Technical educational content related to ZK, cryptography, and blockchains.
Technical content
The future of crypto is increasingly multi-chain. Blockchains are a powerful new platform for developers to build decentralized and trustless applications, but their properties place limits on scalability. To address this, we have seen an explosion in the number of blockchains, which has increased the global supply of blockspace and
Technical content
Aligned is a ZK verification layer for Ethereum. But what does a ZK verification layer do? Why is it needed? Read on to find out! Ethereum is achieving scalability through a rollup-centric roadmap. There are two types of rollups: optimistic and ZK. Basically, we move execution to rollups, which inherit
Technical content
Aligned is designed to verify every proof system. Groth16 was one of the first efficient proof systems. It's used by projects like Zcash, Worldcoin, RISC Zero, and SP1 by Succinct Labs. At the core of Groth16 lie pairing-friendly elliptic curves, such as BN254 and BLS12-381. These curves allow
Technical content
Aligned is designed to verify zk proofs cheaply, with high throughput and low latency. However, any existing mechanism that can guarantee computation integrity can be used in Aligned. For example, trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) like SGX, can also provide an efficient way to guarantee a computation was done correctly. This
Technical content
In recent months, we have witnessed the development and enhancement of general proving virtual machines such as Risc0, Valida, Jolt, and SP1. These innovations allow users to write ordinary code in languages like Rust or C and generate proofs demonstrating the integrity of computations. This evolution is poised to transform
Technical content
Elliptic curve pairings play an important role in Ethereum’s Proof of Stake and in proof systems such as Groth16 and Plonk. They allow us to perform some sort of encrypted multiplication, crucial to aggregatable signatures and some polynomial commitment schemes. However, pairings seem shrouded in mystery and complexity. Read
Technical content
The Sumcheck protocol is an efficient tool to develop succinct arguments. It is relied upon by many proof systems, such as Lasso/Jolt by a16z crypto, HyperPlonk, Binius, Spartan, and GKR. Sumcheck was first proposed by Lund, Fortnow, Karloff, & Nisan in 1992. The sumcheck protocol is an interactive protocol
Technical content
SNARKs have gained considerable attention recently due to their broad utility in areas such as blockchain scalability, identity mechanisms, verifiable machine learning, and fighting against misinformation and fake news. We see new developments daily, but SNARKS have been around for a long time. SNARKs allow one party, the prover, to
Technical content
Authors: Roberto Catalán and Federico Carrone Bridges are generally insecure and economically inefficient. They exhibit an asymmetry between users and bridge operators, where users can easily lose funds. We propose a bridge design that is simple, modular, and utilizes multi-storage proofs and the native messaging system between Ethereum and Layer