Summary

Week 2 was devoted to preparing the presentation and trip to Cannes for EthCC conference. Week 3 involves attending EthCC events and a few days of work on openVM.

Sunday 29 June, Beam day

Daily event devoted to Beam chain and its roadmap. Currently, there are no specs about beam chain. On the other hand, progress related to post-quantum cryptography was reported quite advanced. A large part of the discussion was devoted to testnets as well. The lack of beam specs implies that benchmarking zkVMs will be carried on the beacon chain. In particular, Ream has developed a beacon chain implementation for testing purposes that we will use. Unnawut (the project proposer) has also asked to create a comparison table for various zkVM features that will allow for an educated decision in the following week.

Monday 30 June, EPF day

Most of the day was devoted to presentations of all fellows who traveled in Cannes. Taking into account Unnawut’s feedback in my talk I presented my basic understanding of how a zkVM works and stated a preliminary plan:

Communicate with other fellows so that we get balanced teams among Grandine’s and Ream’s project
Narrowing down my options to openVM and Zisk and understand the basics of risc0 example already found in Ream’s github repo.

Tuesday 31 June and Wednesday 1 July, EthCC event

I attended two long talks.

Funding research in the ecosystem: Flashbots members gave some talks. They are funding reasearch proposals and I found many interesting ones some of which are (remotely) related to my PhD
The future and current status of eth-magicians and ethresearch

Rest of the week

I started working on openVM by looking into the codebase and trying to compare with the risc0 example