Proof of Track 2024-09-03

Sep 02, 2024

yes please tell me more about your zk ai oracle that sounds hilarious

I know this meme is not about ORA but we really worked on zkOracle before lol, and now we have AI Oracle.

🔍 🔑 ZK & Cryptography

Best crypto infra ELI5s for zk and FHE

I have received word that TEEs are now back in style

Mostly due to Flashbots. bullish consensus<>secure hardware, TEEs are like handcuffs, and MPCs are like jails, TEEs are great, but some of the claims I hear from the proponents seem pretty wild, The strategy proof computing future we are building for has a need for ZK, MPC, FHE, and TEEs, a cheatsheet for you to understand TEE tweets, Gists of 4 key encryption tech: ZK, MPC, FHE, TEE, What apps are unlocked by the TEE stack?, Most people doing TEE research don’t seem to understand: A brand new Scanning Electron Microscope costs under $100,000, Everything you need to know about the most important three letter acronyms in crypto, ZK, MPC, FHE, TEE: no-BS guide to the buzzwords, A High-Level Technical Overview of Fully Homomorphic Encryption, FHE is your new best friend.

zkML: Tradeoffs in accuracy vs. proving cost

In a nutshell, zkML should not be regarded as a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead of blindly porting a model into the zkML framework of choice, ML practitioners interested in verifiable inference should design their models with proving costs in mind from the beginning.

for any given project ZKVMs will fade and custom ZK will take over

"Here's why: ZKVMs have been crucial for widespread adoption by significantly reducing time to market. However, this comes at the cost of high resource demand for proof generation. While this cost is decreasing, custom ZK is likely to be more performant." See also: "Specialized" vs. "Generalized" ZK: Which One is the Future?

You can't have fully private finance!

"Finance relies on selective disclosure for supply and demand to match", "But finance does partition private state". Public state: federal reserve rate; private state: individual user balances, public aggregations of private state: LIBOR.

VIMz: Verifiable Image Manipulation via Folding-based zkSNARKs

ZK proofs for image authenticity.

Dark Skippy

new method for a malicious signing device to leak secret keys. With a modified signing function, a device can efficiently and covertly exfiltrate a master secret seed by embedding it within transaction signatures.

Paper: Analyzing and Benchmarking ZK-Rollups

analysis on concrete vs provable security for FRI

What is the current overhead of zk-proving some execution vs just computing it?

On ZK overhead.

zk-sgx-attester

verify SGX attestation quote on-chain by moving DCAP verification to off-chain zkVM.

zkTLS is being discussed

Basically it's MPC TLS? See: 1, 2, 3, 4.

🔍 🧠 AI

model collapse as successive model generations models are recursively trained on synthetic data

Decentralized training is much closer to reality than broadly thought. The popular narrative here is wrong

Myths about decentralized training.

the closed-source vs. open-weight models figure for this moment

gpu.cpp

Portable C++ GPU compute using WebGPU.

New paper in Nature shows model collapse as successive model generations models are recursively trained on synthetic data.

forky

A git-style way of managing LLM chats.

Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online

"essentially the premise of zero knowledge plus a credentialing intermediary".

Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines

Turn TPU into GPU. And Predict the next frame is a UI framework.

Prediction market and AI?

It's ripe to become its own chain. And Wei DAi's thread on zkTLS.

AI "learned" to do less work over the holidays

🔍 ⛓️ Ethereum & Blockchains

Thoughts on predictions markets (PM) TLDR - what matters is regularity (sports is by far the best example of this)

Obviously I'm elated when people are excited by rainbow staking but I also want to give my own perspective on where it fits in a larger roadmap for staking.

"tldr: Reasons to be excited, reasons to be cautious, and no easy way out from hard trade-offs to be made".

Taxonomy of transaction sequencing mechanisms 2.0

Fairness-aware consensus-level sequencing algorithms, sequencer-level sequencing algorithms, on-chain application-level sequencing algorithms (auctions), off-chain application-level fair sequencing algorithms.

Prediction markets are capital markets for truth

prediction markets are actually job markets

Big blocks blobs and reorgs

with EIP-4844 increasing Ethereum's throughput, blobs now dominate block size and contribute significantly to reorgs, Comparing the percentage of reorged blocks with 0 and 6 blobs, we can see that the probability of a reorg is more than 3 times larger.

When will Ethereum have single slot finality?

It's just a poll, no answer...

Some interesting facts about USDC and USDT on mainnet

About blacklist, unblacklist, multi-sig, contract...

Alkimiya Mainnet

The market for Bitcoin blockspace.

web3 for all

ELI5s for any project.

Doesn't make sense when: stablecoin supply + non staked TVL in DeFi > ETH staked

Repeated arguments over economic security + issuance are a reminder Proof of Stake's threat model is completely and utterly broken — BFT models assume the worst economic attack is a double spend.

