241215 - ZKPunk's ZK Insights

Highlights

Google Quantum AI: Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip

New chip demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer

https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

Your definitive guide to zkVMs

The goal of this article is to not only provide objective performance metrics but also talk about the subjective experience while we were building using this toolkit.

https://x.com/Kautukkundan/status/1867589273446232368

Introducing the fhEVM Coprocessor: Run FHE smart contracts on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM chains

Zama’s fhEVM Coprocessor enables confidential smart contracts on EVM chains using FHE, ensuring data privacy, scalability, and composability, supporting applications like private stablecoins, governance, and tokenization, all programmable via Solidity.

https://www.zama.ai/post/fhevm-coprocessor

Brave: Commitments and zero-knowledge attestations over TLS 1.3: DiStefano protocol

Brave’s DiStefano protocol enables zero-knowledge proofs over TLS 1.3, ensuring secure data commitments, privacy-preserving attestations, and efficient integration for applications like age verification and anti-fraud checks.

https://brave.com/blog/distefano/

Scribe: Low-memory SNARKs via Read-Write Streaming

Scribe!Scribe is a new low-memory SNARK that is able to prove arbitrarily-large circuits while using minimal memory.

zk, verifiability, and privacy projects on Solana

https://x.com/solana/status/1865799989663805464

A Technical Dive into Jolt: The RISC-V zkVM

The article provides a detailed explanation of how Jolt zkVM works, covering instruction lookup, offline memory checking, and R1CS constraints to verify RISC-V program correctness using zero-knowledge proofs.

https://www.zksecurity.xyz/blog/posts/how-jolt-works/

Improving the Security of the Jolt zkVM

The article uncovers critical security flaws in Jolt zkVM, including execution trace validation, output checking, and memory layout issues, detailing their fixes.

https://www.zksecurity.xyz/blog/posts/jolt-findings/

Mathematicians Uncover a New Way to Count Prime Numbers

The article details how mathematicians used rough primes and Gowers norms to prove the infinitude of specific prime forms, marking a breakthrough in number theory.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-uncover-a-new-way-to-count-prime-numbers-20241211/

2024 ZK Market Map

Made by Electric Capital, there are five major directions, including: applications, protocols, developer tools and services, interoperability and middleware, and core infrastructure, with the technical difficulty increasing in sequence.