Background

In the previous weeks I went through

  • the Moonmath Manual to ZK-SNARKs by Least Authority. I went through it briefly, unfortunately, without having time to work out the examples/exercises which I find very useful. It is self-contained with very few prerequisites in math and cryptography. The main outcome is that the reader becomes capable of computing a pen-and-paper example of a SNARK proof.

  • the book Practical Vim by Drew Neil. The book progresses by examples in the form of tips that come from real life editing. There are six parts, each one covers a different topic: modes, files, motions, registers, patterns, tools. I went through the first few i.e. modes, files, a bit of motions.

Fast typists benefit the most from Vim’s efficiency. I am not one of them, so I use edclub to train.

Finally, I decided to host the weekly updates on gitlab. I used jekyll and bundler to create static html websites. All the information can be found in jekyll’s tutorial and gitlab.

Epf projects

I am interested in enhancing security and decentralisation of Ethereum with the use of cryptography. A non-exhaustive list of projects that I would like to work on

  • EIP-7805 (FOCIL): Fork-choice enforced Inclusion Lists aim at enhancing censorship resistance during the construction of the transaction block. This achieved by ensuring that, valid, transactions will be included in the block under construction by creating inclusion lists. There are plenty of things to learn because the implementation includes many changes in various parts of the consensus layer.

  • Benchmarking zkVMs: I don’t know the details of each implementation of zkVM but I find them interesting due to the scaling opportunities they offer to L1. Benchmarking various zkVMs will allow me to dive into various codes and expose me to the technicalities of each implementation. Additionally, I would greatly benefit from the overview of the zkVM sector.

  • Exploring Distributed Validator Technology (DVT): DVT allows decentralization of key generation and validation. Both the high level specs and technical specs are written in Python which is the language that I know the best. The goal of the project is to assess Grandine’s compatibility. I think that my background is well suited for this project due to the emphasis on reports and bibliography.