETH mainnet

A bug hunter's sideline - finding hilariously lengthy contract names.

fully P2P 5189 bundler

A fully P2P bundler executing any AA standard txns and open-sourced for all to join the mempool. See also Agusx1211's post.

betherscan

An open-source tool for exploring Ethereum's blockchain data efficiently and transparently.

stablecoin-fun

Really minimal stablecoin with ERC-4626.

The Art of Judging Bug Bounties

explores the complex role of judges in bug bounty contests, highlighting the challenges and techniques for fair assessment. "Ultimately, judging is one of the most demanding, stressful roles in web3 security".

TPS Counter of Bitcoin

tracks the TPS counts of the most recent 144 bitcoin blocks (roughly the past 24 hours).

Solcurity

an opinionated security and code quality standard for Solidity smart contracts.

cryptfolio-scripts

A collection of Google Apps Script custom functions for tracking crypto portfolios in Google Sheets. See discussion.

LilOrders

A nicely smol erc20 matching contract. Source.

blob-brrr

submits 10 blobs concurrently.

blob-transactions-the-hard-way

An explanation and a walkthrough to understand blob transactions in Ethereum.

blobbit

a simple script to submit blobs to Celestia.

u--1: EigenLayer directory

Live data for AVSs, Operators and LRTs on EigenLayer.

Ethereum engineering puzzle

Q: how do you cancel a pending transaction in Ethereum? A: "You can't. If you don't have anything meaningful you want to do, replace it with a no-op (e.g. 0 ETH self-transfer)"

🔍 🤭 Memes

How to become a Blockchain Researcher 101

Which way cryptographic man?

Crypto as casino, or crypto as computer?

badcryptobitch's MPC memes

Gold.

Tiers of founders

S tier: @cmsholdings, @fede_intern, @frogmonkee, @intern, @wassielawyer.

this is the future of gaming - every shot is on chain

Fully onchain lol.

crypto conference: the schedule

Me obviously.

Dankrad's answer when Peter asks who decides what is necessary on the Ethereum roadmap. "Ethereum alignment" was one singular Dankrad tweet. About their beef, discussion: Kobi thinks it's a deeper issue of lack of trust. Also more critics: 1.