Unsolicited advice to zero-knowledge system learners. I’m a cryptographer, not a ZK specialist, who spent years lost in the Cambrian explosion of ZK systems. Every time I sat down to learn the new cool kid, say Plonk, an even cooler kid arrived, Halo or the next thing.

In new work with Alistair Stewart, we disprove proximity gaps and list-decodability conjectures up to capacity. These conjectures underpin the security and efficiency of many deployed SNARKs and are the subject of Ethereum’s “Millennium Prize.” eprint.iacr.org/2025/2046 🧵

Amazing results by Rohan and Venkat! In a week of negative news about proximity gaps, they show that folded RS codes, univariate multiplicity codes, random linear codes and randomly punctured RS codes have mutual CA *up to capacity*!

proximity gap result: the distance between my understanding and the latest findings is increasing exponentially

Ethproofs call 6 just wrapped! Over 200 joined a deep dive into proximity gaps, the mathematical core of modern hash-based SNARKs. 6 new papers in 6 days reshaped our understanding of these gaps - both breakthroughs and refutations that sharpen what’s provable and what remains

Sitting on the shoulders of giants, I am glad to announce the following paper with Eli Ben-Sasson, Dan Carmon, Swastik Kopparty, and Shubhangi Saraf: eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2025/16… On the one hand, we improve the existing decoder analysis from Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and

lowercase snarks Words like laser, scuba, radar began uppercase. LASER — Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation SCUBA — Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus RADAR — RAdio Detection And Ranging When a technology matures and becomes reliable, trusted,

While this is difficult to appreciate from the outside, a major decision is at stake behind the Forkcast rankings published over the last week: Adding FOCIL to Glamsterdam or not. In my view, it would be a short-sighted decision to add FOCIL, either as a definite commitment and

Craaazy 365 days of lean Ethereum progress. Cheers to the builders. Cheers to the dreamers. Cheers to anti-fragility, too :) Devcon, Bangkok — Nov 12, 2024. The suspense is real. The room overflows; hundreds can't get in. An "announcement of an announcement" had sparked wild

lean Ethereum x.com/leanEthereum/s…

current status: preparing my next presentation . Thanks Ben Edgington (if you know you know :))

Finally out, the proof of mutual correlated agreement for RS codes, up to Johnson bound. I have let it circulate in the community about a year, but never found the time to make it public. For now without the improved bounds from the recent proximity gaps paper - but that will be

🤯 two 5090s now prove every L1 EVM block 🤯 The ZKsync Airbender team pulled off something insane ahead of tomorrow's ethproofs.day demo. Mainnet proofs on two gaming GPUs. One box, ~1kW—basically a toaster. Props to robik (∎, ∆) zk/acc, Michael Carrili, MM, Alexander Vlasov.

mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115591487…

Tiny Proxember snack: a 12-symbol RS code over 𝔽₁₃ with (n,k)=(12,5) and δ=1/2 already has ~50 codewords in a single Hamming ball, sitting cleanly between the (1−δ)n≤k “trivial” line and the Elias capacity curve. Code to poke/extend/attack the picture 👇

Do you feel like you are missing the fun of Proxember? Join the numerical army and help us to test whether proximity gaps and list decoding conjectures hold "up to capacity"!