Bangkok Devcon: The ZK world is exploding

Author: Haotian
Thailand Devcon: What I Learned and Learned (Part 1):
Although the main event of Devcon will not start until the 12th, I arrived in Bangkok on the 9th, eager to experience this annual innovation event exclusively for developers. Fortunately, I stayed in the same hotel with a group of Ethereum EPF-related developers, and had a brief exchange with some of them:
The Ethereum Foundation has carried out five Ethereum Protocol Followers (EPF) activities. In each session, dozens of developers, researchers, engineers and other Crypto practitioners or enthusiasts from all over the world will form a "short-term study group". This group is completely optional. Although qualified applicants can get a part of the bonus, those who fail the application can also learn and discuss with the group. It is quite like going to a university campus to "crash" an open class. This is how I "sneaked" in.
Well, without further ado, let me share a few thoughts:
1) The core contributors of EPF all seem quite “young”, not necessarily in terms of age. Perhaps because they have been focusing on code, programming, and open source contributions for a long time, these developers give people a very “pure” feeling. When I was with them, what impressed me was the spirit of continuous contribution that was not “short-sighted”. Without this pure spirit, playing MEME, chasing Ponzi, and any other short-term profit-driven activities might lead to a wrong path;
2) The Crypto industry can help many people change their lives, and open source contributions are very important. In addition to grant funding such as EPF and Retrofund, there are also incentives for competitions such as Hackathon and Bugbounty, which give developers the opportunity to integrate into the Crypto community and obtain potential short-term and long-term returns such as jobs and bonuses. If you are lucky, you may be able to achieve wealth that ordinary graduates cannot accumulate in 10 years in one wave;
3) EPF is a cool way of "cultivating" talents in a decentralized way that is free, collaborative, and communicative. The Ethereum Foundation assigns mentors to some members, who share technology and answer questions with them from time to time. But in fact, the foundation does not care what they can really produce, and mentors cannot take care of everyone. This decentralized organizational governance and collaborative learning group is more like an interest-driven Crypto talent "incubator";
4) The wealth effect of MEME is very important for attracting users outside the circle and introducing talents. What surprised me after talking about it is that most people entered the circle either during the ICO wave in 2017 or during the zoo MEME coin wave in 2021. A technical expert admitted that his potential for code development was actually related to a previous loss in MEME speculation. After experiencing sudden wealth and sudden loss, he did not want to leave the market, so he focused on coding to prove his personal value. One thought can make you a devil or a Buddha. Whether you are suitable for playing MEME and whether you can control your inner greed and gambling nature, I am afraid that only those who have experienced it will understand.
5) Self-learning and motivation are very important in the field of Crypto. Although developers generally seem to be dull, not good at speaking, and even some of them do things their own way, they all have their own value scales. They know what time to invest, what to do, and who to worship. Each developer has his or her own judgment criteria and principles of doing things. It seems easy to make open source contributions and get incentives, but there are very few people who can actually delve into it and get results. Most people are driven by the persistence of the "geek spirit". Even in the EPF learning adventure, some people will deviate and fall behind, but those who can stick to it are really extraordinary.
Bangkok is an interesting city. During the day, you can hear the sound of motorcycle taxis from time to time, revealing their flamboyant personality and vitality, while at night it is full of lights, wine, and women. This sense of contrast is just like the current complex Crypto industry. Different paths lead to different views.
This review has nothing to do with the conference, but after interacting with EPF members, I can clearly feel the strong backup innovation power of Ethereum and the "geek spirit" driving the growth of the Crypto industry. It can give us the confidence and confidence that we cannot see by just focusing on the secondary market.
Bangkok Devcon Insights (Part 2): The ZK World is “Exploding”
In the past two days, I participated in the Proof Summit jointly organized by EigenLayer\altlayer, Provable hosted by RISC Zero, ZKHub initiated by ZKM and GOAT Network, and ZK Accelerate, etc. There are many activities, and it is impossible to participate in them all. But I went to the "ZK field" and after running around, I felt that I was poisoned by ZK and was very addicted.
-Dream back to the ICO moment: Onchain anything ——>Prove anything.
I remember that during the ICO in 2017, there was a prosperous scene of "all industries can be put on the chain", such as: medical case data on the chain, agricultural products from planting to the table traceability chain, supply chain upstream and downstream transaction financing on the chain, etc. Although, later facts proved that not all scenarios can be put on the chain, and not all need to be put on the chain. However, the narrative paradigm of Onchain anything has made the bull market prosperous in 2017.
I had a similar feeling after attending these major ZK special events. ZK is launching a grand narrative of "Prove anything".
