ZK Hack Wrap Up
- ZK Hack consisted of seven sessions teaching participants about zero knowledge tooling and concepts alongside a capture the flag style puzzle competition.
- The puzzle competition resulted in Rumatta888 in first place, niooss-ledger in second and Konstantce in third. A special mention goes out to wborgeaud who came in first place in five out of six of the puzzle competitions.
- Workshops were hosted by top ZK teams including iden3, Starkware, Anoma, Aztec, Aleo, and Mina.
- While the first ZK Hack event is over, the series will be ongoing. Watch out for announcements of future sessions.
- If you attended ZK Hack, please fill out our feedback form to help us improve future events.
- Stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter, follow us on twitter and join the community in our discord server. If you want to get more involved with ZK Hack, send us a message on discord!
After seven workshops and six puzzles, the first edition of ZK Hack is complete. The event was organised by ZKValidator and Zero Knowledge Podcast, and every Tuesday for the last seven weeks, we hosted some of the top zero knowledge projects and experts in the field. Alessandro Chiesa, Nick Spooner, Pratyush Mishra, Alex Ozdemir, Jose and Alberto from iden3, Henri, Ariel and Yonatan from Starkware, Joshua and Joe from Anoma, Joe and Zac from Aztec, Errol from Aleo, and Izaak and Jason from Mina delivered educational content, aiming to onboard the ZK-curious into the space. Concurrently, we ran six puzzle competitions, with more than 37k USDC given as prizes to participants alongside many exclusive NFTs.
Puzzle Winners
View all of the puzzles and solutions here
There were six puzzles to be solved during the course of ZK Hack, the puzzles were built by Anoma and Aleo and were based upon various weaknesses that could be exploited in cryptographic protocols. 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 scores for each individual puzzle are available to view through the spreadsheet here. The aggregated score at the end of the six puzzles placed Rumata888 first, niooss-ledger second and Konstantce in third place. Although not in the top three, a notable competitor was wborgeaud who managed to come first in five out of six of the puzzle competitions.
The top 10 competitors also received NFTs based on the ZK Hack theme and disguises of puzzle master Kobi Gurkan, you can view the collection here.
The best solution write ups were also awarded 500 USDC each week, it was encouraging to see that some participants were new to the ZK space and still managed to submit correct submissions. One notable participant, grjte, won two of the solution write up prizes for Double Trouble and To be adaptive is to be strong, used the ZK Hack to onboard onto ZK and has since launched a gitcoin grant for a ZK powered game of Mafia.
Workshops
All recordings of the workshops can be found in this playlist
Over the course of seven weeks, different tooling and domain specific languages were introduced and interactively explored. The first workshop, led by Alessandro Chiesa, Nick Spooner, Pratyush Mishra and Alex Ozdemir, laid out the basic principles and theory of zero knowledge proofs and how to create zkSNARKs (zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge) from hash functions and polynomial commitments. After these foundational sessions, we hosted six further workshops, diving deeper into specific ZK tooling.
Here is the rundown:
- iden3 kicked off the workshops with an introduction to Circom 2.0, a circuit compiler for zkSNARKs with practical examples and some live coding.
- Starkware gave an interactive workshop on how to write smart contracts on StarkNet using the domain specific language Cairo and the example of deploying a voting contract.
- Team members from Heliax outlined the cryptographic components behind Anoma including the Ferveo DKG/TPKE system for front-running prevention, the private bartering circuits, and the zero-knowledge proof system Plonkup, check out the workshop here.
- Aztec explored the cryptography behind Aztec connect, a privacy preserving bridge between Aztec’s L2 and Ethereum L1 and coded up an example bridge contract.
- Aleo, a layer 1 chain using the ZEXE model, presented how to make zkSNARKs with ZEXE and how to create a game of hangman using the Leo domain specific language and compiler.
- The last workshop of the seven week ZK Hack was from Mina, all about Snarkyjs and Snapps. You can view the workshop here.
We hope that all of this content helps the ZK curious learn more about how to get started with ZK tooling.
The Future of ZK Hack
The first seven sessions and six puzzles that made up the first ZK Hack are completed. We were encouraged by the attendance and engagement we received for the ZK Hack event as well as the community that has formed around this idea. Although we cannot give many further details yet, rest assured that this won’t be the last instance of ZK Hack. Keep your eyes peeled for announcements of future ZK Hack sessions. Stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter, follow us on twitter and join the community in our discord server.
