Educational program providing training on blockchain technology, Ethereum educational material, and financial literacy to vulnerable communities across 14 Latin American countries.
Add Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) support to the Kurtosis Kubernetes featureset, to allow devops and others to restart instances for enhanced testing and shadowforks. This is also a precursor to support syncing public devnets and testnets.
Series of articles describing the current proposer-builder separation (PBS) landscape and the latest developments around improving PBS and ePBS, such as optimistic relays, pepc-boost, MEV-Boost+, and MEV-Boost++.
Research on the effects that Stackelberg attacks can have on miner extractable value, to illuminate the underlying complexity of games on the blockchain and emphasize the care needed in designing good transaction fee mechanisms.
Consensus layer
Towards a Holistic Formalization of Ethereum’s Economics
Building a macroeconomic model of Ethereum with a focus on staking and understanding equilibria and dynamics. The goal is to better understand the effects of liquid staking and similar constructions (e.g. restaking) in order to minimize their undesirable effects on e.g. stake concentration.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Acceleration Program Ecosystem Development & Coordination
Streamlining the Acceleration Program’s processes and scaling the educational curriculum of the ZK Contribution Program to provide robust, open-source learning resources to the community.
Chiquito is a high-level structured language for implementing zero knowledge proof (ZKP) applications. Most ZKP domain specific languages (DSLs) are based on writing constraints, witness generation, and some abstraction for DRY like templates or gadgets. Chiquito allows the developer to think in more high-level and structured abstractions than most ZKP DSLs, while not sacrificing performance.
Implement an efficient batch verification of ECDSA signatures using P-256, as part of a larger project to develop a circuit in a user-friendly DSL and use aggregation- or recursion-friendly proof systems to output succinct proof of verification.
Contract wallet using emails that allows users to send crypto assets simply by sending emails without any actions from recipients (powered by ZK Email).
Research on the security of algebraic hash functions and Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity (FRI) and developing a curriculum for learning the necessary mathematics to understand ZK cryptography and its primitives.
Project deployed at Devconnect Istanbul that utilizes NFC chips to give out ZK-friendly Baby JubJub signatures to participants as a form of provable private data, providing an educational experience about the possibility of personal control over private data using ZKPs.
Research on multi-party computation (MPC), especially Threshold ECDSA, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and publicly auditable MPC, which will be summarized into explainer articles.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
NFC x ZK Development
Supported the technical development of PSE‘s Devconnect Istanbul NFC x ZK activations, including Jubmoji.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
On-Chain AAA for DePin
Improving and deploying a dapp that represents the on-chain authentication, administration, and authorization (AAA) for decentralized internet networks.
P-2556 WebAuthn Circom implementation, which will be integrated in a smart contract wallet that validates WebAuthn ES256 attestation within a zkSNARK verifier.
Elaborated on existing documentation of FHE over the torus (T-FHE) to make the materials more accessible to newcomers with little mathematical background.
Exploring the applicability of existing and potentially new torus-based cryptography techniques to determine the efficiency of Whisk and Curdleproofs when instantiated in the target group G_T, in terms of both time and space.
AA browser focusing on maximal extractable value (MEV) analysis and data visualization that will show basic AA statistics and provide analyses of the bundler transaction frontrun and AA MEV incidences.
Developer-centric wallet that has the usual functionality of a crypto wallet, as well as additional built-in tooling to speed up builders’ development workflows.
Continued development of Solhint, an open-source Solidity linter.
Execution layer
Account Abstraction Developer Team
Supporting the AA developer team’s continuous work on ERC-4337 and its implementation, infrastructure, documentation, supporting the ecosystem, RIP-7560 (native AA), and additional AA research.
Investigating the design of a mechanism to align the Aggregator and User incentives in AA, in which the Aggregator should perform as much aggregation as possible and the User should pay the lowest fee necessary to compensate the Aggregator for its service.
African digital repatriation project that seeks to find a mechanism to bring African artifacts (and the ticket revenue they generate) closer to their communities of origin, as part of the Next Billion Fellowship Cohort #3.
Grants round to support the growth of local Ethereum communities, initiatives, and projects in Southeast Asia.
General growth & support
Technical Challenges in Enterprise Ethereum
Continued exploration of issues and solutions for enterprise users of Ethereum in areas including decentralized identity, NIST standards alignment, Baseline protocol specification, and layer 2 standards and specifications.
Financial vehicle allowing UNICEF to receive, hold, and disburse cryptocurrency to increase their operational efficiency, cost effectiveness, and transparency.
Academic blockchain research initiative based at Cornell Tech with researchers across multiple universities with the goal of bringing the science of blockchains to the forefront and delivering blockchain innovation in code.
Common good infrastructure for coordination between security professionals, protocols, and the community to collaborate on and launch ambitious and impactful security initiatives.