Sponsorship of BlockchainsForHacks, an ideation challenge for high school and college students to create innovative projects using blockchain technology.
Game theorietic research completed by a group of Stanford students on using zk-SNARKs to construct “incomplete information” environments where users can keep a private state while publicly submitting verifiably valid actions. Dark Forest was created to demonstrate the capability of this framework to create complex environmental and strategic dynamics in decentralized gaming.
Method for preventing spam when using Semaphore, a zero-knowledge gadget for anonymous proof of membership. RLN (Rate Limiting Nullifier)reveals the private key of an account signaling above an acceptable rate, which another member can use to remove them from the group.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
ETH Summer
Program for students to learn about and build on Ethereum, including contributions to 4byte.directory.
Continued work on PLONK, including delivery of Ultra-PLONK, which adds PLOOKUP gates; development of a domain-specific language and compiler; and prover upgrades.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Blind Find v1
Peer-to-peer network allowing private peer search: one user can locate another via provable pathways between multiple peers without revealing any information about the connection.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Quadratic Dollar Homepage
Smart contracts and web UI for a Quadratic Dollar Homepage, inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage. Users determine the prominence of images on a web page via quadratic voting, using Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) for collusion resistance.
Improvements to Hardhat (formerly known as Buildler), a development environment for compiling, deploying, testing, and debugging Ethereum software, built and maintained by Nomic Labs.
Developer experience & tooling
formalize.eth
Verified compiler from a subset of Vyper to YUL, written in Coq.
Developer experience & tooling
IPLD, Object Signing and Encryption
Joint funded with Protocol Labs: research by Textile and 3box into cryptographically securing data in IPLD, the linked data framework used by IPFS, to enable scalable and interactive dapps using both IPFS and Ethereum.
Continued maintenance and improvements to the Web3j library including Solidity library dependency management, smart contract migration support, Web3j Solidity debugger enhancements amd integration for IntelliJ/Android Studio, and Eth2 support.
Testnet and experimentation to understand the impact, including uncle rates and block propagation times, of larger block sizes resulting from implementation of EIP-1559, reduction in calldata gas cost, and/or increase in gas limit.
Testing, including creation and deployment of a set of sample programs on various machines, operating systems and EVMs, to estimate gas costs and dependencies for EVM computation, with the goal of addressing imbalanced gas costs for EVM instructions.
Censorship-resistant block creation mechanism for Optimistic Rollups wherein the right to create a new block to is auctioned to the person willing to burn the most ETH.
