No one's excited about cryptography anymore. I propose announcing that there's a ~10% chance that ZK proofs will become self aware and destroy the human race.

1/ Today we're releasing Lattice Jolt: a post-quantum version of the Jolt zkVM, built on lattices instead of elliptic curves. It's _faster_ than curve-based Jolt and has the shortest proofs of any post-quantum zkVM — under 100 KB. Post: a16zcrypto.com/posts/article…

A few months later - a Quantum Safe Bitcoin tx on mainnet: mempool.space/tx/305a24ffea9… Thanks to StarkWare's @giladi_tom85141 taking this to the finish line and @MARAFoundation_ Slipstream mining this non-standard tx Also @robin_linus & @Ethan_Heilman on previous work led to QSB

First Principles Ep. 6 with Shafi Goldwasser What if you could prove something is true without revealing why it’s true? Turing Award winner Shafi Goldwasser tells the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs: how a playful question about playing poker securely over the telephone led her, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff to rethink what a mathematical proof could be. Goldwasser traces those ideas through interactive proofs, the sum-check protocol, SNARKs, and the systems now used to verify computation and preserve privacy on blockchains. She also reflects on why breakthrough ideas are often rejected at first, how toy problems can produce foundational theories, and whether AI systems should have to prove their answers. Hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden with @SuccinctJT 00:00 Intro 03:36 How mental poker inspired zero-knowledge proofs: Proving that something is true without revealing the underlying information 06:30 The simulation paradigm and the meaning of “zero knowledge” 08:33 Why the original paper was repeatedly rejected 10:33 How interactive proofs became more powerful than conventional proofs 13:36 The road to modern SNARKs 19:02 Why the sum-check protocol is so useful for verifiable computation 25:31 Why many so-called “zk proofs” are not actually zero knowledge 34:06 Why toy examples, playfulness, and narratives can produce deep theory 37:23 The role of rigor and computational assumptions in cryptography 42:44 Applying zero-knowledge proofs to law, evidence, and secret software 45:23 Training AI systems to provide proofs alongside their answers 54:27 Why genuinely new ideas are often difficult for experts to recognize

The first experimental evidence of recursive self-improvement (RSI). Autoresearching the autoresearch agent for eight days. The result beats the harness we hand-tuned for two years, on held-out benchmarks: 🧵(1/7)

STRK20: Practical privacy, built for how crypto works and designed for real-world use. The compliance layer in detail: starknet.io/blog/compliance-…

BREAKING: @BitsofGold_LTD announces the first digital shekel stablecoin

We recently added more Circom bugs to zkbugs, bringing the total to 70 Circom and 139 ZK bugs. We aim to reach 300 bugs, focusing more on zkVMs. We also began evaluating security tools and are currently building open-source AI tools that the community can use while developing ZK code and before audits. Any contribution to the QF round will help us focus more on it and give opportunities to junior researchers through internships.

1/ Jolt now supports zero-knowledge 🧵 This makes Jolt suitable for privacy applications — no SNARK recursion, no "wrapping", no sacrifice of transparency. Marginal increase in proof size (~3 KB). Prover time is essentially unchanged. a16zcrypto.com/posts/article…

ok by popular demand we pushed Early-Bird to end of this week (Feb5), turns you don't like weekend deadlines.. :)

🚨 Early-Bird to ZKProof 8 in Rome ends on January 31st ! If you plan to join, May 9-10 (before Eurocrypt), now is the time :) Registration is here: zkproof.org/events/zkproof-8…

"but here's the kicker" oh shush, your LLM is showing <Robots, robots everywhere> Humans where you at ffs

holy crap... this "mystery AI model" might crash the stock market it took some digging, but I figured out what this model is (it's not what you think)

1/ New post: Jolt now proves RISC-V programs with 64-bit registers (RV64IMAC), at speeds exceeding those we previously reported for 32-bit. 1.5M cycles/sec on a 32-core CPU, 500k cycles/sec on a MacBook. Here’s why this matters 🧵

Aaaaaaaaah @Zac_Aztec it works as a solana program! Generator is generic now and works for arbitrary circuits. Now we will land some Noir-Lang proofs on mainnet Mark my words, I will become the unofficial Chief ZK tooling Officer on solana

I shared a quick 5 min on what’s at the heart of Zcash starting at about 7hrs 2min in. @zooko immediately follows with some Zcash and @halfin lore. Grateful to @balajis for the opportunity. 🙏

We made a Bitcoin SPV contract on EVM chains economically possible by proving the whole Bitcoin history with Noir. SPV contract is available on Ethereum and Base. Proof of ~915,000 blocks took 109 hours, but can be verified by the smart contract instantly. We tried to aggregate all technical details here hackmd.io/@olkurbatov/S1vEdG…

🚨New Bitcoin Whiteboard. We can do better than BitVM. 00:00 Bitcoin Bridges and ZK Verification 08:42 Addressing Critics of Rollups 13:28 Optimistic ZK Verification 16:56 BitVM1 vs 2 vs 3 25:45 Garbled Circuits 34:07 Glock: Future of Bitcoin Bridging