Funny, I've been calling it the mathslopcalypse. To each their own. Can anyone honestly say they found a paper among the hundreds in the release that's *not* a huge pain to read (without AI assistance)?

🎙️This week, @AnnaRRose & @kobigurk chat with @ronrothblum, fr @SuccinctLabs. They cover his Fiat-Shamir attack on GKR, his PCS work, an update on Flock and — an open competition challenging AI agents to build a faster prover.

Excited to share a joint work with Joshua Brakensiek, Yeyuan Chen, Louie Putterman, and Zihan Zhang (@VVfishtail) on list decoding Reed–Solomon codes up to capacity in the low, but still constant, rate regime! 1/5

New work out! We (royally) show that Fiat-Shamir transformation is insecure for a class of proof systems for *generated* relations (including variants of commonly deployed protocols for R1CS). A thread to explain where this applies

I don't categorically object to SNARK-friendly hashes, and I think that for some applications they do make sense. For me the point is really just about making proving of general computation as fast as possible.

Proud that Flock is part of this milestone for Ethereum's future. Until recently, proving standard hash functions was too slow for Ethereum blocks, so cryptographers instead built bespoke SNARK-friendly hashes. Flock — developed by @ronrothblum, @benediktbuenz, and @kleptographic — closes that gap, moving us closer to a future where proving is as fast as computing. Our work with @eigenlabs and @yukonresearch on the autoresearch competition has crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. This cutting-edge performance enables Ethereum to switch to hash functions that have withstood decades of scrutiny, a record their newer SNARK-friendly counterparts haven't had time to build. We are entering a golden era of hash-based cryptography, just in time for the post-quantum transition.

Goodbye, Poseidon! An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography. Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs. In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs. The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive. We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June. With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value. Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028. As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming. On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow. Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10#, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :) Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more. Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability. Believe in something. Believe in hashes.

First Principles Ep. 6 with Shafi Goldwasser What if you could prove something is true without revealing why it’s true? Turing Award winner Shafi Goldwasser tells the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs: how a playful question about playing poker securely over the telephone led her, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff to rethink what a mathematical proof could be. Goldwasser traces those ideas through interactive proofs, the sum-check protocol, SNARKs, and the systems now used to verify computation and preserve privacy on blockchains. She also reflects on why breakthrough ideas are often rejected at first, how toy problems can produce foundational theories, and whether AI systems should have to prove their answers. Hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden with @SuccinctJT 00:00 Intro 03:36 How mental poker inspired zero-knowledge proofs: Proving that something is true without revealing the underlying information 06:30 The simulation paradigm and the meaning of “zero knowledge” 08:33 Why the original paper was repeatedly rejected 10:33 How interactive proofs became more powerful than conventional proofs 13:36 The road to modern SNARKs 19:02 Why the sum-check protocol is so useful for verifiable computation 25:31 Why many so-called “zk proofs” are not actually zero knowledge 34:06 Why toy examples, playfulness, and narratives can produce deep theory 37:23 The role of rigor and computational assumptions in cryptography 42:44 Applying zero-knowledge proofs to law, evidence, and secret software 45:23 Training AI systems to provide proofs alongside their answers 54:27 Why genuinely new ideas are often difficult for experts to recognize

Flock efficiently proves standard hash functions: SHA-256, Keccak, and BLAKE3. To push it further, we've partnered with @eigenlabs and @ethereumfndn on a competition to speed up the implementation of Flock's prover

Excited to announce Flock! A new SNARK for efficiently proving batched Boolean computations, in collaboration with @benediktbuenz and @kleptographic . The key use case for Flock is proving standard hash function such as SHA-256, Keccak and BLAKE3. For example, on an m4 max MacBook Pro it proves over 660k BLAKE3 compressions per second.