Intro to Ethproofs day: Public 🤝 Private Partnership by Will Corcoran, Ethereum Foundation

Transcript

Hello. All right, we got audio. We got visuals. I'm told we've got a connection coming up after me. All right, so glad to see you all. This is very exciting. So, welcome to Ethroofs day. Raise your hand if you've been to an ETH proofs call. All right, a bunch of people. Okay, so we hope today is going to be a lot like an ETH proofs call. We're going to speedrun through a lot of topics. We got 24 things to go through, lectures, panel discussions, so on so forth. Hope there's going to be a lot of alpha, a lot of announcements, new benchmarks, and a lot of opportunities for Q&A.

Uh hopefully everyone's getting a t-shirt or has gotten a t-shirt or attempted to get a t-shirt. You should also have an opportunity for some lunch, some coffee cuz we're going to have to keep you fed. We've got 10 lightning talks, seven keynotes, three spicy panels, one demo. If you're ever lost in terms of like what's up next, go to efroofsof.de. It's the first website I ever shipped. I'm very proud of it. Um, we've got 10 teams that are presenting or representatives from 10 teams and five actually seven teams from the EF that are represented today.

So, who am I? Uh, I'm Will Corkran. I'm a research coordinator at the Ethereum Foundation. And before I started in the fast-paced world of open-source cryptographically cryptoeconomically secured distributed protocol research coordination uh I was an architect. Um this is one of the last buildings that I designed this is or worked on. I was the project manager. Uh it's a co-located Chicago public library branch and Chicago public housing. Um I think it's pretty cool. It's a very very challenging project to have done. Um, and the reason why I mention it is because based off of the constraints that we had in front of us, the site,

the schedule, the budget, the tenants that we were trying to find a home for, the long-term sustainability of the project, the only way it was able to happen was through a public private partnership. Um, which is very much how I view this race towards real-time proving of Ethereum L1 execution layer blocks. It's a public private partnership and the the reason why it's so important is because the potential benefits are massive. We've got an opportunity to significantly increase the transaction throughput without sacrificing on decentralization or security and we're just in my opinion like entering phase zero. So this is going to be a

long process uh and it's going to require a lot of teamwork and a a strong sort of sense of purpose to be able to accomplish it which I really really feel today and I've felt very much for the last several months. So this public private partnership in my opinion like the reason why they're so important is because you rely on the the dynamism of the private market to be able to do things that large institutions you know sort of like a a large agency isn't able to do isn't able to be as nimble. But then you also need the public entity to be able to think out the box, be collaborative and help uh usher things along and and connect

dots to un to remove blockers for that private institution. So or private entities. So in our case, it's really begins and ends with all of these amazing ZKVM teams that just keep blowing out new benchmarks and shipping new technology. And we've got eight of them on ETH proofs. Uh right now there's uh I think nine or 10 that are going to be on the stage today, but then there's a whole fleet of others that are at different stages of development that we've been tracking and we're also in conversations with. I think I've got like 45 Telegram channels with different ZKVM teams.

The other side of that private uh uh private dynamism comes from the prover side. So these are the teams that are excelling at DevOps hardware acceleration uh orchestration and really making all the ZK VMs dance and um are submitting these real-time proofs. So these provers come in all shapes and sizes. Um mult we're really really interested in these uh sort of uh multi-GPU clusters that are uh you know we call them like not at home but at garage or or at office uh proving could be at home someday.

There's also larger entities prover networks which we'll hear from a couple uh on the final panel today and then all the the ZKVM teams are also like have their hands dirty. they're running their own they're dog fooding their own software and submitting proofs and learning a lot about uh the whole process through those iterations. So on the public side and I'll kind of use that term loosely to describe the EF and the research uh efforts that are going on. First and foremost, you've got the ZKVM team really just like setting the tone in terms of uh what is going to be an acceptable framework for real-time proving and always make sure that we land on in or we trend in a direction that's consistent with Ethereum values

of decentralization and security and you know have everything done in a very like provable way that can be reproduced. You also have the cryptography team. These are the people that are looking at all of the foundational cryp cryptographic primitives, the proof systems and you know really sort of making sure that we're building on a foundation of soundness. You also have the protocol snarkerification team which the sort of uh you know primary effort that uh they've been championing is the formal verification effort. So really making sure that everything that gets specified and audited you know is what you see is what you get.

You also have the robust incentives group. So Julian from rig is going to be moderating the final panel today. And so as we are looking at uh prover dynamics and prover business models um you know I think that we want to make sure that we have a clear sense of the incentive structures and so that there's no centralizing vector that comes out of uh the prover activities. And so the new kit on the block is the fifth team that I would add to this. So this is ETH proofs um just recently announced as a team fair as a team lead been doing an amazing job and really kind of consider this as this interface between public and private research and industry and it's also this kind of

mimemetic wrapper that's usually where I come in to try to help with strengthening community and making sure that like all of these uh individual efforts and visions are uh you know move forward in a in a coherent aligned manner. Uh so quickly about ETH proofs launched uh January 28th of last year. E uh the Ethereum.org team did an amazing job with uh standing up the first uh minimal viable product and rolled that out. Uh when I came on board, I was really focused on uh driving community and we've hosted several community calls, six in total.

Um and the each one of these calls usually uh gets about 250 uh participants. A lot of exciting information comes out of those. Right now on ethroofs you can see if you go to the website we've got 13 teams uh ZK uh eight ZKVM teams 21 clusters and we've uh out of those clusters we've had about a million proofs submitted to ETH proofs in less than a year. Since January 1st to today, when you're just looking at a single 4090 proof, we asked provers to submit one block for every hund or one proof for every 100 Ethereum blocks. On that metric, we've seen latency go from 16 minutes to 26 seconds at the highest

point for a single uh GPU submitting that proof. The cost of that has also gone from $169 to fractions of a penny. Uh we also have in browser verification. We've got Telegram bots. We are in the DMs of all the teams letting them know the stability of uh of us receiving the proofs so that we can like sort of keep an eye on this top of funnel and and track the mini while the researchers really kind of track all of the very detailed use cases. Uh we've introduced some countdowns. Shout out L2B. Um you know we're really trying to drive everything towards reproducibility, open source. I think that we're making great strides with that. We've been really

strengthening the API. We uh shipped a public uh product requirement doc and roadmap. If you go to ETH proof's uh GitHub repo, you can find that in the PM repo. We just did a a really great uh collaboration with client side proving um you can see that dashboard now on the full V3 refactor that just shipped. Uh again, welcoming a new team lead in Pharaoh. And if you liked eat proof day, you're going to love beast mode. So we've got three events coming up in can. I just want to plug real quick. I'll be having the QR codes up later on. We're going to have one that really focuses on ETH proofs and lean execution. We call that beast mode. And then we're also doing a a similar effort with advancing lean

consensus with our PQ interop. Some of those teams are here. We're going to have fort mode for that and a little hacker house running two days which we're calling villa lean. So, um, when you get a chance, try to sign up. So, we're going to start off. Uh, first we've got this demo that we've been talking about and then we've got a panel and then two keynotes from key EF researchers. So, um, I think we'll we'll throw it to the uh to the shared screen if if we can do that now.