The Relentless Pursuit Of A Better Internet

Announcing Nethermind Synthesis

by Greg Vardy

Thanks to Borys Tam, Julian Sutherland, Kristof Gazso, Michal Zajac, Swapnil Raj, and Szymon Kulec for contributing.

Over the past year, there’s been a Cambrian explosion of exciting projects happening at Nethermind. We’ve gone from 15 employees to more than 100. Along the way, we’ve fostered a culture driven by open-mindedness, intellectual curiosity, and the fundamental belief that the technology we’re working on will empower anyone, anywhere, to wield the power of distributed, permissionless systems to do extraordinary things and change the world for the better. I know it can sound hyperbolic — and yet it’s true. None of this would be possible without our incredible partners & all the great people we’ve worked with along the way, so to you, we say thank you.

Nethermind Synthesis

So, what is Synthesis? Synthesis encompasses a bunch of new things we’re working on at Nethermind. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things the teams at Synthesis are working on:

• Formal Verification & Auditing
• Fundamental cryptography research
• StarkNet development
• Protocol development

One of the goals of Synthesis is to publish regular technical blogs, podcasts & videos to keep you in the loop & engage/collaborate with the broader ecosystem. To that end, here’s a summary of what some of the teams are working on!

Formal Verification & Auditing

The formal verification team exists to hunt down bugs/vulnerabilities that traditional auditing/testing might miss. They handle the formal specification and verification of the Ethereum & StarkNet ecosystem by:

• Developing formal specifications for Cairo, Yul, EVM bytecode, and Solidity in Lean (we’ve also made contributions to Lean).
• Verifying liveness properties of distributed consensus protocols with TLA+.
• Developing SMT-powered formal verification and static analysis tools for Solidity & Cairo.
• Formally verifying security properties of application-layer protocols.

Hand-in-hand with formal verification, we’re expanding our Auditing team. On top of Solidity audits, we’re now doing Cairo audits. We’re about to start auditing the canonical StarkNet bridge.

Cryptography Research

The cryptography research team is working on more efficient, secure and robust cryptographic primitives and protocols that enhance the efficiency, security, and robustness of the Ethereum ecosystem. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Zero-knowledge proofs. We’re investigating constant-size zkSNARKs and analyzing their security models and properties to ensure they fit into distributed systems. We’re working on combining techniques from STARKs and SNARKs to get the best of both worlds.
• Polynomial commitments. We’re researching post-quantum secure commitment schemes and analyzing their security properties.
• Shuffle arguments and leader election protocols. We’re analyzing existing schemes’ security and making them more efficient and secure.

In each of these points, their scope of research is broad. We provide a theoretical framework and model security, construct new schemes, and eventually implement them.

Protocol Research

• Account Abstraction: We’re working with OpenGSN on research, implementation, and outreach for ERC-4337, a novel account abstraction mechanism that does not require a hard-fork, paving the way for widespread smart contract wallet adoption.
• Verkle Trees: We’re prototyping the use of Verkle trees to store state in an Ethereum node, replacing the current hexary Merkle Patricia trie. A Verkle tree replaces the hashes in a Merkle tree with a vector commitment, leading to much smaller witnesses and a more efficient branching factor.

Layer 2 Product Development

• Voyager: The block explorer of the StarkNet universe. This includes providing search capabilities, interaction with StarkNet contracts through your browser, integration with StarkNet wallet providers, and decoding StarkNet transactions.
• Warp is a Solidity to Cairo transpiler that makes porting existing Solidity code to Cairo/StarkNet a breeze.
• Juno is a StarkNet client we’re developing as part of StarkWare’s initiative to make StarkNet fully decentralized.
• We’re working with Aave to port Aave V3 to StarkNet.

Again, a giant thank you to our amazing partners & everyone we’ve worked with over the last couple of years. We’re looking forward to continuing to build great things together. On a closing note, we’re hiring across all the teams mentioned above! If you’re interested in working at the bleeding edge of crypto, email us talent@nethermind.io or DM me on Twitter.