How parallelizable is the EVM?

par.tryghost.xyz for visualizing the transaction dependency graph for any ethereum block.

Every day a professional investor asks me how bitcoin can have value when it doesn't produce cash flows.

More demand, more value; less demand, less value; no demand, no value.

Is anyone building a prediction market for purely on-chain data?

"Will the balance of smart contract go down by 90% within a period of 1000 blocks? Will an account be inactive for the next 1 million blocks? How many people will vote on that controversial DAO proposal?"

Trust-Minimized Bridging

ONLY L2s can get trust-minimized bridging with L1s, because bridge contracts can permissionlessly verify proofs.

Let's say you are given –– $10 million and 2 Months. You have to beat @pumpdotfun's huge network effects & become #1 memecoin launchpad. How would you do it?

Spend $100k on a clone; Spend $400k on infra; 9.5m on incentives for volume that only trigger on day 59; advisors, farming & TGE date announcement; CEX, cash for KOL...

1 like = 1 hopefully hot take trend by Mikerah

🔍 🪙 Bitcoin

The path to general computation on Bitcoin

Covenants, STARKs, Cairo, OP_CAT.

Hearing ‘Bitcoin L2’s’ are granting unbacked IOU’s to whales.

Shinigami: Bitcoin Script VM in Cairo

Bitcoin Heartbeats

Kinda like rollup.wtf for bitcoin L2s.

btc-nova-lc

validating Bitcoin headers using Nova.

🔍 🧱 Layer2 & Modular

Off chain compute: booster rollup => execution with l1 state and partitioned state; rollup => execution with partitioned state; ephemeral rollup => execution with ephemeral state; coprocessor => execution with no state

"think of a 5-day blockchain for coachella each year for ticketing and payments on the ground". Also Is someone working on something like an ephemeral rollup. See also Why do you think the concept of ephemeral rollups has not yet taken off at scale? and What are ephemeral rollups?.

A list of the top 10 L2s by market cap; a dystopian nightmare of centralization

"L2s are multi-sigs". L2s still have a ways to go before we can consider them fully decentralized.

Why developers are building modular not monolithic

TLDR we are all building the same thing out.

Layered Bitcoin

Bitcoin L2s... See also OP_CAT: The Purr-fect Solution for Covenants?.

exploring Rollups using Bitcoin L1 as a DA layer

Bitcoin blockspace simply cannot facilitate 4-8 Rollups posting 100KB-400KB proofs every 6-8 blocks; Rollups will explore off-chain DA layers that post attestation proofs to Bitcoin L1; Bitcoin Rollups might explore partnerships with Bitcoin miners to offer private deal flow for guaranteed block inclusion, locking in some fixed, lower transaction fee rate; Some Bitcoin L2s will explore L3 environments for transaction execution and use a combination of L2s and Bitcoin L1 for data availability.

App Specific Sequencing Infrastructure Tradeoffs

Vanilla Ethereum applications, Cosmos SDK, Astria, EIP-7727, Execution Abstraction, MCP with Priority Block Ordering...

OP stack is going from zero to 3 fraud proof systems!

Multi proof is always better.

wtf is settlement

In general, settlement refers to the reconciliation of ownership of assets. Aka verification.

custom gas tokens can unlock unique opportunities for rollups

Accounting with stable; DA drop so need to convert into ETH for L1 fees; native yield tokens as gas...

how L2s actually work

When L2s Fall

Downtime incidents of L2s.

What percentage of OP stack chains & Arbitrum Nitro chains deployed with RaaS providers use fraud proofs in production?

So Arbitrum Nitro chains will be able to set their own. See also quick findings of assumption, verifier dilemma, and resource exhaustion attack. And discussion around movement.

TRUSTLESS ROLLUP INTEROPERABILITY

Mostly shared sequencer and shared settlement. Full post. And also related project idea: A rollup that‘s simultaneously a L2 to Ethereum and L3 to all the other L2s.

🔍 🏦 DeFi & AMM & TradeFi

Thoughts on predictions markets (PM) TLDR - what matters is regularity

A SANDWICH-RESISTANT AMM by Umbra Research

Potential governance attack on Compound seems to have passed.

So basically someone bribed for voting rights to transfer their money into their own pocket. See also 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Journey Towards Sustainable Yield Farming

Liquidity mining and DeFi summer, from Compound to Ethena and BounceBit.

Token listing strategy playbook

Founders especially, save this if you are planning to launch a token soon.

Pricing Gas Fee Derivatives

a subscription model for Ethereum.

On Token Migrations

When Tokens Pivot.

mathematically speaking. what are the characteristics of a good AMM?

Answers: maps the curve..

30 celebrity coins launched on Solana last month.

All zero now.

