ZK Hack Mini Recap
TLDR
- ZK Hack returned with a Mini edition between March 1st and 15th this Spring, organised by ZKValidator and Zero Knowledge Podcast.
- This edition of ZK Hack Mini consisted of three sessions with workshops covering writing STARK proofs in Winterfell, Miden VM, Plonky2 and the Polynomial Identity Language (PIL) alongside two puzzle competitions built by our puzzle partner Polygon.
- The event series closed with a panel discussion about the latest developments in the ZK space with Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet, Pratyush Mishra from UC Berkeley/Aleo and our very own Kobi Gurkan.
- Concurrently, there were two puzzles to solve during ZK Hack Mini. The competition finished with Trapdoor Tech in first place, followed by maxgillett and BlockHeader in second and third place respectively. 10,000 USDC given out as prizes to participants alongside many exclusive NFTs.
- Stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter and join the community on our Discord server. If you want to get more involved with ZK Hack, send us a message on discord!
Workshops
All recordings of the workshops from the ZK Hack Mini can be found in this playlist.
The four workshops hosted during ZK Hack Mini were practical examples of how to use zk based tools. Here is a summary of each of the sessions:
- Kicking off the event was Polygon Miden, represented by Bobbin Threadbare, inventor of Winterfell, who gave a crash course on writing STARK proofs with Winterfell, a STARK prover and verifier.
- Following his Winterfell presentation, Bobbin then gave attendees an Introduction to Miden VM, a Turing-complete STARK-based virtual machine that provides a level of safety and advanced features currently not available on Ethereum.
- Session #2 was started by Polygon Zero, with William Borgeaud and Brendan Farmer on the stage, talking about Plonky2, a recursive SNARK that is 100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum.
- Then, Polygon Hermez’s Jordi Baylina introduced the Polynomial Identity Language , a framework developed by the team to define the state machines used in the zkEVM prover.
State of ZK Panel Discussion
The event wrapped up with a panel discussion hosted by Anna Rose with Tarun Chitra from Gauntlet, Pratyush Mishra from UC Berkeley/Aleo and Kobi Gurkan from ZK Hack. Panellists also answered questions from the audience regarding the general state of the ZK space. Below are a few takeaways.
Encouragingly there are a lot of newcomers to the ZK space with projects being deployed in new areas, such as hardware acceleration, fundamental to furthering progress in the space. However, it is still clear that access for newcomers is relatively limited as ZK tooling development is lagging behind advances in other areas. Larger corporations, such as Meta and EY have been working on Zero Knowledge tech for a while, but it seems that smaller startups are pushing the niche forwards. The relatively high employee turnover and limited outward communication from larger organisations could be reasons we observe this paradigm in the space.
Record-breaking levels of funding has also poured into the space putting ZK into the spotlight within the blockchain industry more broadly. With more funding typically comes more attention and talent, enabling projects to innovate at a faster pace. However, more caution should be exercised when fundraising as excessively high valuations could do more harm than good for projects in the long term. Despite some mouth-watering valuations, the majority of funding in the space went to credible projects with an exciting trajectory ahead of them.
Puzzle Winners
You can see all the puzzles here.
This edition’s puzzles were built by Polygon and the prizes were sponsored by Anoma and Aleo. Winners were selected based upon the speed of finding the correct solution. The scoring reflected this by awarding the first correct submission with 1000 points with points then exponentially decaying in time down to 300, where 300 points would be awarded to a correct answer submitted 6 days after the start of the puzzle competition.
The aggregated final result across both puzzles awarded Trapdoor Tech with first place followed by maxgillett in second and BlockHeader in third place. The top five participants received NFTs from this edition’s collection, inspired by the characters personified by Kobi Gurkan. You can see the whole collection here.
Next ZK Hack
After this edition, our team is currently working on and evaluating our next steps in the future of ZK Hack. We plan on making this an ongoing event series and learning hub for ZK, so do stay tuned. To be the first to know about updates regarding upcoming event subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter and join the community on our Discord server.
