Privacy & Scaling Explorations : What We Do and How to Collaborate

foreign [Music] thanks everyone for coming actually who's from the EF here okay not everyone that's good all right uh hi my name is Torah and I'm working for the privacy and scaling Explorations team at ethereum foundation and in these slides I will talk about what we do in our team and how you can get involved before I start I would like to get a sense for the room so please raise your hand if you have if you have used a ZK powered application in the past nice that's like 30 that's good um and who has written code related to zero knowledge proofs one two three and two are from our team one is our granted okay um and who would be able to uh like tell a relative about zero knowledge proof and explain like high level what azkp does okay 20 great nice so let's get started the privacy and scaling Explorations team is one of the larger teams at the ethereum foundation and what we do is we explore what can be done with zero knowledge proofs what what type of applications can be built so we we are not building proof systems ourselves we use the existing proof systems to build applications on top and this space is really exciting rapidly evolving right now um especially due to some recent advancements in like engineering and academic work such as Planck and pluck up uh much more complex use cases are possible uh just recently and so it's a really good time if you already had an itch to get involved to get involved now so the what we do in our team usually usually starts with a circuit a circuit is a description for the zkp system to tell it what it should be proving about so we have a bunch of guys in our team that are deeply familiar with ckps and they understand what type of circuits could be useful and we build these circuits on top of these circuits we often built what we call gadgets or Primitives so these are tools or libraries that allow you as a non-zk Savvy developer to integrate the specific functionality that the circuit provides into an application um yeah and sometimes we also build like user-facing applications on top of these Gadgets in order to like showcase to the ecosystem how this can be used um on the on the on the side we also do some other things such as education so we do like blog posts and workshops uh to help people um get up to speed with ckps um one thing that we do quite a lot as well is Grants so we work a lot with the ecosystem support program and that's the reason why I'm invited here today and in the second part of this presentation I will show you a little bit how you can get involved and get a grant with us so this slide is sort of the Black Box explanation just to get everybody on the same page about what ackp is so you might have heard that with azkp you can prove that you have done some computation correctly and you might have also heard about all these different proof systems like snarks darks Planck growth 16 and all of that they all have in common that this proof system needs these circuits or something like that so a description for the proof system that allows it to understand what the proof should be about once you have this circuit then you can set things up and you will have a prover algorithm and you have a verifier algorithm if you satisfy the proverb algorithm so you give it the right witness it will provide you with a short proof string this is the actual proof and that proof can then be fed to the verifier algorithm and this checks basically gives you assurance that this computation really has been performed correctly so um that way ethereum is essentially able to learn whether something that happened of chain some computation that happened of chain and it is potentially large uh is correct or not so it can learn something that it couldn't process itself um and it has sort of this scaling aspect to it um it also has um like with zero knowledge proofs um it it also gives you the optional ability to hide the inputs of this computation so this is what uh how this is how zero knowledge proofs got their name because of this property but it's actually an optional thing so um with these two things together you have the scale scalability aspect and you have this privacy aspect and if you take them together and you use them in the right way you can give ethereum back its privacy and its scalability and this is why we are in our team excited about ckps so now I'm going to show you a couple of projects that are like in our team that we work on in our team and these are just three projects we I counted we have 15 different projects at the moment and you can see them all on our website at the on the last slide I showcased we I have the link to that so I give just these three examples and I've included the people that have right access to the repos here that what that was the easiest way for me to determine who's willing to be publicly associated with the project um so the first project I want to talk about is CK evm that's our largest project and it's a really talented team um really interesting project and what they work on they build a set of set of circuits that allow you to prove that you have processed a ethereum transaction correctly and of course this can be useful for uh like Roll-Ups or so the roll-up can prove whatever state transitions happened in the roll up are correct and ethereum can verify this then um and maybe in the future it could also be for a useful for layer one so that light light clients make use of this technology this project is also called the community edition of CK evm so everything they build is open source you can go on scale privacy scaling minus exploration slash ckvm circuits and look at what's going on there and if you have the right skills then you're welcome to uh become a contributor they're working quite closely with the scroll project as well um yeah so please check that out vitalik has done a Blog recently that um shows um like the differences between these various ckvm projects there are quite a number of them out there and they all make like different trade-offs this project goes for perfect compatibility with ethereum at the expense of prover time um yeah the project is written in the Halo 2 proof system and developed by ccash they made some modifications to that but everybody's really excited about Halo 2 um yeah so this was our first project um at the second project I want to show you here is semaphore the main contributor is Cedar he's sitting back there um and we have hired a PO Andy who is not on this slide and actually wager and Kobe these two guys they have left have left us a while ago but they have met made some very important complete contributions so what is semaphore semaphore is a protocol that allows you to prove that you are part of a group uh privately so you can think of a group as basically a knuckle tree and you create an identity you stick it into this Merkel tree and then you are able using semaphore to prove that you are in this metal tree in practice it's a set of circuits some contracts and some JavaScript libraries that make it easy for developers to integrate this functionality into their applications and Cedar has built some quick setup template it's really straightforward if you have an idea something some application in mind that could use that then you can go ahead [Music] um we have we have recently started a center for Grants rounds and I will talk about that in a future slide uh if you want to see semaphor in action you can go I think on the first floor there is the temporary Anonymous Zone and they will give you a card you you on this card is a link you join uh this link allows you to join the Defcon Bogota semaphore group and and then we're also able to like make use of that interact with some applications there and it's a nice showcase yeah if you want to learn more about semaphore you can go on semaphore.appliedckp.org so this is the last block project I want to