lucqs

📣🚨The Starknet Foundation is very excited to announce the launch of BTCFi Season, a new program to bootstrap BTC activity on Starknet, with a focus on low-cost, BTC-backed loans.

1/ Bitcoin doesn’t change. But what you can do with it just did. From the June 2024 announcement that Starknet would scale Bitcoin, to the product rollouts of March 2025, the path has been clear. BTCFi on Starknet is where that momentum now leads 🧵

Vitalik asked this question in 2022: Could we replace KZG with arithmetic hashes for Data Availability Sampling ? The answer back then was no. But I think it could be a different answer today. I was very upset by the introduction of a trusted setup on Ethereum for proto danksharding. Even if arguably it was the most successful and well executed ceremony ever (Over 141,000 participants contributed randomness, making it the largest trusted setup in history), I don't like this precedent. I was hoping that we would let more time to explore possible alternatives. I am happy that Vitalik did some research after I suggested we explore FRI based alternatives to KZG, and he took time to think about potential alternatives, unfortunately back at this time in 2022 the consensus was that those alternatives would not be practical and they were not considered seriously. 2 years later, a research paper has been published: FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI (Mathias Hall-Andersen, ZkSecurity - Mark Simkin, Ethereum Foundation - Benedikt Wagner, Ethereum Foundation) eprint.iacr.org/2024/248 Recently, I spent more time thinking about DA and especially in the context of Bitcoin, as part of our plans for Starknet expansion to Bitcoin. It's clear that rollups will be extremely limited by Bitcoin DA. So the natural following thinking is what kind of alt DA could make sense while facing those limitations. And surprisingly I think there is no obvious answer. I came to the exact same conclusion as described in the FRIDA paper: While their work thoroughly lays the formal foundations for data availability sampling, the constructions are either prohibitively expensive, use a trusted setup, or have a download complexity for light clients scales with a square root of the data size. It's true! None of the existing alt DAs has all at the same time: - no trusted setup - zk friendly for verifying equivalence of commitments - no fraud proof system As usual, I like to demonstrate ideas with an exploration project. So we started building FRIEDA (github.com/keep-starknet-str…): A Rust implementation of data availability sampling using Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs (FRI), inspired by the FRIDA paper (s/o @0xLucqs for the implementation of FRIEDA in Rust, and thanks @UHaboeck for the help on the moon math). Specifically it uses the Mersenne M31 prime field (2³¹ - 1), the one used in STWO prover for Circle STARKs. It's working and has basic functions to sample and reconstruct data. Ok, having this library is cool, but I wanted to go further and start thinking on how to build a DA layer that would be optimised for ZK rollups and that would offer those properties: - No Trusted Setup - ZK friendly commitments - Optimised bandwidth requirements for light client So we started another exploration project, Mikan, a ZK friendly DA layer using FRIDA for Data Availability Sampling. Mikan repo: github.com/keep-starknet-str… Mikan is a ZK-Rollup friendly data availability layer built on the Malachite consensus framework (s/o @AdiSeredinschi and Informal System team for this great piece of software). It provides strong data availability guarantees using STARK-friendly cryptographic primitives without requiring a trusted setup. The current MVP status has consensus engine using Malachite, block creation with blobs, data sampling, basic mempool. Here is a demo showing data retrieval, sampling, blob creation. Right now it's an exploration project, but I would love to check interest from different rollups teams (especially Bitcoin ones cc @AlpenLabs @citrea_xyz) to explore this further together. @VitalikButerin do you think it would make sense to restart discussions on removing the need for KZG for DAS ? Generally, I really like purity and simplicity of hash based commitment schemes for everything, it became more or less the norm now for proving schemes but maybe it's time to also consider it for other things like DA.

🚨 BREAKING app.zkube.xyz NEWS 🚨 ✅ @0xLucqs hasn't just been cooked, he's been flame-broiled, deep-fried, slow-roasted, pressure-cooked, wok-fried, clay-pot baked. ✅ @shadowfax_m has been absolutely obliterated, the roasting is out of control, she's literally evaporated, she's not even on the leaderboard. If found, call 911 and tell them to bring ice.

Optimism Foundation disables permissionless fraud proofs, plans hard fork following security audits theblock.co/post/311702/opti…