Harmony is committing for zkDAO and privacyDAO, bringing the best research to production, especially for zero-knowledge proofs and other cryptography primitives.
We should focus on products with 100x benefits, magical uses, or universal constructs. The following 6 products are the most ready. We put an estimated numbers of users per product below as a measure of success.
- Succinct – rollups (10M users), stateless (100K)
- Private – mixers (1M), authentication (10M)
- Fair – randomness (10M), anti-collusion (100K)
💥 Join our ZKU.one Course “Zero-knowledge Products on Mainnet”!
2022 May - Harmony zkDAO Newsletter
This is our monthly Harmony zkUpdate, a newsletter on the progress of both zkDAO and zku.ONE, our core initiatives for training developers to build products using zero-knowledge (zk) proof technology. tldr: This month we have devised a brand new syllabus for our current cohort of over 400 registered students.
zku.one
Final Projects by ZKU Graduates
This project focuses on building a decentralized voting portal that allows voters to anonymously verify that they belong to a set of registered voters and cast a vote by signaling their endorsement of a particular string. This portal allows anyone to create a poll and automatically become the coordinator of said poll.
zku.one
In September during ETH Lisbon 2021, we were announcing our $300M ecosystem fund for 100 DAOs. Today I am proud to report that our 23 DAOs are now funded with Gnosis Safe multi-signatures and Snapshot votings. Our Research DAO already has multiple top professors as governors and giving travel grants to students; our Wallet DAO spawned three mobile clients and pushed through many security audits. Our bottom-up approach is the "Basic Income" DAO, paying creatives and builders at $75 per hour – globally for at-will contributions. Our top-down approach is the "Organic Liquidity" DAO, market-making across tens of exchanges by thousands of strategy bots – with aligned and public incentives. Harmony has committed millions of funds to these initiatives. More importantly, we have pushed their formations, governance, and milestones in the public – all as open development across chains. Here, we are launching zkDAO for zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic primitives, and privacy. That's where the 100x benefits and the magical use cases come in. We are focusing on ZK innovations that are the most likely to reach millions of users in 2023. We are most interested in universal ZK constructs that are the building blocks for Web3. In particular, here are six ZK products that already have prototypes on mainnet. The first is compressing computations and states to succinct representations – namely, low-fee zkEVM rollups, trustless Flyclient bridges, and stateless Non-Interactive-PoPoW clients. The second is protecting privacy across multiple chains and Web2-to-Web3 actions. For example, cross-chain coin mixers like Tornado – which is a top use case with 35K users and $6M revenue; Ethereum Foundation's Semaphore Project now enables anonymous authentication and voting. Lastly, fairness is now guaranteed on blockchain. Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) will be a key primitive for randomness in games and lotteries; anti-collusion for quadratic funding will be critical for anonymous and open grants.
Zero knowledge Proofs for Rollups & Stateless Clients
zku.ONE
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www.youtube.com
ZK Light & Stateless Clients (SoK survey)
- Celestia’s data client: modular architecture for consensus & data but not execution, sampling w/ 2D Reed-Solomon erasure coding, interoperable w/ Tendermint & IBC. (github, binary, tech)
- Celo’s Plumo & Valora: verify epoch block headers of the validator set changes once per day, BLS aggregate signature, checkpoints with hundreds of epoches. (research, audit, ops)
- Harmony’s Horizon: Flyclient’s probablistic sampling of logarithmic # of headers from PoW w/ variable difficulty, Merkle Mountain Range as updatable committment. (networking, data)
- Nil’s Mina client & Auro: 22KB recursive SNARK proof (architecture, roadmap, wallet)
- Ethereum 1.5 & 2.0: stateless w/ sharded accounts & fast sync (verkle tree, state expiry)
- Cardano’s Mithril: noninteractive proof of PoW (NiPoPoW) (miners, velvet fork, multisig)
- Facebook’s Novi Diem: full epoch proofs for BFT consensus. (SoK survey, proof of assets, spec)
ZK Trustless & Secure Bridges (SoK survey)
- Interlay’s Bitcoin bridge: multi-collateral, w/ Polkadot & Cosmos (SoK, txchain, reduction)
- Celo’s Optics & Nomad: 1-of-N fraud-proof, batch committment, bond forfeits (evmos, github)
- Harmony’s Horizon: 200K gas w/ BLS checkpoints, proof of burns between epoches (assets)
- Near’s Rainbow & Aurora: 6-minute (20 blocks) & 500K gas (ux, ecosystem, governance)
- Nil’s Solana client: 100KB & 2M-gas proofs, 5X reduction w/ PLONK (architecture, libraries)