The real value of ZK lies in the separation of off-chain computing and on-chain verification. Only by allowing off-chain computing to exert its ultimate computing efficiency can the on-chain storage and execution costs be minimized. ZK Tech serves as a "trusted bridge" to connect everything.
Looking back at the past two cycles, both tended to tell the story of "on-chain", and Rollup layer2 is just the tip of the iceberg of ZK's value. After the outbreak of ZK, there will be no boundary between on-chain and off-chain, and there will only be a new paradigm of "verifiable computing".
At the same time, Prove Anything's innovative exploration is also quietly igniting. Verifiable computing games, identity authentication, DeFi/RWA, privacy transactions, voting governance, AI model verification, trusted proof of IoT devices, enterprise-level supply chain privacy assurance, and other application scenarios involving both off-chain and on-chain will all be covered.
- The AVS economic consensus system is important to ZK.
At the Proof Summit, we saw many new projects. For example, AltLayer is going to create a VITAL ZK proof system to provide ZK proof capabilities for OP-Rollup; Aligned focuses on large-scale ZK proof generation and explores effective integration with OP Stack; Opacity Network explores data privacy and secure shared infra based on VDN, zkTLS, MPC, etc.; Lagrange Prover Network will establish a dedicated proof service layer between L1 and L2 to provide a unified shared proof infrastructure for different ZK proofs.
I have previously analyzed that Eigenlayer and its AVS service paradigm represent the future of Ethereum, if it was just a prospect at that time. At this conference, I was verified that the improvements that altlayer wants to make for OP Fraud Proof must be based on AVS, and the unified proof service layer consensus that Lagrange wants to make must rely on AVS.
The "secure consensus" that AVS provides with commercially available packaged output will help ZK quickly build a number of middleware protocol service networks, and help connect a series of rapidly emerging ZK infrastructures and existing pure chain VM environments.
Needless to say, everyone can feel that there are too many emerging ZK forces active upstream and downstream of the AVS active verification service system initiated by Eigenlayer. Although it seems to be in its early stages, let's wait and see.
-TEE verifiable execution environment gives ZK wings;
This TEE Salon lasted a whole day and I didn’t have time to listen to it all, but surprisingly, the event was held at Google’s cool office in Bangkok. Out of a spiritual pilgrimage to the world’s largest Internet company, I was quite excited to attend this event.
Google's Confidential Computing cloud computing product line, Intel's SGX and TDX technologies, etc. are eager to find a suitable entry point in the new TEE narrative. The logic is simple. Just look at the ambiguous relationship between Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud and blockchain.
In my opinion, ZK+TEE is the left and right guardian of the era of verifiable computing. ZK is responsible for computing proof and verifying information transmission, while TEE provides a trusted execution environment and data privacy.
For example, Aztec's dark pool, Fabric's VPU hardware innovation chip, etc. More and more projects integrate ZK and TEE as well as other MPC and FHE encryption algorithms to accelerate the arrival of a new verifiable computing paradigm. Although TEE still feels too traditional, it will definitely help ZK as it becomes more popular.
-zkVM provides major infrastructure for the popularization of ZK Tech <br>At the zkHUB special event, the overwhelming number of ZK projects such as ZKM, RiscZERO, Cysic, Mina, Goat Network, Succinct, etc. made people a little dazzled. When I say "dizzy", I don't mean the concept of "too many", but the coverage level and depth of its upstream and downstream solutions are amazing.
Many people may have seen some of the innovations that the Risc-V virtual machine is making from Vitalik Buterin’s article. Here I saw ZKM engineers systematically explaining zkMIPS, a general-purpose zkVM that simplifies the ZK development process. It reduces the time and complexity of developing custom ZK circuits and provides a standardized platform for ZK application development.
Different from Risc-V's processor architecture that is more hardware-oriented, zkMIPS's streamlined instruction subset that is more software-oriented can greatly optimize the scenarios required to generate zero-knowledge proofs.
zkVM is very popular in the context of modular narrative. Many people know that zkVM is more promising than zkEVM. Its core logic lies in the fact that the future ZK will definitely break away from the original pure chain connection paradigm.
Therefore, zkVM is really important because it can connect all AltVMs, make Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc. a unified settlement layer for the entire chain environment, and build a unified liquidity layer that transcends technical architecture restrictions.
I believe that at the end of the EVM-Compatible narrative, the new zkVM will release a large infrastructure of verifiable computing that connects everything and will be a continuous hot topic for many years to come.
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Finally, let me end with a sentence from RiscZERO VP. He said that the blockchain we are in is entering a new "Cloud Era" from the "Server Era" represented by Ethereum and Solana.
Putting this sentence into the current blockchain development environment where "modularization, chain abstraction, zkVM" and other aspects are being dismantled and reconstructed, you will definitely understand what is being promoted and advocated behind this sentence.