ZK Mesh: Aug 2025 Recap
Welcome to ZK Mesh, a curated monthly newsletter covering the latest in advanced privacy-enhancing cryptography, distributed protocol development, and zero-knowledge systems research.
Each month, we bring you recent research, useful articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, tools, project updates, and events. ZK Mesh is produced by ZK Hack.
Research
Time-Space Trade-Offs for Sumcheck | Anubhav Baweja, Alessandro Chiesa, Elisabetta Fedele, Giacomo Fenzi, Pratyush Mishra, Tushar Mopuri and Andrew Zitek-Estrada
Constraint-Friendly Map-to-Elliptic-Curve-Group Relations and Their Applications | Jens Groth, Harjasleen Malvai, Andrew Miller and Yi-Nuo Zhang
Glock: Garbled Locks for Bitcoin | Liam Eagen
zip: Reducing Proof Sizes for Hash-Based SNARGs | Giacomo Fenzi, Yuwen Zhang
Data Matching In Unequal Worlds and Applications to Smart Contracts | Dmitry Khovratovich, Mikhail Vladimirov and Benedikt Wagner
Coral: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge CFG Proofs | Sebastian Angel, Sofía Celi, Elizabeth Margolin, Pratyush Mishra, Martin Sander and Jess Woods
Design ZK-NR: A Post-Quantum Layered Protocol for Legally Explainable Zero-Knowledge Non-Repudiation Attestation | Minka Mi Nguidjoi Thierry Emmanuel, Mani Onana Flavien Serge, Djotio Ndié Thomas and Atsa Etoundi Roger
qedb: Expressive and Modular Verifiable Databases (without SNARKs) | Vincenzo Botta, Simone Bottoni, Matteo Campanelli, Emanuele Ragnoli and Alberto Trombetta
DIMSEPP: A Decentralized Identity Management System with Enhanced Privacy Protection | Yu Zhang and Zongbin Wang
RGB I.0: Scalable Consensus for Client-side Validated Smart Contracts | Maxim Orlovsky
AVPEU: Anonymous Verifiable Presentations With Extended Usability | Yalan Wang, Liqun Chen, Yangguang Tian, Long Meng and Christopher J.P. Newton
When Can We Incrementally Prove Computations of Arbitrary Depth? | Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore and Mahak Pancholi
Efficient Randomized Strong $2$-source Non-malleable Extractor for Any Linear Min-entropy | Divesh Aggarwal, Pranjal Dutta, Saswata Mukherjee, Satyajeet Nagargoje and Maciej Obremski
TLShare: Private Authenticated MPC and FHE Inputs Over TLS | Manuel B. Santos, Dimitris Mouris, Xiang Xie, Miguel de Vega and Andrei Lapets
PQ-STAR: Post-Quantum Stateless Auditable Rekeying | Shlomi Dolev, Avraham Yagudaev and Moti Yung
Articles/Threads
Optimizing Sumcheck | Lambda Class
Multilinear Polynomials: Survival Kit | Lambda Class
Signature schemes you've never heard about | Kobi Gurkan
So what are Ethproofs, really? | Zero Knowledge Podcast
Are STARK/hash-based proof implementations really ZK? | Ian Miers
The inner product argument | Sean Bowe
Circle STARKs: Part III, Circle FFT | zkSecurity
Jolt gets a 6× speedup — and we’re just getting started | a16z
Sumcheck good. Lookups good. JOLT good. Particularly for zero-knowledge machine learning | ICME
HD Wallet for Lattice Cryptography | Ethresearch
EU Age Verification using a Ligero-inspired solution | Mamy Ratsimbazafy
Videos/Podcasts
Ethproofs Call #4 | enshrine RISC-V? | Ethproofs
How ZK inspired AI Watermarking with Miranda Christ | ZK Podcast
zkPDF and zkID with Vikas Rushi and Ying Tong | ZK Podcast
Ethproofs, zkVM Benchmarks & the Unstoppable Rise of ZK with Justin Drake | ZK Podcast
Lighter, Perp DEXs and Custom ZK Circuits | ZK Podcast
NYC Meetup Videos: ZK Hack Meetups | ZK Hack
The Moonmath Manual to ZK-Snarks | ProgCrypto (ZK) Study Group 2025
Guides and Resources
Linear algebra over field extensions | Guille Angeris
A public framework to evaluate trusted setups of ZK proving systems | L2Beat
Jolt | a16z
𝒫𝔩𝔬𝔫𝒦: A Hands-On Deep Dive | zkSecurity
WHIR for Ethereum | Thomas Coratger, Giacomo Fenzi
My Journey into ZK: From HTML to a Verifiable High Score | zkVerify
Tools/Implementations
Noir Playground | 0xandee
Aragon x MACI Private Voting | Aragon & PSE
Cartesian Merkle Tree | Nethermind
ZEX v0.1: Confidential Peer-to-Peer DEX | Ethresearch
User-centric Private Data Availability | Celestia Forum
Vulnerabilities
Monero 51% Attack | Charles Guillemet
Two critical soundness bugs found in ZisK | COSTA research group
RiscZero Vunerabilities | RiscZero
Project Updates
Announcing LLZK: A Unified, Open-source Intermediate Representation (IR) for ZK | Veridise
Ensue Made Public | Ensue
Penumbra Labs Winding Down | Penumbra
ZK proving on Arbitrum chains | Succinct
Introducing ZK Coin | Boundless
Introducing AnomaPay: A Secure, Global Stablecoin Router and Payments Network | Anoma
Introducing Payy Card | Payy
Glock is here | Alpen Labs
Strategic Bundling, the Antidote to Modular Complexity | Zorp
The ZKWASM Tokenomics Cycle | Delphinus Labs
The Age of Proof: Building Privacy-First Age Verification Infrastructure for the Web | Kakarot
Introducing the Hyli Guide | Hylé
Events/Hackathons
Builders Week Istanbul | Istanbul, Turkey. Sept 1 - 7, 2025
Decompute 2025 | 30 Sept & 11 Nov 2025
Devconnect | Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nov 17-22, 2025
zkID Sessions | Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nov 18, 2025
zkTLS Day | Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nov 19, 2025
EthProofs Day | Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nov 22, 2025
RWC 2026 | Taipei, Taiwan. March 9–11, 2026
zkSummit 14 | Europe tbd, Spring/Summer 2026
Eurocrypt | Rome, Italy. May 10-14 2026
Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2025) Aarhus, Denmark. Dec 1-5, 2025
Asiacrypt | Melbourne, Australia. Dec 8-12, 2025
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There you have it!
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