show here the name is Macy and it's an idea that vitalik came up with it's currently run or managed by an anonymous guy called q and there are also two important people that don't write code here this is V and Queenie and they should also they're not included in this slide so Macy stands for minimal anti-collusion infrastructure and the idea is so the point of Macy is to prevent bribery and voting systems so as an example you could have you could think of something like Bitcoin where there are voters that basically vote on allocation of funds and in this system someone could say everybody who provably voted for me will get an airdrop later on and so this would sort of distort these um uh incentives of the quadratic funding system and Macy can help you get around that using zero knowledge proofs uh how Macy works is that all the voters they encrypt their votes they put them on chain and then there's a coordinator who tallys all the votes and um so he's able to decrypt the votes the down chain he tell us to tell his the votes he publishes the result along with the zero knowledge proof that shows that um the telling has been performed correctly so he only has two choices either he doesn't participate at all or he uh published the correct result another important feature of Macy is that it's always possible for voters to override their vote again so if the briber looked over their shoulder while they were like voting um they could always change their mind later on and override that vote so this is amazing how it works you can also see this in action here on Defcon they are running together with the clear front guys clr.fund they're running a quadratic funding round they are like supporting local communities here in Latin America I think with 250k um the team is also running a project called qfi This is an incubator that helps local communities to spin up their own quadratic funding Round And basically provides them provide them with the infrastructure for that yeah so these were like a sample a couple of projects we're working on and I hope those got you excited because in the following slides I will talk about how you can get involved how you can can contribute to such projects and in fact these projects that I just showed you were in large part built by also grantees that made like big contrib contributions so the first [Music] um thing that I want to talk about in regards on how how to get involved is targeted Grand surrounds that we're doing so occasionally we um just get out to the ecosystem and encourage them to submit applications on a specific topic the first one I want to mention here is semaphore so this is a dedicated grants round for people that build an application on top of semaphore or that extend some are for or that have like um a completely different approach to solve the same problem as semaphore so we are interested in supporting all all such kind of projects um projects at all stages are welcome to apply here you can follow this QR code here it will lead you to the announcement blog post and in this blog post you you find like you find your way to a submission to um uh form where you can type in the actual application and there will also be a there is also a wish list which can give you some inspiration on what type of projects could be interesting to build on semaphore so examples for that could be um Anonymous voting application whistleblowing application Anonymous chat applications Anonymous reputation systems there's a a huge amount of like untapped potential here uh one of our guys had the idea to build like a private feedback but in Discord that our team can use internally to like share feedback so yeah please if that's interesting for you follow this QR code and submit an application um an upcoming Grand surround that we are currently preparing um is the L2 Community grants round uh it is with James from the ethereum foundation this will start on October 24th so there will also be a blog post about that with a submission form and a wish list or examples of interesting things here would be like r d stuff like cross roll up execution or compression for roller better compression for roll-up data L2 light lines things like that educational efforts would be great to like inform the ecosystem about the advantages of roll ups and potentially the risks um yeah so yeah please look forward to that so targeted grants rounds we get quite a lot of Grants from that but we um we that's not most of the grants that we're doing most of the grants are what I would call discretionary grants so these are things where we find someone someone tweeted a cool project they did on Twitter and we reached out to them and ask them do you need support like we can give you advice or you can we can support you with funding or sometimes people also come to us with ideas in general if you're thinking about getting a grant from the EF your first thought should be the ecosystem Support Program like they have the right infrastructure and well-oid oil machine to process your application and make it a nice experience with us it makes more it makes a lot of sense to talk directly to us however if you have a ZK focus and if you're an individual we are not really working with like corpse or D5 project daos or whatever like this is just too difficult for us to deal with in terms of like the due diligence yeah so um this type of discretionary grants are very often these are Grand people that build something on top of our projects or that extend somehow the functionality of our existence existing systems so people uh find out what we're doing and just want to get involved Somehow Here quite often people come also to us with ideas on their own that we don't really have in-house expertise on so we have been doing a number of ZK machine learning grants for example lately and we like support them as good as we can with like what we know and with funding um finally we we always have like some ideas of what we would be excited about um if you have no idea at all like uh about what you would like to do but you do definitely have the right skills to do something then uh please talk to us we have uh like these are normally the more difficult grants uh or more complex projects like we would be really interested in supporting the Halo 2 ecosystem more like um building a DSL for that make it as easy to write a circuit in a circle I see that battleships guys are excited about it um make it as easy to build a circuit in Halo 2 as it is for circum or have more circuits make recursion easier and things like that or if you're into breaking things we want to see people that try to break these um snack snack friendly hash functions for example um yeah so if any of that is up your alley please get in touch with us directly we are also hiring um I have in the last slide I have a in the next slide actually I have a link to our jobs page you can check those open positions out but it also always makes sense to just talk to us if you're good at rest if you have experience building circuits or if you are um like and if you're just really excited about building applications about that use ckps in some way and you don't really have a lot of deep experience in CK it still makes sense to talk to uh to talk to us directly we might just be able to find something for you and of course if you don't want money everything is open source everybody's welcome to contribute to what we're doing so this um the last slide how to get involved uh our website still has our old name it was called applied ckp so it's applied ckp.org the GitHub is privacy minus scaling minus expirations this left QR code here is for the our job site and the right QR code is for a Discord we have a very friendly and open Discord channel so please um get in touch there we would be welcoming you Yep this was my presentation thank you so much you can talk to me later uh and you can reach out to me on telegram at CK underscore th