[AMA] We are EF Research (Pt. 8: 07 July, 2022)

• zkevm-circuits

  5 777 9.0 Rust
  

zkEVM circuit auditing: The goal here is to find bugs in zkEVM circuits developed by the EF and others. All auditing techniques are fair play (e.g. code inspection, fuzzing, formal verification).

• blst

  3 435 8.5 Assembly

  Multilingual BLS12-381 signature library

  

cryptographic versus non-cryptographic: Complex low-level BLS12-381 cryptography is encapsulated away in libraries. Péter can for example interact with the BLST API when working on Verkle trees.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• requests-for-proposals

  2 54 0.0
  

After The Merge, getting more scale into the system is probably the most pressing issue so much of our resources have been focused on 4844 and extensions of 4844 to "full sharding". Extensions of 4844 require a better `is_data_available()` function that instead of downloading everything performs Data Availability Sampling which is a hard problem to do in a decentralized/distributed yet reliable way. We just put out an [RFP](https://github.com/ethereum/requests-for-proposals/blob/master/open-rfps/das.md) to get more teams in this and are excited by the number of submissions. Reach out if this is the first time you've seen it and are interested in performing some work/research in this domain!

• mev-boost

  59 1,077 7.7 Go

  MEV-Boost allows Ethereum validators to source high-MEV blocks from a competitive builder marketplace

  

It's definitely a concern. The short term solution is basically to hope that MEV Boost works well. MEV boost gets most of what you want out of PBS, except it requires an extra layer of trust in relayer intermediaries that an in-protocol solution would be able to avoid entirely. In the longer term, in-protocol PBS is the way to go.

• py_pairing

  1 93 10.0 Python

  Elliptic curve operations, including pairings

  

Even I, after making an explainer blog post and an implementation of pairings, still feel like they're spooky voodoo math!

• Nova

  6 641 8.6 Rust

  Nova: High-speed recursive arguments from folding schemes (by microsoft)

  

There's been a lot of VDF progress. The new design is Sloth + SNARKs (specifically Nova with GPU-accelerated MSMs). We will have an end-to-end demo of a CPU-based VDF in a few weeks, and the first VDF ASICs test samples (12nm GlobalFoundries) will be produced in December 2022.

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