Privacy and Scaling Explorations

This post was written by the Bandada team. We are happy to announce the public release of Bandada V1! Try our app out or run it yourself locally v1.0.0-alphaBackgroundBandada is a public infrastructure project that allows you to easily create and manage privacy-preserving groups of anonymous individuals. It is a plug-and-play, free SaaS or self-hosted solution, for developers, DAOs, governments, and individuals that care about privacy.Anonymous Groups and CredentialsGroups are an important co...

This series intends to provide an overview of the zkEVM Community Edition in a way that is broadly accessible. Part 3 reviews the general logic and structure of the zkEVM Community Edition. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Components The zkEVM Community Edition has the challenge of creating proofs to validate EVM execution as it is today. To make this feasible, a system of interconnected circuits has been designed to prove the correctness of EVM opcodes while dealing with the inefficiencies of co...

P0tion was built with love by: MACI, Trusted Setup, RLN, and Design Teams at PSE. We are excited to unveil p0tion V1, a versatile and comprehensive toolkit designed to streamline Groth16 zk-application development and enable them to become production-ready. The goal is to facilitate Phase 2 Trusted Setup ceremonies for multiple circuits simultaneously, making the entire process more efficient and scalable.MotivationThe Groth16 proving system has gained popularity for its ability to produce sm...

This post was authored by drCathieSo.eth and was originally published here.IntroductionI am thrilled to share that my project on ZKML has successfully been completed with the invaluable support from the Ecosystem Support Program of Privacy & Scaling Explorations (Ethereum Foundation). This platform bridges the AI/ML and Web3 worlds, providing a privacy-preserving solution with immense potential to revolutionize both industries. This is a POC of an end-to-end platform for machine learning deve...

This post was authored by @0xDatapunk at PSE Security.IntroductionSmart contract security is of paramount importance in the blockchain ecosystem. As the adoption of Layer 2 (L2) solutions increases, ensuring the security of these contracts becomes even more critical. Due to their complexity and the potential for significant value stored in L2 contracts, they become attractive targets for malicious actors. In this article, we will explore the power of crowdsourcing smart contract security and ...

This post was authored by @curryrasul. We’re pleased to announce the “production-ready” release of Rate-Limiting Nullifier (RLN) protocol.What’s RLN?Developing zero-knowledge protocols (such as Semaphore) allows us to create truly anonymous apps. But anonymous environments allow spammers to act with impunity because they are impossible to find. RLN is a zero-knowledge gadget that enables spam prevention. It is a solution to this problem. Even though spam prevention is the primary use case for...

The task of making Ethereum faster, cheaper, and easier to verify is a globally distributed effort with many moving parts. Developing zkEVMs is one piece of the effort with the majority of zkEVM projects being built as Layer 2 scaling solutions. A zkEVM capable of validating L1 blocks is on a long – and often changing – roadmap for scaling Ethereum that has been referenced as part of “The Splurge”, “ZK-SNARKing everything” on the rollup centric roadmap, “enshrined rollups”, and most recently ...

This post was authored by Nico, a frontend developer working in the Privacy & Scaling Explorations Team (PSE). Nico summarizes the learnings and challenges he faced during the development and deployment of the KZG Ceremony.What is the KZG Ceremony?Rollups and L2s are a way to scale Ethereum without sacrificing security and decentralization. They abstract execution to layer 2 and post resulting data to layer 1. By reducing L1 data storage costs, rollups can reduce their transaction fees consid...

This post was written by Enrico Bottazzi Special thanks to Yi-Hsiu Chen (Coinbase), Shashank Agrawal (Coinbase), Stenton Mayne (kn0x1y), Michelle Lai and Kostas Chalkias (Mysten Labs) for review and discussion. Part 1 introduces the main concepts behind the Summa protocol. Part 2 dives into a full Proof of Solvency flow.Part 2 - Summa ProtocolThis section analyzes the flow of an Exchange performing Proof of Solvency using Summa. The core idea to enable the transition from CEX to CCEX is to bu...

This series of articles intends to provide an overview of the zkEVM Community Edition in a way that is broadly accessible. Part 2 is a summary of the common components used in most zkEVMs. Part 1: Introduction Part 3: Logic and Structure Before diving deeper into how the zkEVM Community Edition works, it is necessary to understand some basic concepts that are common among zkEVM projects. The following section is not technically complete and is written as a simplified introduction to zkSNARKs,...

This post was authored by grantee Blake M Scurr. His mandate was to explore zk-ECDSA, build applications with zk-ECDSA, and contribute to ZKPs to make this vision come true.IntroductionEthereum is a principled project, popular for being a credibly neutral payment, financial, and computing system. Unfortunately, to achieve neutrality, it has sacrificed privacy because every transaction must be public to be verified. Recent advances in ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) systems have made it practical t...

This post was written by Enrico Bottazzi Special thanks to Yi-Hsiu Chen (Coinbase), Shashank Agrawal (Coinbase), Stenton Mayne (kn0x1y), Michelle Lai and Kostas Chalkias (Mysten Labs) for review and discussion. Part 1 introduces the main concepts behind the Summa protocol and can be skipped if already familiar to the reader. Part 2 dives into a full Proof of Solvency flow.Part 1 - IntroductionIn 1494 Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan Friar, published Summa de arithmetica, geometria, Proportioni et p...