The power of zk is in the palm of your hand! More so than ever, the unique properties of zk are available to developers of all levels via groundbreaking new tools.
I put together a guide through these options that helps break down the key tradeoffs:
I have been spending a lot of my time building on the Fuel ecosystem and although I have started seeing more folks discussing the project, the game-changing technical approach is yet underappreciated. I took some time to write out an explainer:
Attention NY web3 hackers, we are hosting a builder meetup at our new office in NYC on Sunday. Goal is to brainstorm/hack on some creative new apps on top of the modern blockchain tech stack.
Weird experiments highly encouraged!
My first reaction to
@worldcoin
was similar to many of the reactions I have seen from critics on Twitter: ahhh eyeball scanning dystopian Orwellian nightmare! BUT, the problem they were trying to solve was so huge that I could not help but at least dig in.
1/ We've led the $115M round of
@worldcoin
!
Founders
@alexblania
and
@sama
are the perfect duo to scale a privacy-preserving identity protocol for the internet
More on our thesis and addressing the misconceptions below. ↓
The FuelVM is a next-generation smart contract execution environment that optimizes for speed. Contracts are written in Sway, a new rust/solidity-inspired programming language. The BCAP team is building Swaymigo, a smart contract toolbox for Sway devs:
Introducing n-per-epoch, a simple Solidity function modifier that leverages
@worldcoin
's WorldID or any Semaphore anonymity set to rate limit actions on-chain.
On-chain governance systems today are fully transparent at the cost of privacy. A better system could authenticate participants anonymously by verifying a zero-knowledge proof on-chain. I built a sample of such a protocol for any NFT collection.
Attention NY web3 hackers, we are hosting a builder meetup at our new office in NYC on Sunday. Goal is to brainstorm/hack on some creative new apps on top of the modern blockchain tech stack.
Weird experiments highly encouraged!
Introducing my 2023 halloween costume: the human jumbotron. This apparatus displays my face (and a few other modes) to 4 external sides of the cube. Check out the video to see it in action
happy halloween to all those who overdo things
Stoked (or should i say starked) to announce that we led
@RiscZero
's $40m series A! Has been a blast to work alongside this team and have never been more excited about the future of verifiable compute.
Check out some of the ideas I have been experimenting with below 🧵
We've led the $50M Series A financing of
@eigenlayer
!
Founder
@sreeramkannan
is a technical visionary who's revolutionizing our ecosystem.
More on our thesis. ↓
“European diet is just so much better for you, bro”
My daily diet:
3-5 croissants
6-10 espresso
1.5 kilos of cured meat
1 kilo cheese (3:2 ratio)
All the shellfish found in a sea hectare
stick of butter with sugar (brûlée-d)
Olive oil (intravenously)
Sybil is already a problem. As the sophistication of automated agents increases and the scarcity of the resources on the web remains the same, this problem only becomes worse. So what are our options for solving sybil…
Node providers vary in speed across RPC methods depending on their network infrastructure and even the underlying node client software. I built this script to quickly compare the providers' performance on relevant methods to choose the best one for the job
We hosted our first Web3 builder meetup in our new NY office this weekend. Lots of interesting conversations around novel mechanism design, on-chain gaming, and zk-powered Web2 vampire attacks. Looking forward to hosting more events like this in the future!
@chadfowler
im pointing at the pattern I have observed recently where trad web2 auth patterns (ie JWTs, WebAuthN, OAuth, DKIM) are getting support in smart contracts by proving the protocol off chain in zkVM or custom circuits then just verifying on chain.
some projects:
DKIM:
What's the biggest problem facing blockchains today?
That's right... a way to send people physical mail.
The dark ages are over, anon, the Ethereum Postal Service is here!
Biometrics are not used as an authentication mechanism. They are only used one-time during set entry for uniqueness. This means once you are in the WorldID set, none of your actions have any association with your biometrics anymore (thanks zk!).
This is only scratching the surface of the many nuances of the
@worldcoin
+ World ID protocol and I’m excited to discuss some of the concerns with the community as a converted skeptic myself!
@boredGenius
@SuccinctLabs
@RiscZero
performance: its hard to compare these things apples to apples because most of the perf comes from accelerated "precompiles" built for a specific task (ie keccak accelerator). additionally, program size sometimes a way to game the metrics because certain systems are designed to
The Future of Verifiable Computation is Coming
Phase 1: Trusted Setup Ceremony
The ceremony has progressed through 2 of 3 phases and is open to the community.
1⃣ Team ✔️
2⃣ Partner ✔️
3⃣ Community 🟢
Together, we'll enable a future where you can prove anything and verify
Come work on cool stuff with me and the rest of the BCAP team. Great place for exposure to all the innovations happening in the crypto space while working directly with the teams making it happen!
Also, a little on-chain puzzle in there... can you be the first to solve it?
We're hiring software engineers to work with
@sproule_
and the rest of the BCAP research team!
If you're excited about experimenting on the bleeding edges of crypto, this might be for you.