In two short tweets I'll explain two fundamental truths about equity investing and LPing on decentralized exchanges that will make you really popular at parties.

Past earnings predict future cash flows better than past cash flows, and past markout P&L predicts the future realized P&L better than a past realized P&L..

every single token is a memecoin and you know it

UNI, ARB, stocks.

The difference between the EF striving to be hands off credibly neutral etc vs the Solana foundation getting in the paint with ads marketing and organizing efforts has been interesting to see play out.

Nakamoto Dollar and The Math Behind Ethena

there's no real yield so the only yield available is via the injection of new capital onchain

this is via ethena (where you get funding paid by perp traders) and from airdrop (where you get vc capital injected onchain for growth).

Prediction markets aren’t predicting the news but rather just just reacting to it.

Insiders.

L2 that farms with deposits like blast but instead of distributing yield directly it just gives all yield to a random depositor like pooltogether's lottery

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ORACLES

Market Rate (price from dex and cex) and Exchange Rate (underlying value). See talk and restaking collateral health.

the world's first and only fully anonymous on-chain DAO with token-weighted voting

Memecoins are Tokenization of the INTANGIBLE Assets

why do people choose to use a DEX over a CEX?

UX? KYC?

Where's the capital in crypto? Mostly on Ethereum

complex uniswap v4 hook startups are mostly ngmi ?

🔍 🤖 MEV

wait until this guy hears about the members of a certain research collective (or was it pirate ship?) exploiting idiosyncrasies and zero-day exploits in their own public goods infrastructure for profit

Big bird saying Flashbots mates are doing this.

**@Consensys acquired @specialmech and now they sell all your m*tamask orders to Titan and Beaver Builder your order gets value extracted mtamask gets paid 💸**

Is it worth using MEV-Boost?

"Using MEV-Boost increases the APR from 2.93% to 3.24%.", "but if you compare within execution layer it is big (it increased validator’s revenue by 4x)".

Business of Block Space Pt. 2: Mevconomics

"Summary: MEV Plays a Lesser Role Today, but a Large One in the Future".

rbuilder

is a Rust-based, high-speed Ethereum MEV-Boost block builder that supports backtesting and live block creation.

Flashbots Protect Explorer

See what you've saved with Protect.

Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why?

a "chicken-and-egg" problem where builders need differentiated order flow to profit, but only receive such flow if they have a significant market share.

SolverScan: Explore Solvers and Intent Protocols

day-to-day basis in our MEV operation

indexing, database, mempool stream...

Hot take: centralization is ok if there's nothing really harmful that the centralized operator can do

"Centralized operators can 1) censor and, 2) extract MEV."

SolverFi is coming

and also "Welcome to the post-blockchain era, and the off-chain frontier where".

Apparently there’s a bot that buys $2 of 99% of the coins that launch and it out-trades most of CT

6vd8cGfnr46BWpR3JWSAMfytZuXDeWvi8hq2xVfzuoUU.

Mempool Dumpster

Archive of Ethereum mempool transactions.

Maximal Arbitrage Value in Starknet. Nostra V2 Arbitrage Quantification.

the value extracted from memes on solana

TOTAL: 518m extracted.

Brontes

A blockchain analytics pipeline based on Reth.

Sorella

"Angstrom, on the other hand, will launch as a Uniswap V4 hook, Srinivasan told The Block. It will use Sorella's off-chain network to run two auctions per block. The first auction determines who transacts first, and the second is a batch auction where all orders are executed at the same price, preventing common forms of arbitrage in decentralized exchanges, Srinivasan said." Their gud dashboard and its ASS.

MEV Reading Lists

Does multi-block MEV exist?

Not really. Also see Jonah's post.

Private Order Flows -The Sleeve Bidding of Crypto - Contribute 89% $642.5M of Builders' Income

The dominance of private order flows, contributing 90% of builder income.

Decoding Bitcoin MEV: Insights and Implications

Wrote about this last month or so. TBH since inscription is dead, Bitcoin MEV is not that sexy rn.

🔍 🔧 Dev & Toolings

mev-commit Validator Registry

ATLAS

L2beat for RPC providers.

evmrepl

txcity

Mempool visualized.

Polymarket Whales

Dashboard for Polymarket.

EVM (EOF) Taxonomy

One pager on EOF changes to the current EVM and its intersection with legacy bytecode.

evm.monster

one-stop shop for debugging EVM transactions, and see how the builder hacked a MEV bot with it.

Principles and Best Practices to Design Solidity Events in Ethereum and EVM

Dos and Do nots.

Blockchain size

What is total amount of data stored within a blockchain network?

Total Contracts deployed by chain versus Total Unique contracts deployed by chain huge difference

reward-streams

Reward Streams allows permissionless rewards distribution of multiple tokens in staking and staking-free manner. Implementation of billion-dollar algorithm.