- Celestia’s inter-cluster: composable w/ trust-minimized synchrony assumption (SoK, trilemma)
Other Products
- https://starkware.co/use-cases (25K users in 2021)
- https://gubsheep.substack.com/p/six-moonshot-zk-applications (100K users in 2023)
- https://medium.com/o1labs/10-snapps-use-cases-on-mina-83e646010e52 (10K in 2021)
- https://zeroknowledge.fm/the-l2-roundup-discovering-new-things-about-ethereum-l2-platforms/ (100K users in 2021)
Q1 Action Items
- 20 scholars on our ZKU.one Course “Zero-knowledge Products on Mainnet”
- Port Dark Forest (already live on Ethereum and xDai mainnets)
- Grants to port Starkware’s NFT SDK (already live for Immutable X marketplace)
- Grants to port Matter Lab’s zkSync 2.0 (as Volition with optional data availability)
- Grants to port Polygon’s Miden (Distaff-based zkEVM)
Research DAO
The Research DAO stands at the intersection of three fields of computer science: Cryptography. Cryptography concerns the design and analysis of protocols in the presence of adversaries. A strongly mathematical field, it touches upon both low-level primitives such as signatures, encryption schemes and zero-knowledge proofs, as well as higher level protocols such as blockchains, consensus algorithms, and authenticated data structures. Prominent academic conferences in the field are CRYPTO and EUROCRYPT… Privacy. Blockchains are the first practical application of zero-knowledge proofs, a much loved if not idolized concept in cryptography. The ability to perform private transactions that enable untraceability and unlinkability is one aspect. The ability to have fully private smart contracts and smart contract state, whether on layer 1 or on layer 2, is a much more difficult goal. New blockchain-centric primitives that enable zero-knowledge creation of stake and signatures are central to these systems. The two primary peer-reviewed conferences in the blockchain field are currently Financial Cryptography (FC) and the ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT). We are also recruiting works in the top security and cryptography conferences in the field. Research DAO – Bring Best Results to Production
Latest Development
- https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/11/05/halo.html
- https://zkmesh.substack.com/p/zkmesh-oct-2021-recap
- https://0xparc.notion.site/ZK-Learning-Group-Topics-f53933eecc2f41438c6c2bdd5b42ee2d
- https://www.zkhack.dev/#workshop
Current Metrics
- $6.23M fees, $4.36B assets, 34.1K users
Dune Analytics
Ethereum Ecosystem analytics by and for the community. Explore and share data from Ethereum Mainnet, Matic, Optimism and xDai for free.
dune.xyz
- dydx, Immutable X
L2BEAT - The state of the layer two ecosystem
L2BEAT is an analytics and research website about Ethereum layer two (L2) scaling. We provide a comparison of the various Ethereum L2 systems available today. An important differentiator between L2BEAT and similar sites is that L2BEAT is committed to educating users and lists only projects that match our narrow definition of L2.
l2beat.com
Our Research & Surveys
Zero knowledge Proofs for Rollups & Stateless Clients
Networking: Data Availability, Sharding, Light Clients
Cryptography for stateless and privacy
WIP] Road to privacy on Harmony What is privacy? Privacy = confidentiality (hiding payment amounts) + anonymity (hiding the identities of senders and recipients) Why privacy? Anyone can track your financial activity on-chain; swapping, transacting, voting, lending, borrowing, and more May ca...
docs.google.com
Ethereum 3.0? Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain
Ethereum 3.0? Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain applications exchanges: deversifi, loopring, immutable-x, tornado, starkware stateless: flyclient, zksync, zk² rollup scale: rollups (uniswap, idex, 0x), vm, fraud proofs, reddit points compose: bridges, swaps, wraps, pegs, defi, on-demand liqu...
harmony.one
Harmony Consensus - Roadmap (tentative)
Harmony Consensus - Roadmap (tentative) Auction mechanism P0: Designate desirable properties and study whether the current protocol lacks them (these properties are different in a blockchain setting VS a traditional auction mechanism) - January 2022 P0: Devise concrete attack parameters and des...
docs.google.com
Harmony Research Roadmap
Updates in 2019/07: Harmony aims to bring the best research results to production. We're hiring research engineers. Here're our timeline and topics of research: 2019Q3: consensus (Hotstuff, Ava's leaderless), staking (Ouroboros, Algorand), BEP2/EVM bridge, WASM2019Q4: confidential assets (Eian's Bulletproof, zk-DAI), unison E2E networking (HIPv2,
blog.harmony.one
awesome-zk/README.md at main · ventali/awesome-zk
zkSNARKs in a nutshell is a great introductory article for people unfamiliar with zero knowledge proofs. However, it might have skipped too many important, basic concepts for people unfamiliar with this subject, or cryptography in general.
