ZK Day is a series of meetups curated by zero-knowledge proof enthusiasts. The meetups first originated from a ZKP study group in Taipei, Taiwan, in the Fall of 2020, with many of the members coming from the Taipei Ethereum Meetup group.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
7PM Taiwan Time (UTC +8)
Agenda:
7:00 pm Intro by Yahsin
7:05 pm What makes an ideal state tree? by Vitalik
7:45 pm QA
7:50 pm Tornado Cash with Poseidon Hash by CC
8:10 pm QA
8:15 pm zk-SNARKs mathematical foundations by Oskar
9:05 pm QA
9:10 pm Networking – head over to gather.town
Speakers:
Vitalik Buterin – Creator of Ethereum. Vitalik is the chief scientist of the Ethereum Foundation. Website: https://vitalik.ca/
Talk description: “What makes an ideal state tree?”
The Ethereum research community has recently been focusing on changing the state tree structure to enable stateless clients, with a lot of focus on Verkle trees as a solution. But what are the requirements for a state tree, and why won’t other alternatives (eg. polynomial commitments, accumulators) also work well? I describe the often quite subtle requirements that a tree structure suitable for state trees in Ethereum needs to fulfill, and while Verkle trees, while imperfect, are better than anything else we have seen so far.
Chih-Cheng Liang builds zero-knowledge proof applications on Ethereum. EF’s Privacy and Scaling Explorations Team.
Talk description: “Tornado Cash with Poseidon Hash” https://github.com/ChihChengLiang/poseidon-tornado
Tornado Cash is a non-custodial transaction mixer on Ethereum. A user deposit funds then withdraw them using a zksnark proof to hide information and break the link between depositing and withdrawing addresses. The core logic of the Tornado Cash is implemented in short line of codes. The circuit part has less than 200 lines.
In this talk we present a variant of Tornado Cash that’s proposed in one of the original project’s audit report. It features even more simplified circuit logic and nullifier hash construction. Also the project is built on ethers.js, hardhat, and newer versions of Solidity and Circom, so that the codebase is quickly reproducible in the newer development environments. The goal of this project is to help onboard new developers to learn how Zkapp works.
Oskar Thoren – protocol research lead at Vac, a secure p2p messaging stack. Before that he was Head of Engineering at Status, a mobile Ethereum client. He also organizes the Papers We Love meetup in Taipei.
Talk description: “Briefly on zk-SNARKs Mathematical Foundations”
In this talk we’ll briefly go over what zk-SNARKs are, how they work, what properties they have, and what its mathematical underpinnings are.
We’ll look at things such as polynomial properties, modular arithmetic, homomorphic encryption, knowledge of exponent assumption, elliptic curve cryptography, and cryptographic pairings.
Moderator – Yahsin Huang is a community builder in the blockchain space. Her focus has been exploring how the democratization of digital tools empowers individuals. She is the operations manager at HashCloak.