The research arm of Nethermind

We introduce Zinc , a hash-based succinct argument for integer arithmetic. Zinc's goal is to provide a practically efficient scheme that bypasses the arithmetization overheads that many succinct arguments present. These overheads can be of orders of magnitude in many applications.

Latticefold, a post-quantum cryptography solution, has undergone extensive benchmarking of its core components including Linearization, Decomposition, Folding, and fundamental operations like Ajtai commitments and NTT. Testing with 128-bit security parameters across single-threaded and parallel implementations revealed that while Latticefold's prover time is greater than Hypernova, it maintains practical usability while providing robust post-quantum security.

We introduce two folding schemes for lookup instances: FLI and FLI+SOS. Both use a PIOP to check that a matrix has elementary basis vectors as rows, with FLI+SOS adding a twist based on Lasso’s SOS-decomposability.

We present Mova, a folding scheme for R1CS instances that does not require committing to error or cross terms, nor makes use of the sumcheck protocol.

We present two techniques to improve the computational and/or communication costs of STARK proofs: packing and modular split-and-pack.

The long-awaited Shapella upgrade, expected to go live in early spring, will enable validators to exit. The upgrade is set to increase the number of ETH validators going forward, as staking will become safer, and validators will no longer have to lock their capital for an undetermined amount of time.

In this article, we examine whether these fears are justified and attempt to estimate how many validators are expected to exit and how many will join post-upgrade.

The Shanghai upgrade, set to take place in early spring, will permit validators to withdraw their staked ETH, opening the door to new opportunities in the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) market.

We propose multi-round MEV-Boost, a modification of MEV-Boost that enables based preconfirmations by running multiple rounds of MEV-Boost auctions within a single slot. This approach inherits the L1 PBS pipeline and mitigates the negative externalities of based preconfirmations as a result.

Decentralized preconfirmers come with significant tradeoffs that will likely make them impractical for the forseeable future. The preconfirmation sauna creates a repeated game amongst permissionless preconfirmers…

This research analyzes a simple "strawman" preconfirmation setup, identifying its shortcomings and highlighting challenges that future solutions must address to mitigate negative externalities.

This article introduces the concept of appointed execution proposers (AEPs), a proposer allocation protocol that allows validators in a committee-based consensus mechanism, e.g. proof-of-stake, to appoint specialized proposers to propose blocks on behalf of validators. AEPs joins a long line of protocols decoupling high-barrier requirements, e.g. execution-block building, large amounts of slashable stake, from low-barrier requirements e.g. beacon-block proposing, attesting.

A protocol that enables based rollups to capture value from block building while allowing for based preconfirmations, addressing the initial design’s lack of revenue capture for rollups.

This post reviews two popular digital signature schemes, along with their Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) versions.

In this post, we discuss the notion of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols.

Although staking is used in multiple proof-of-stake networks, this article focuses solely on Ethereum. We will briefly discuss other types of staking, but our main area of interest is the various flavors of liquid staking.

This article introduces Distributed Key Generation (DKG) protocols and one of its fundamental building blocks: Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS) schemes.

In this blogpost, I will explain how to use Shamir's secret sharing to securely share mnemonic keys which are often used to secure cryptocurrency wallets.