Anoma ETHCC Round-up: Day 3
The final day of ETHCC[5] was jam-packed with great talks, and the team were excited to man the stand again at Maison de la Mutualité.
Here is what we contributed to on day three of ETHCC:
Vamp-IR: A universal language for arithmetic circuits
First up, Anoma Cryptographer, Joshua Fitzgerald, took to the Sorbonne stage to deliver a more in-depth version of his talk “Vamp-IR: A universal language for arithmetic circuits”.
Joshua began by explaining the need for a language for arithmetic circuits in the first place — “because it’s a big pain to write arithmetic circuits. We have DSLs which can help with this, but they are often highly tied to a specific proof system or back-end, and if you want to change the proof system or back-end library, then you often have to re-write the circuit, essentially from scratch.”
At Anoma, the need for a language for arithmetic circuits arose when the team was trying to convert the multi-asset shielded pool (MASP) from Groth16 to PlonK. Joshua was translating polynomials by hand, and he felt that “it was hard to tell if you have done it correctly, or in an optimal way.”
Vamp-IR is “a language that can represent an arithmetic circuit canonically and universally, so that same circuit can just be ported to whatever library you want to use, and all you need to do is write a compiler from this language to the back-end library, and it takes care of transforming it into a form that those libraries want.”
On the other side, you can write DSLs that compile two Vamp-IR. For example, Joshua explained that “at Anoma, we have some languages that are going to do this.” he continued “Juvix is our dependently-typed programming language for validity predicates, and it will also create an arithmetic circuit that represents those predicates.”
He went on to explain that there is nothing stopping people writing a compiler from ZoKrates or Circom into Vamp-IR as well. Vamp-IR can be changed into R1CS or Plonkish constraints, and can be further refined for other libraries that are being used, too.
Joshua also gave detailed explanations of how arithmetic circuits are written in Vamp-IR, how it works with other libraries, and finished with an overview of the future research that will be done and incorporated into the language.
You can watch Joshua’s talk here:
Intent-centric (intent-solver pattern) architectures for fully decentralized dApps
For our final contribution to ETHCC[5]. Co-founder, Adrian Brink, took to the main stage in front of a full auditorium to deliver his talk “Intent-centric (intent-solver pattern) architectures for fully decentralized dApps”
Adrian began by giving a brief overview of the evolution of blockchains, from
(scriptable settlement) through (programmable settlement) to the present day — which he calls “programmable settlement++”. Adrian explained that settlement alone is not enough — as it presumes that people “already know who they are, already want to know with whom they want to settle, and already know what they want to settle.”He explains that, in many applications, there is a need for infrastructure for counterparty discovery. Adrian comments that “Generally speaking, users don’t have fully formed state transitions, they have intents. They have the idea that they currently have Bitcoin, and they’d rather hold some ETH. So they have the intent of selling BTC for some ETH. This is not something that they can settle on-chain, they need to discover some counterparty who has the exact inverse, or a number of counterparties with whom they can settle.”
At present, this is either attempting to be addressed on-chain — such as with AMMs — or through a centralized, single-operator database — such as with OpenSea — or by an app-specific sovereign chain — such as dy/dx. All three of these approaches have significant tradeoffs, ranging from cost and speed, to creating inefficient, centralized systems. On the latter, Adrian commented that “we’ve tried to make it so that they can’t actually steal funds, but of course they can always censor and exclude people from transactions.”
He then arrived at what we consider to be “the third generation” — which is Anoma — a unified architecture for full-stack, decentralized applications. With Anoma, it’s not just programmable settlement, but also decentralized counterparty discovery and distributed solving.
Adrian then continued by explaining the design principles that govern Anoma — ”intent-centricity”, and “homogeneous architecture, heterogeneous security” — before diving into the architecture of Anoma itself, how it can be deployed, and what it can be used to build.
Watch Adrian’s full talk here:
Privacy Evolution: Catch up on the event
For those of you who weren’t able to join us for Privacy Evolution in Paris, we’re excited to share the full video with you!
Co-hosted with
and ZPrize, and with support from , Privacy Evolution was an evening of discussions on the myriad aspects of zero-knowledge cryptography and privacy.Watch the full video here:
See you at BUIDL and ETH Seoul!
ETHCC confirmed — once again — how important and rewarding it is to connect in-person with people from all across the Web3 Community. Members of the Anoma team will be in Seoul in early August for ETH Seoul and BUIDL Asia. We hope to see you there!
Be sure to follow Anoma and Namada on Twitter, and join us on Discord, for updates as they happen.