github.com
GitHub - weikengchen/merlin: Composable proof transcripts for public-coin arguments of knowledge
Merlin is a STROBE-based transcript construction for zero-knowledge proofs. It automates the Fiat-Shamir transform, so that by using Merlin, non-interactive protocols can be implemented as if they were interactive.
github.com
- Top conferences: IEEE S&P, ACM CSS, USENIX Security
- Related conferences: NDSS, NSDI, SOSP
- Specialized conferences: FC, Scaling Bitcoin, Breaking Bitcoin, Bpase
Friends’ Projects
Information Dispersal with Provable Retrievability for Rollups
The ability to verifiably retrieve transaction or state data stored off-chain is crucial to blockchain scaling techniques such as rollups or sharding. We formalize the problem and design a storage- and communication-efficient protocol using linear erasure-correcting codes and homomorphic vector commitments.
arxiv.org
Technical Roadmap → Q2 2022
The anchor protocol is the first protocol built by Webb Technologies. It is a non-custodial private bridge protocol that uses smart contracts to bootstrap a zero-knowledge bridge. It is designed to work in all possible smart contracting environments. The current working repos for this protocol are targeting the EVM & Rust based chains such as Substrate.
hicommonwealth.notion.site
medium.com
medium.com
GitHub - proxima-one/kzg: a simple implementation of the KZG polynomial commitment scheme
This code has not beed audited - use it at your own risk. kzg is a simple implementation of the Kate-Zaverucha-Goldberg polynomial commitment scheme over the ecosystem's primitives, mainly their abstraction. kzg implements the "simple" variant described in the paper as "DL", including batched openings.
github.com
https://dusk.network/news/harmony-partnership-zero-knowledge
dusk.network
EF-Supported Teams: Research & Development Roundup
We all have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season, from the first birthday of the beacon chain, to the successful upgrades over the past year and the incredible progress across the entire Ethereum ecosystem. As a highly productive year draws to a close, there are a few final gifts to deliver in the form of updates from many (15+!!)
blog.ethereum.org
chaosma - Overview
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github.com
Projects
An implementation of a bribery-resistant voting system built with zero-knowlege proofs on Ethereum, currently used by the clr.fund project to facilitate permissionless quadratic funding for public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem. Phase 1 of a multi-party trusted setup ceremony for zero-knowledge circuits on the BN254 curve.
kohweijie.com
Privacy Technologies
Privacy technologies stand to be one of the most important parts of the cryptoasset space. We have complied a list of resources that introduce concepts like confidential transactions, MimbleWimble, ring signatures, and zero knowledge proofs. If there is anything you'd like to add or change, you can tweet your feedback at @messari_crypto or email zack@messari.io.
messari.io
Release announcement: Semaphore, a zero-knowledge gadget for Ethereum
We are excited to announce that Semaphore, a generic privacy layer for Ethereum applications based on zk-SNARKs, has been fully audited and is now available for developers to build upon. This open-source library allows any user to signal their endorsement of an arbitrary string, revealing only that they have been previously approved to do so, and not their specific identity.
weijiek.medium.com
zkEVM - HackMD
zkEVM *We thank Vitalik Buterin, Barry Whitehat, Chih-Cheng Liang, Kobi Gurkan and Georgios Konst
hackmd.io
kohweijie.com
kohweijie.com
L2 Stablecoin Mirror | zkLink
zkLink supports one-step stablecoin swaps with stablecoins and anchored assets (e.g, BTC, ETH) across different chains and of different kinds on zkLink Layer2 Engine, as efficiently and economically as possible. For example, on zkLink's Layer2 network, users can not only transfer their USDT on Ethereum (ERC-20) to BSC (BEP-20), but also swap their USDT on Ethereum to USDC on BSC.
docs.zk.link
Trustless, privacy-preserving blockchain bridges
In this paper, we present a protocol for facilitating trust-less cross-chain cryptocurrency transfers that preserve privacy of bridge withdrawals. We leverage zero-knowledge primitives that are commonly used to design cryptocurrency mixing protocols to provide similar functionality but across two or more blockchains.
arxiv.org
Privacy on Mir
TLDR: As blockchain usage grows, privacy is becoming increasingly important. However, existing private smart contract designs like ZEXE aren't practical at scale due to state growth. Mir offers a new design for scalable privacy. As more financial infrastructure is built on decentralized protocols, users face an increasing need for privacy.
mirprotocol.org
#Circom 2.0 is released! - Iden3 project blog
We're delighted to announce the release of the new version of Circom, the zero-knowledge circuit compiler. Jordi Baylina developed the first version, which he released in 2018. It was one of the first toolkits of zero-knowledge technology, and it has been successfully used in projects like Tornado Cash, Dark Forest, Polygon Hermez, Zkopru, Semaphore, TrustCommunity and many others, including of course iden3.
