zk

An Opinionated Overview of ZK Tooling and Proof Systems Right Now

crypto zk || When entering the ZK space, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Everyone is shilling their own protocol, and there are a ton of different proving standards and papers coming out every day. Folks often have similar questions on how to think about different ideas and protocols security, efficiency, and tradeoff wise. Unfortunately, its very hard to quickly distinguish what is worth investing into, and all of the precise security guarantees or undisclosed “gotchas”.

How Quantum Computers affect Cryptography and Blockchain, and Solutions

crypto zk quantum || I think this is a good middle ground between the oversimplified layman-oriented quantum news articles, and the hyper academic quantum computing papers that are hard for a cryptographer to parse. As the field rapidly evolves, things here may become outdated or wrong. Feel free to leave thoughts/comments/corrections on the hackmd draft of this post! An old version was previously also posted on zkresearch and a version that explains how to migrate Ethereum was posted on ethresearch.

ZK Email

crypto zk || The lack of trustless integration with web2 is one of the leading reasons that blockchains feel siloed from the rest of the world – there’s currently no way of trustlessly interoperating with the exabytes of existing information online, built up over decades by millions of users, that plug into every system we use every day. The resulting isolation of blockchains leads to fully contained apps and ecosystems: a great fit for DeFi or gaming, but a terrible fit for prosocial applications trying to weave themselves into our daily lives.

PLUME: Unique Pseudonymity with Ethereum

crypto zk || Thanks to Kobi Gurkan, Wei Jie Koh, Vivek Bhupatiraju, Remco, Wei Dai, Nalin, gubsheep, ludens, Blaine Bublitz, Prof. Kalai, Prof. Vaikuntanathan, Prof. Boneh, Richard Liu, Piotr Roslaniec, Lily Jordan, and Riad Wahby [and probably tons of other folks I’m missing, please dm me if I did!] for making this work possible :) Why do we want PLUMEs? The proliferation of advances in zkSNARK applications has created a useful new privacy primitive: a user can prove statements about their identity without revealing their full identity.