Mainnet beta looking good here. - Prover competition is insanely high - Proving is effectively free on Boundless - All provers are third-parties (The Boundless team is not doing any proving, decentralized af) Boundless is legit.

got the idea to write this while watching the Jigsaw talk at SBC () which a coSNARK-based approach to private smart contracts.

How to build private smart contracts via : - zkSNARK: State is commitments, a single prover computes on plaintext and posts a zkSNARK, no global decryption or access control. - coSNARK: State is commitments, computation is off-chain via MPC so no single server sees the full witness, still no global decryption or access control. - TEE: State is ciphertext outside and plaintext inside the enclave, computation and policy gated decryption run inside a remotely attested enclave, relying on hardware/attestation integrity. - FHE: State is ciphertext under a common FHE key, anyone can homomorphically evaluate with on-chain verification, decryption is policy gated by a threshold committee (collusion risk). - iO: State is ciphertext and compute is homomorphic, a public obfuscated decryptor enforces decryption policy without a live keyholder (no collusion risk).

Amazing to see so many major L2s now at stage 1. The next goal we should shoot for is, in my view, fast (<1h) withdrawal times, enabled by validity (aka ZK) proof systems. I consider this even more important than stage 2. Fast withdrawal times are important because waiting a week to withdraw is simply far too long for people, and even for intent-based bridging (eg. ERC-7683), the cost of capital becomes too high if the liquidity provider has to wait a week. This creates large incentives to instead use solutions with unacceptable trust assumptions (eg. multisigs/MPC) that undermine the whole point of having L2s instead of fully independent L1s. If we can reduce native withdrawal times to under 1h short term, and 12s medium term, then we can further cement the Ethereum L1 as the default place to issue assets, and the economic center of the Ethereum ecosystem. To do this, we need to move away from optimistic proof systems, which inherently require waiting multiple days to withdraw. Historically, ZK proof tech has been immature and expensive, which made optimistic proofs the smart and safe choice. But recently, this is changing rapidly. is an excellent place to track the progress of ZK-EVM proofs, which have been improving rapidly. Formal verification on ZK proofs is also advancing. Earlier this year, I proposed a 2-of-3 ZK + OP + TEE proof system strategy that threads the needle between security, speed and maturity: * 2 of 3 systems (ZK, OP) are trustless, so no single actor (incl TEE manufacturer or side channel attacker) can break the proof system by violating a trust assumption * 2 of 3 systems (ZK, TEE) are instant, so you get fast withdrawals in the normal case * 2 of 3 systems (TEE, OP) have been in production in various contexts for years This is one approach; perhaps people will opt to instead do ZK + ZK + OP tiebreak, or ZK + ZK + security council tiebreak. I have no strong opinions here, I care about the underlying goal, which is to be fast (in the normal case) and secure. With such proof systems, the only remaining bottleneck to fast settlement becomes the gas cost of submitting proofs onchain. This is why short term I say once per hour: if you try to submit a 500k+ gas ZK proof (or a 5m gas STARK) much more often, it adds a high additional cost. In the longer term, we can solve this with aggregation: N proofs from N rollups (plus txs from privacy-protocol users) can be replaced by a single proof that proves the validity of the N proofs. This becomes economical to submit once per slot, enabling the endgame: near-instant native cross-L2 asset movement through the L1. Let's work together to make this happen.

get the girlies @chippedsocial 💕

Decentralized sequencing is a solution for censorship resistance and trust-minimization. It does not necessarily imply better uptime. Rollups are able to retain extremely high uptime because they have centralized infra. Decentralized sequencing (among untrusted parties) incurs constant risk of sequencer failure. While the network may recover from these failures more quickly (<33 mins in comparison to @base yesterday) the chance of failures occurring is higher. There are many benefits to decentralized sequencing, but it is not a silver bullet to all our problems.

if you're building with EigenCloud, you're still early 🫡

The Rust crab before Depot: ☠️ After plugging into Depot Cache + faster runners: 🦀💨 Full guide in 🧵

Back in 2023, Arbitrum was a FIFO chain and had no priority gas ordering With its centralized sequencer, Arbitrum was indistinguishable from a centralized exchange

How I almost took down Arbitrum - and how it radicalized me 🧵