blog.iden3.io
如何打造一款吸引公会的链游：Dark Forest 的另一种解读 - Mirror
同时，建议大家去关注分享的回放，主题是游戏性的策划，另外两位分享者，周衍老师和宋阳老师，他们分享的内容都是非常专业的干货，能够为想要投身链游研发的朋友提供直接且有效的帮助。 我是来自 RhizomeDAO 和DAppChaser 的 Erica，同时是一位科幻创作者。接触这个行业比较早，还是刚刚读大学的时候，在全身心投入加密世界之前，我从事的是行业研究相关的工作，四年前开始写区块链相关的科普作品，参与过一些区块链项目的孵化。 小学时，我开始玩网络游戏，是一些网游中公会战的积极玩家。在《天堂Ⅱ》的时代，我参与了个人游戏生涯中第一个公会；后来，担任过《飞飞》某个服务器最大公会的元老，记得那时最爱打的职业是巫师，升学期间，不幸终止于盗号。 兴趣使然，对于链游，我一直保持着比较密切的关注。 印象中，最早的「链游」，应该是2015到2016年，是一款卡牌对战游戏，算是古董级的链游，募集的是BTC，游戏币也不是Token，而是Coin。这个游戏有自己的链，现在已经彻底消失了，行情网站找不到任何信息，它的游戏道具是中心化的设定，和现在很火的 NFT 也没有任何关联。 （补充：这段是临时提到的，今天重新确认，这个游戏似乎已转手，成为了以太坊生态的 NFT 项目，但暂无起色。） 本次分享的主题是关于 Dark Forest 黑暗森林，一款灵感源于《三体》三部曲的去中心化区块链游戏，并由此出发，去谈谈链游如何从游戏机制上吸引公会，实现比较长期主义的良性发展。 Dark Forest 是一款基于零知识证明的去中心化实时战略游戏，是一个非常重数值的游戏。玩家所在的宇宙会一直生成和扩大，地图信息存储在玩家浏览器本地，需要用算力进行探图；如果你没有探索出攻击一方的领地，那么你无法知道到底是谁正在攻击你，敌人实力究竟如何。 目前， Dark Forest 仍处于测试阶段，更像是限时的链上电竞赛事和黑客松。以下是从0.5 到现在的每一轮赛事的规则，我们留到后面的部分具体举例。 下图是我在 v 0.6 第二轮时截的数据，大家可以看到，一旦 Dark Forest 开始新的一轮，整个 XDAI 网络的 GAS 消耗会突然提升，而且占比最大的就是 Dark Forest 的合约交互。 因为 Dark Forest 是开放式的去中心化状态，大部分玩家会使用社区开源和自己制作的插件，链上交互非常高频，排名靠前的玩家每轮游戏可能会消耗上百 XDAI 。 提醒：做链游，选择的链，会直接影响玩家的体验，需要考虑链的性能是否能支持游戏正常运转，链的生态是否能和游戏实现共赢。 想要开始玩 Dark Forest，需要准备邀请码和充足的
k.mirror.xyz
zCloak Network: a Technical Overview
zCloak Network provides Zero-Knowledge Proof as a Service based on the Polkadot Network. It enables a new computation paradigm called the Cloaking Space, which provides a private and scalable computation environment for Web 3.0. The blockchain, in essence, is a replicated state machine.
zcloaknetwork.medium.com
github.com
github.com
Tornado Cash V2?
What's next for tornado cash development? We seem to have stagnated somewhat in terms of popular proposals to work on, and it's not clear to me what the next stages of development are, if there are any currently. Is the…
torn.community
Pyrros Chaidos
dblp.org
EF-Supported Teams: Research & Development Roundup
We all have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season, from the first birthday of the beacon chain, to the successful upgrades over the past year and the incredible progress across the entire Ethereum ecosystem. As a highly productive year draws to a close, there are a few final gifts to deliver in the form of updates from many (15+!!)
blog.ethereum.org
kohweijie.com
kohweijie.com
FC'22 : Program
Financial Cryptography and Data Security is a major international forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration, and debate regarding information assurance, with a specific focus on commercial contexts. The conference covers all aspects of securing transactions and systems. Original works focusing on both fundamental and applied real-world deployments on all aspects surrounding commerce security are solicited.
fc22.ifca.ai
going all in - starkware
dm me to add any resources @natimuril
koopxyz.notion.site
Introducing Plonky2 - Polygon | Blog
Polygon Zero's mission is simple: to use zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum to a billion users, without compromising decentralization or security. Achieving this requires fast and efficient proof systems. Today, we're excited to share Plonky2, a major milestone for zero-knowledge cryptography. Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that is 100x faster than existing alternatives and natively [...]
blog.polygon.technology
