ZK Industry News: January 27th to February 2nd, 2025
✨ ZK-Newsflash! ✨
Each week, we're bringing you industry highlights so you can stay aligned with the latest developments in ZK.
Here's what happened from January 27th to February 2nd, 2025.
Mina offers an update on the status of bridges in the Mina Protocol ecosystem
This update includes information on:
✅ Aligned State Bridge
✅ Ethereum ←→ Mina Token Bridge
Aligned can verify Mina’s proofs and post the results to Ethereum, enabling a Mina → Ethereum state bridge, thanks to the LambdaClass bridge work.
For more information, you can check out our blog post.
Heard you wanted an update on the status of bridges in the Mina Protocol ecosystem, check it out 👇
— Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 (@MinaProtocol) January 28, 2025
Aligned State Bridge@alignedlayer verifies different kinds of proofs on Ethereum, while improving verification speed and costs. Soon, this will include verifying Mina’s Kimchi…
StarkWare creates a Bitcoin exploration team
New use cases for STARKs are emerging everywhere, and StarkWare has announced that they are creating a team to explore use cases in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Some projects they’re exploring in this context are:
✅ Raito
✅ Shinigami
✅ Pontis
✅ Bitcoin-circle-stark
✅ And more
Check out the announcement by Abdel Bakhta, Head of Ecosystem at StarkWare:
👋 Yosh, Bitcoiners!
— A₿del ∞/21M (@dimahledba) January 27, 2025
We created a Bitcoin exploration team in @StarkWareLtd.
I am looking for Bitcoiners to join us in this team to explore Bitcoin (and symbiotic ecosystems: Lightning Network, Cashu, Nostr) x STARKs use cases.
Right now we have 2 open positions in this team.…
Announcing Ethproofs: an L2BEAT for zkVMs
Ethproofs is a new collaborative project that aggregates data from various zkVM teams to provide a comprehensive overview of proven blocks.
As a complement, the website also includes an educational section covering foundational concepts like zkVMs, SNARKs, use cases, and more.
Announcing https://t.co/60HiBESi0g to boost Ethereum SNARKification!
— Ethproofs (@eth_proofs) January 27, 2025
Ethproofs is the L2beat of zkVMs—launching today with @SuccinctLabs, @ProjectZKM, @Snarkify_ZKP 🚀
Pi Squared shares new work on benchmarking zkVMs
They evaluate the performance of zkVMs in validating mathematical proofs of on-chain transactions, covering seven zkVMs:
✅ RiscZero (@RiscZero)
✅ Jolt (@a16zcrypto)
✅ zkWasm (@DelphinusLab)
✅ Cairo (@StarkWareLtd)
✅ Nexus (@NexusLabs)
✅ SP1 (@SuccinctLabs)
✅ Lurk (@argumentxyz)
🧵1/3
— Pi Squared (@Pi_Squared_Pi2) January 29, 2025
In the process of constructing our Proof of Proof system, we investigated and tested a number of different zkVMs. In our latest blog post, we go over our findings with the following zkVMs:
RiscZero (@RiscZero)
Jolt (@a16zcrypto)
zkWasm (@DelphinusLab)
Cairo (@StarkWareLtd)… pic.twitter.com/kkqYRoPsd9
Fermah announces they can generate proofs for Stwo
Stwo is a blazing-fast prover developed by StarkWare.
Using Circle STARKs, which unlocks the efficient prime field M31, Stwo enables extremely fast and cheap zero-knowledge proof generation.
Fermah, a universal proof market, can now generate Stwo proofs—making these proofs more accessible to developers.
Fermah can generate proofs for Stwo, @StarkWareLtd's ZK prover pic.twitter.com/TtcOLJaUcX
— Fermah (@fermah_xyz) January 27, 2025
The first episode of "From Zero to Knowledge" is released
Last week, we announced the collaboration between House of ZK and Vanishree Rao to launch an in-depth video series on ZK, and the first lesson is officially live!
This episode explores the question: What is a Zero-Knowledge Proof?
Check it out to learn how this technology is shaping the future of privacy, scaling, and security.
In the first-ever episode of From Zero to Knowledge, @vanishree_rao, a cryptography expert with over 15 years of experience and Founder of @fermah_xyz, introduces the series and explores the question: What is a Zero-Knowledge Proof?
— House of ZK (@HouseofZK) January 27, 2025
From Zero to Knowledge is an educational… pic.twitter.com/i5lbwyEqDg
Abstract announces its mainnet launch
Designed to propagate crypto everywhere, Abstract is a ZK-rollup built using ZKsync's ZK Stack to deliver fast, secure, and user-friendly blockchain experiences.
This is a new beginning for crypto’s consumer era.@AbstractChain, built to bring crypto to the masses, leverages @zksync and its groundbreaking ZK Stack to deliver fast, secure, and user-friendly blockchain experiences.
— ZKsync (∎, ∆) (@zksync) January 27, 2025
Enter The Portal 👉🏻 https://t.co/Li2Sp8gTuN https://t.co/COf5iGhthm pic.twitter.com/ADJirnhtpH
How to Prove False Statements: Practical Attacks on Fiat-Shamir
The Fiat-Shamir transform is used to convert general interactive protocols into non-interactive ones. It is known to be sound in the random oracle model. However, when instantiating the random oracle using a concrete hash function, the authors found examples of protocols in which the transformation is not sound.
This highlights the need for the cryptographic community to closely examine the security— or potential vulnerabilities— of Fiat-Shamir or other protocols used in practice. The paper was presented by Ron Rothblum, Lev Soukhanov, and Dmitry Khovratovich.
1/ Excited, but frankly quite worried, about a new work with the wonderful @levs57
— Ron Rothblum (@ronrothblum) January 27, 2025
and @Khovr: https://t.co/MWF2MiuZiz
We break soundness of a standard protocol (essentially commit to witness and run GKR) by constructing a circuit for which we can prove a false statement.
DewTwo: a new transparent PCS
DewTwo is the first Polynomial Commitment Scheme (PCS) for multilinear polynomials with a transparent setup, efficient verification, super small proofs (4.5kb), and quasi-linear prover time.
This work was presented by Alireza Shirzad, Benedikt Bünz, Tushar Mopuri, and Sriram Sridhar.
Excited to share our new work, DewTwo!
— Alireza Shirzad (@alrshirzad) January 28, 2025
DewTwo is the smallest known transparent pcs (with a 4.5 KB eval proof) built solely from falsifiable assumptions in groups of unknown order.
A joint work with @benediktbuenz, Tushar, and Sriram.
Link: https://t.co/tlaQn0F1ey https://t.co/qleBKRJ1hz pic.twitter.com/Og27dqf9kG
KZH and KZH-fold: a new PCS and a new pairing-based folding scheme
This work introduces:
✅ KZH, a polynomial commitment scheme that has sublinear verification, sublinear proof size, and efficient opening proof generation and the commitment consists of a single group element.
✅ KZH-fold is a pairing-based folding scheme with sublinear communication size and constant recursive overhead.
The paper is co-authored by George Kadianakis, Benedikt Bünz, Arantxa Zapico, and Hossein Hafezi.
🚀 Excited to share fresh work with a heavyweight team: @benediktbuenz @arantxazapico and @RandomString00!
— George Kadianakis (@asn_d6) January 31, 2025
KZH-fold is a pairing-based folding scheme with sublinear communication size and constant recursive overhead.
Link: https://t.co/7iCXUNMtD0 pic.twitter.com/UU2O0ojmx9
Stay tuned: 🐦 Twitter | 🗨️ Telegram | 👾 Discord | 🌐 Website | 📝 Manifesto
