ZKPs: Privacy, Identity, Infrastructure, & More

A SNARKs Tale: A Story of Building SNARK Solutions on Mainnet

We tell the story of deploying a real-world solution using SNARKs as a core primitive; highlighting many cutting edge SNARKs and their limitations in the hope to identify opportunities for the community to make Ethereum more SNARK friendly, creating a diverse ecosystem where SNARKs built upon a variety of unique primitives can thrive.

A ZoKrates Update

zkSNARKs are becoming a cornerstone of decentralised technologies. Yet they are often considered impenetrable to newcomers. We will present an update on the ZoKrates toolbox, a set of tools aimed at making developing zkSNARK applications easier using a high-level language instead of handcrafted circuits.

Are Your Zero-Knowledge Proofs Correct?

Recent efforts have made it possible to write zero-knowledge proofs without having deep expertise in cryptography. Nevertheless, these proofs can be subtly wrong and result in situations where the application erroneously “verifies” bogus information from an attacker. In this talk, we will give an overview of our research that can be used to reason about the correctness of zero-knowledge proofs and highlight some of the open-source tools that Veridise has developed to find bugs in ZK circuits.

Anonymous Signalling on Ethereum

Semaphore is a protocol, designed to be a simple and generic privacy layer for Ethereum DApps. Using zero knowledge, Ethereum users can prove their membership of a group and send signals such as votes or endorsements without revealing their original identity. The talk will describe the protocol, the main concepts and some use cases. A simple demo will also likely be used to show how Semaphore can be used to create DApps and solve real problems in the ecosystem.

Building a Unirep ecosystem

What does an identity ecosystem built on top of Unirep look like? Learn how reputation works in a system where participants are anonymous and how it can be used to build applications.

Building Privacy-Protecting Infrastructure

In this talk we'll go over how to build privacy-protecting infrastructure. What is it, why do we need it and how can we build it? We'll look at Waku, the communication layer for Web3. We'll see how it uses ZKPs to incentivize and protect the Waku network. We'll also look at Zerokit, a library that makes it easier to use ZKPs in different environments. After this talk, I hope you'll better understand the importance of privacy-protecting infrastructure and how we can build it.

Designing Public Goods Using ZKPs

In this talk, designers reflect on the common threads that run through a constellation of tools and applications built with ZKPs. We share mental models being explored and strategies for fluidly navigating an evolving space. By offering real examples from our design workshops and dApps, we will explore the question – How might we materialize abstract concepts to enable internal and external teams to build with ZKPs?

ELI5: Zero Knowledge

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Improving Performance of Provable Computations Using Rust

We reimplemented the Cairo VM in Rust to increase its performance. We will show an MVP that is between 10 and 100 times faster than the previous Python implementation. Executing a program with this VM outputs a trace which can later be used to generate a Proof of the program's execution. Combining Zero Knowledge Proofs with Rollups allow us to have scalability without compromising the security of blockchains.

Interep: An Identity Bridge from Web2 to Web3

Interep aims to provide an identity solution for Ethereum users by bridging from an established digital identity source, typically a web2 platform. The product provides an identity layer in an application stack, and integrates with a privacy-focussed layer using the Semaphore framework. Interep can be used to to qualify users, or as an anti-sybil service.

Introduction to Circom2.0

The workshop aims to explain the basics of Circom2.0, the new features respect Circom1.0, the tool stack and explain a simple project about the following topics: - Zk-Rollup + Mixer: Put a mixer in the withdraw of Hermez1.0. - Polygon ID: Explain some of the Circom circuits of polygonID and how can be used. - NFT project: A project that aims to airdrop an NFT to some address that accomplish certain conditions without reveal the address.

Little Things I’ve Learned in Developing Halo2 Circuits

We will share some Plonkish circuit designing patterns we learned during the zkevm development.

Non-interactive, Unique Nullifiers: The Key to The Next Era of ZK

ZK app systems are being held back because there isn't an anonymous way to prove that you aren't double claiming/double posting. In this talk, we explore the variety of nullifiers and present a new signature scheme that would enable things like zk airdrops or other zk systems that require uniqueness.

Penumbra: Building a Private DEX with ZKPs and Threshold Cryptography

ZKPs allow transactions to prove their state transition was valid, without revealing anything about what it was. But this isn't enough, because useful applications require shared state, which ZKPs can't provide. In this talk, we'll describe how to break this barrier by combining ZKPs with flow encryption, a new threshold crypto primitive, to allow private interaction with public shared state, and how Penumbra uses this technique to build a private DEX.

Private Value Transfer in 10 Lines

Demonstration of how drawing from a standard cryptographic library can reduce zero knowledge circuit implementations to simple programs of as few as 3 lines. The Join split circuit is a popular circuit that originated from Zcash and is being used in Aztec. Using the Aztec Noir standard library, we reconstruct the join split in 10 lines hiding all of the circuit complexities involved.

