🚨 LATEST: SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce says zero-knowledge proofs could verify compliance without collecting users’ personal data. She warns current KYC/AML practices create “data haystacks.”

It's only dead if you give up I'm not giving up on privacy. I'm doubling down. firefly.social/post/x/210138…

Thanks to Tachyon's @MariusMargulus, the new zk-SNARK prover in Zakura (and also in @vizorwallet) is the first Zcash prover with a machine-checked Lean proof of statistical honest-verifier zero-knowledge. Read more: zakura.com/engineering/ironw…

GOAT Research has published a full explainer of SHRINCS, the draft signature scheme proposed for Bitcoin's post-quantum migration. SHRINCS was published as a BIP in August. It is built from hash-based cryptography older than Bitcoin, runs entirely on SHA-256, and asks the network to trust nothing it does not already trust. The open question is its statefulness: a SHRINCS key signs through a compact path that must track how many signatures it has produced, because reusing a slot makes forgeries possible, and when state is lost a stateless path takes over at a larger signature size. Compact signatures in exchange for new wallet complexity is the trade the proposal makes, and it is the substance of the discussion around it. The explainer covers the mechanisms behind that trade: the two signing paths, the state rules, the signature budget, and how the August draft differs from the April specification. hackmd.io/@goatresearch/HkOe…

Rust implementation of SHRINCS: github.com/AppliedPQC/shrinc… The measurement on an Intel Xeon Platinum, 4 vCPU with 2 threads per core, 14 GB of memory:

A network built to secure the next economy with Bitcoin has to outlive the quantum computer. The signatures securing most blockchains today will not. GOAT Network is moving its validator consensus keys from secp256k1 to ML-DSA-65, the NIST post-quantum signature standard: one validator at a time, while the chain keeps producing blocks. Full engineering writeup below: what broke, what it costs, and the playbook for any chain looking to do the same. hackmd.io/@goatresearch/B1f3…

Goodbye, Poseidon! An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography. Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs. In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs. The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive. We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June. With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value. Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028. As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming. On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow. Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :) Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more. Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability. Believe in something. Believe in hashes.