Applicants who solve the puzzle at the bottom get priority 🫡
But if I need to use my iris for using apps or to access coins that must be bad, right? That could incentivize people to harvest my eyes!!
Biometrics ≠ private keys
1/ Unveiling our rebrand and introducing our new department: BCAP Build.
We've been partners to crypto builders since 2013.
Now, we’re doubling down on post-investment support.
🧵 ↓
I got a chance to sit down with
@IAmNickDodson
and
@jadler0
from
@fuellabs_
to talk about the upcoming roadmap and many of the interesting technical differentiators that separate Fuel from the crowd. Don't sleep on this team!
Listen to
@IAmNickDodson
and
@jadler0
open up about Fuel's innovative design, roadmap, potential Fuel L3s, and more.
Enjoy this conversation with
@blockchaincap
Some highlights 🧵👇
KYC? central government issued ID is both non-inclusive (many countries don't have digitally verifiable ID) and centralizing, now THAT sounds Orwellian.
Anonymous gas sponsoring: smart contract with a pool of eth where spending rights are represented by private utxos. This allows users to provide a zk proof to the sponsor contract that doesn’t reveal which account they are, just that they own sufficient utxo to cover gas cost
Wallet and dapp UXs of today are fundamentally limited by the authorization mechanisms of the underlying virtual machine. What account abstraction offers is a programmable way for them to construct their own custom authorization mechanisms.
Account abstraction has seen increased attention in the EVM via ERC4337.
However,
@fuellabs_
VM was designed with AA.
Fuel's predicates are the cleanest and most expressive version of in-protocol AA.
Check out
@sproule_
's deep dive into the technicals.
here's the cool part:
as a permissionless network everyone on world chain can submit transactions, but verified humans will get prioritized blockspace
verified addresses will also get an allowance of some free gas for casual transactions
Iris (this is different from a retina 😉): sufficient entropy, non-invasive, minimal information revealed. People reveal their iris every day by walking around with their eyes open, not a common .
Continuing our mentor drop, we'd like to welcome Brianna Montgomery of
@EigenLayer
and Ryan Sproule of
@blockchaincap
!
@zkBri
leads strategy at EigenLayer and
@sproule_
heads the engineering team at Blockchain Capital. Solar Eclipse Accelerator builders will be able to glean
Biometrics are viable if there is a great enough source of entropy to avoid collisions at global scale AND these biometrics aren’t leaking dangerous information.
It’s funny how we “aren’t supposed to look“ at literally the most interesting thing in our sky. I reject this solar ignorance philosophy. I’ve been looking at the sun everyday for months and I’ve noticed my hearing has improved dramatically
DNA: sufficient entropy, extremely invasive, unnecessarily reveals extra information (race, genetic disease, etc), problematic to reveal to even a very small group.
cortisol can jump up to 9x from acute stress response events (like a jump scare). The average baseline cortisol levels at mid day are around 15 mcg/L in humans. When this national alert went off on all our phones, the 331 million Americans released a total 200 billion micrograms
I have built my first frame on
@farcaster_xyz
! A shared game where users are fighting against (or with) a deadly virus spreading across the platform!
Check it out:
Any devs want to pitch in on a new prototype concept?
"WarrenSwap" - a wrapper over Uniswap where every time you do a trade, it sends a custom lobbying letter to Warren letting her know you were super informed thanks to blockchain transparency:
ZK TFHE (wip) - Run the
@zama_fhe
FHE protocol inside zk. Get all the benefits of fully homomorphic encryption (privacy) while having assertions that the computation was not tampered with.
oh sorry ill unfollow him right away i was a fan of his leadership of the fremen and casting the harkonnen off arrakis but i had no idea he set forth a holy war spreading across the universe like an unquenchable fire, a warrior religion with fanatical legions chanting his name
Attention devs @ ethcc. If you are a software engineer that has interest in building AND investing around blockchain technologies, say hi in my dms to coordinate connecting irl
@fuellabs_
sees where the puck is going in scaling blockchains. Consensus is not the bottleneck, we need to scale at the execution layer by going beyond the EVM.
quiz: Is it possible (via a proof or directly) for an L2 smart contract to know if its own state transitions have been posted to the L1 and at what block height?
I had a few major takeaways from this experience: 1. in this space, simply paying attention and some basic knowledge of how to read block explorers can mean millions of dollars. 2. todays runtime security + disaster response around smart contracts is extremely nascent.
ZK Sentiment Analysis - verifiably prove some sentiment score produced in a Risc Zero program. This could allow a decentralized content network that handles certain forms of content curation in a fully transparent and trustless manor
Sway is based on Rust, which was new to me before starting with Sway. This added little to no friction for me picking up the basics of Sway, and inversely, helped get me going on Rust! (wish I had done so ages ago)
@samrags_
@adamscochran
@boredGenius
thinking about a smart contract that controls the state of my Smart Lock. Can run periodic on-chain auctions for the right to open my front door.
This is a paradigm shift in how we think about the utility of the chain.