This is a moderated platform for members of the applied ZK community to discuss constructions and ideas.
zkresear.ch operates with a few goals in mind:
- Push contributors in our ecosystem to freely share new ideas, rather than keeping new ideas “under wraps.”
- Facilitate cross-team and cross-domain collaboration.
- Build a persistent repository of long-form technical writing.
- Create a new top-of-funnel for attracting and recruiting new talent into the space.
The ideal zkresear.ch post lives somewhere between “long Discord message” and “0xPARC blog post.” Many hackmd notes that have been written historically by community members would be well-suited as zkresear.ch posts. We explicitly encourage participants to post long-form content that is not super polished - this is meant to be a home for even half-baked ideas, where you can get rapid feedback!
Here are a few examples of notes which could have been zkresear.ch posts:
- zkNFTs by gubsheep (December ‘21)
- Poor Person BLS by Kobi (Feb ‘22)
- Batch-ECDSA for optimistic rollups by Yi and others (May ‘22)
- ZK Security Problems and Methods by gubsheep (March ‘22)
- Trusted Setup Implementations by 0xSage (July ‘22)
- circom ECC optimizations by Wen-Ding and others (April ‘22)
- BLS multiplicity by Nalin (August ‘22)
Here are some cases for which you might want to write a zkresear.ch post:
- You’re proposing an idea for a useful new cryptographic scheme or primitive (or optimization/enhancement of a scheme or primitive) that you’ve thought through pretty carefully but haven’t rigorously analyzed.
- Ex: Poor Person BLS, efficient circom-ECDSA, ZK Email, BLS multiplicity
- Such a post could become a reference for a new primitive, until a more formal spec or standard is adopted
- You’re proposing an architecture for a new class/pattern of {ZK, MPC, etc.}-enabled application.
- Ex: README of EthDataMarketplace, Trustless Bitcoin Bridge with WE
- You’re writing an explainer on a research question: its motivation, relevant work so far, and a possible approach or approaches (and possibly comparing them).
- Ex: ZK Security Problems and Methods, any of the four subsections of the ZK-ID Part 2 post
- Such a post could become a temporarily “canonical” overview outlining a certain research direction
- You’re aggregating different implementations of some infrastructure, and comparing and contrasting these implementations.
- Ex: Trusted Setup Implementations, benchmarking implementations of the same core circuits across different proving systems, benchmarking poseidon merkle trees
There shouldn’t be any issues using LaTeX - but please let us know if you run into anything wonky. For example, here’s Euler’s totient theorem:
Note that for display mode LaTeX, you’ll need to put your expression on a new line, in between the $$s.
Lastly, to bootstrap this forum with a high signal-to-noise ratio, this forum will initially be accessible only to whitelisted users. If you or someone on your team needs access, please let an admin know.