This is the 5th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks. Disclaimer: this is a collection of tweets, writings, videos, and other materials; these don’t express our opinion and may not necessarily be accurate. Please do (or continue) your own research. Hold on tight! 🎢Spice of the weeks 🌶️Twice in a week, Ethereum had Mainnet Finality issues. Offchain Labs presented an analysis outlining the incident...

Below is a summary of Taiko’s Q1 2023. We know it’s mid-May and do apologize for the delay! We’ll try to release this closer to each quarter’s end going forward. Of course, you don’t have to wait for these to stay abreast of Taiko happenings—we try to share all the meaningful updates right as they happen: in bi-weekly GitHub changelogs, Taiko Tuesday weekly recaps, timely announcements, and for that matter, build right out in the open to begin with. But we do hope this format is helpful for t...

Ethereum’s commitment to rollups is strong and credible; rollups’ commitment to Ethereum ought to be the same.Taiko is a fully decentralized, Ethereum-equivalent ZK-Rollup (Type 1 ZK-EVM). Our goal is to scale Ethereum while upholding the root principles of security, permissionlessness, and decentralization. We started building Taiko in Q1 2022 and are currently working on the ZK-EVM circuits, the L2 rollup node, and the protocol smart contracts on L1. In this article we would like to share t...

This is the 4th edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks. Disclaimer: this is a collection of tweets, writings, videos, and other materials; these don’t express our opinion and may not necessarily be accurate. Please do (or continue) your own research. Hold on tight! 🎢Spice of the weeks 🌶️Gitcoin announced a new approach to diversity projects: “50% of the project’s team must reflect the diversity of ...

Disclaimer: Taiko Protocol Design is still a work in progress. Below is its newest version, however, things might still change.Taiko follows the “decentralized from day 1” approach. Below is the protocol description. Taiko protocol consists of three stages: block proposal, validation, and proving. TLDR:Taiko is a type-1 ZK-EVM, meaning it is Ethereum-equivalent. That is, it implements the Ethereum Yellow Paper specifications;The block execution is deterministic once the block is appended to t...

This is the 3rd edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks. Disclaimer: this is a collection of tweets, writings, videos, and other materials; these don’t express our opinion and may not necessarily be accurate. Please do (or continue) your own research. Hold on tight! 🎢Spice of the weeks 🌶️Apr 6: “a project on zkSync raised 921 ETH ($1.7M) in a token sale, but funds are stuck forever in the smart cont...

Special thanks to Ben Wan, Matthew Finestone, and Brecht Devos for feedback and review.Table of contentsIntroductionZK-SNARK DefinitionThe Properties of ZK-SNARKsThe PLONKish ZK-SNARK Proof Systems 3.1 The PLONKish ZK-SNARKs in a Nutshell and Their Role 3.2 Commitment Schemes 3.3 Interactive Oracle Proof 3.4 Fiat-Shamir Heuristic 3.5. How the PLONKish ZK-SNARK Proof Systems Work 3.6 A Bit About Advanced PLONKish ZK-SNARK AspectsReferencesIntroductionA ZK-SNARK is a cryptographic proving syste...

We launched our alpha-2 testnet a bit over two weeks ago, and it has been a very useful one in terms of testing, finding issues, and other takeaways. We, and you, have utilized this testnet to primarily test decentralized proving and protocol economics. We want to say thank you to all who have helped test—transacting, deploying, node running and proving—and also want to express our apologies for any sub-optimal experience (transaction delays) you may have encountered in helping surface some o...

This is the 2nd edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks. Disclaimer: this is a collection of tweets, writings, videos, and other materials; these don’t express our opinion and may not necessarily be accurate. Please do (or continue) your own research. Hold on tight! 🎢Spice of the week 🌶️**Debate over worldcoin's biometry use and concerns about negative consequences. **After GPT4 release and Sam...

Taiko alpha-2 testnet (a2) is live! Following our first testnet (a1), Snæfellsjökull, a2 continues the trend of Icelandic volcanos and is called Askja. Let’s scale this mountain on our road to scaling Ethereum securely. Relative to alpha-1, the most prominent changes are:ZKPs (validity proofs) are partially integratedProvers are in and are permissionless; proposers are permissioned (just us)—opposite of alpha-1Protocol economics are enabledReal rewards for provers to compensate their resource...

This is the first edition of ZK-Roller-Coaster where we track and investigate the most exciting, meaningful, and crazy ZK-stuff of the prior two weeks. What to expect? New and ongoing ZK research discussions and proposals, new projects, updates from the already existing and beloved projects, ZK-drama, some educational watchings and writings, opportunities for builders, and puzzles for the curious. Not all of these every time but all of these from time to time. Let’s start with the first editi...

Below is our brief summary of what happened in the fourth quarter of 2022. It was a super busy one to close out the year, and now we are excited to be writing from 2023 - the year where ZK-EVMs are sure to leave an indelible mark on Ethereum and the world. Let’s jump right in.Research & DevelopmentZK-EVMImplemented RETURNDATASIZE/RETURNDATACOPY.Added circuit benchmarks.Added unit tests for math gadgets/super circuit.Added support for invalid transactions.Refactored math gadgets.Made improveme...