Newsletter #7

The Rollup 

May 18th, 2023

Gm privacy enthusiasts 🔐,

With ZPrize 2023 quickly approaching, we’re taking you on a journey through the innovative solutions that came out of ZPrize 2022.

Also in this week's edition of The Rollup:

• 🗞️ Latest ZK News

• 🐦 ZK in the Twitterverse

• ✨ Your dose of zkInspo

• 💻 Opportunities to build the future of privacy

🛣️Road to ZPrize 2023

The first group of ZPrize solutions we’d like to highlight is for the Open Division Prize which focused on improving multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) for the BLS 12-377 G1 curve by increasing its speed and efficiency. Participants needed to develop the lowest-latency MSM technique using either a GPU or an FPGA. This competition was important because computing MSM operations is a major bottleneck for zero-knowledge proving.  

The Open Division Prize 1a category required participants to create the most efficient MSM technique using a GPU. Matter Labs tied with Yrrid Software for first place in this category, both achieving a speedup well above 2x over the baseline implementation. The other category (1b) focused on accelerating MSM Operations on FBGA where Hardcaml created the winning solution.

Read more about the solutions here.

🗞️ ZK News

• 📗 Zero-Knowledge Privacy Startup Webb Protocol Raises $7M

• 📘 Polygon ID and Verida Make Zero-Knowledge Credentials Accessible to All

• 📙 Are ZK-proofs the answer to Bitcoin's Ordinal and BRC-20 problem?

🐦 ZK in the Twitterverse

A dose of 'can't miss' content.

✨ zkInspo

The Mina Foundation released its 2023 State of Zero Knowledge Report which aggregates findings of a recent survey on the crypto community’s views on ZK Tech. Their tweet summarizes the top takeaways.

🏗️ Build web3 Privacy:

Be sure to check out ZPrize Hub: your all-inclusive resource for opportunities to join the ZPrize DAO and build the future of the ZPrize competition.

• Compiler Engineer - Aleo 

• Founding Smart Contract Engineer - Axiom 

• ZK Cryptography Engineer - O(1) Labs 

• Full Stack Engineer - Aleo 

• Join Mina’s zkIgnite, Cohort 2 (kicking off June 14th, 2023) 

📜 The Rollup is brought to you by ZPrize: a collaborative effort across the blockchain industry dedicated to accelerating zero-knowledge cryptography. 

You can expect to hear from us twice per month. In the meantime, follow us on Twitter, check out our website, and connect with ZK builders in Discord. 

If you enjoyed The Rollup, share with a fellow ZK enthusiast 👇.

Yours in Privacy,

Team ZPrize