Private Exchange on ZKOPRU

Give a presentation about private-exchange application on zkopru which consists of three different zero knowledge protocols including socialist millionaire problem, blind find, and zkopru. In the presentation, I will show how the private exchange works.

Public Goods and Experiments, the journey of Zkopru

Zkopru is one of the inital projects of EF's PSE team. During the development and experiements PSE team could establish the own ethos for the public goods and experiments. This talk introduces Zkopru project's journey from the beginning to its sunset of the 1st version. Also it introduces the achievements and the future plans.

Public-Private Composability

Learn about the challenges of designing a private execution layer for Ethereum. Previously, smart contract execution (L1 & L2) has been fully public. Some apps provide basic private functionality for a single private state (e.g. privacy coins). We'll discuss ways to execute general private and public state changes across multiple smart contracts in one transaction, within a zk-rollup. This unlocks programmable private smart contracts.

Rate Limiting Nullifier

RLN (Rate limiting nullifier) is a construct based on zero-knowledge proofs that enable spam prevention mechanisms for decentralized, anonymous environments.

Recursive ZK Applications and Affordances

Recursive zkSNARKs are poised to hit production in the next two years. We discuss how to think about the new affordances and potential applications that recursion unlocks for both scalability and privacy. These include proofs-of-proofs-of-knowledge like ETHdos, on-the-fly "programmable" SNARKs, incrementally verifiable computation, distributed proving, and tactics for reducing verification cost or proof size.

Scalability is Boring, Privacy is Dead: ZK-Proofs, What are They Good for?

The first mainstream uses of zero-knowledge(zk) proofs were for private payments in systems like Zcash and then scalability. In both, we hide data to improve privacy or validation costs. But private payments, unfortunately, have seen limited direct demand. And scalability needs faster proofs but not even zero-knowledge. What are practical zk proofs good for? This talk considers zk proofs + blockchains as a tool both for cryptocurrency and broader applications.

Scaling Privacy with Starlight

Five years ago, at DevCon in Prague, EY took the wraps off Nightfall, our open source public domain approach to privacy. Now it's live on Ethereum as a layer 2 privacy-enabled ZK-optimistic roll-up solution called Polygon Nightfall. That's only half the story though - we also need private smart contracts. This talk will cover our roadmap to that end, including our newest tool in development (also open source) called Starlight.

Towards a Feature-Complete and Backwards-Compatible Privacy Layer for Ethereum

Eth EOAs and token standards (ERC20/721/1155) are terrible for end-user privacy. Can we build an alternative to them that preserves the existing functionalities while providing meaningful anonymity and privacy? This talk explores the functionality requirements of Eth user accounts, such as asset use authorization, asset & identity provenance, what privacy means in the areas of DeFi, NFTs, and identity, as well as concrete ways to build such an ecosystem.

Vampire, a Novel, Cheap to Verify, zkSNARK

In this talk, I would like to introduce Vampire (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/406) -- a novel zkSNARK that has the smallest communication complexity and on-chain verification cost of all known updatable zkSNARKs.

What to know about Zero Knowledge

Zero Knowledge, aka ZK, has become a catch-all term to represent much of "modern" or "advanced" cryptography -- especially cryptography that's relevant to the future of blockchains. In this panel, we will share our perspectives on ZK -- how to think about it, what to look out for, and what to focus in on. We'll also discuss how ZK may alter and complement Ethereum's own future.

Why We Need Threshold FHE for Blockchains

There is a fundamental limit to building privacy-preserving applications in ZK. For example, we do not know how to replicate applications such as Uniswap and Aave in zero knowledge where complete privacy for users is achieved. This talk introduces how threshold FHE can help fill the gap ZK tech leave us desiring--privacy for shared-state applications.

ZK Application Design Patterns

We build a brief mental model of zkSNARKs and give an overview of application design patterns and techniques for ZK-enabled apps. We discuss the overall landscape of proving environments and applications of each: the affordances of browser proving, mobile proving, server proving, GPU proving, etc. We'll go over the current state of the art and key benchmarks, and how improvements across the landscape can unlock new applications of both privacy and succinctness.

ZK Proof Performance and Security Characteristics

ZK tech gets almost mystifying treatment from both regular users & devs. However, beyond the moon math, quantifiable differences between the zkps deployed in the Ethereum ecosystem can help users and builders understand what they are interacting with. Join me as I explain our methodology for collecting and quantifying these differences in a format digestible for the non-math professor.

ZKPs and "Programmable Cryptography"

Historically, cryptographic protocols have been built special-purpose for specific kinds of claims or information hiding mechanisms. zkSNARKs and other new cryptographic tools move us to a world of "general-purpose" cryptography, where we have expressive languages to express claims about digital identity, reputation, and more. We discuss a high-level framework for thinking about where and why ZK and related technologies might (or might not) be useful for digital applications.