Bangkok Devcon: The ZK world is exploding

Author: Haotian
Sharing my experiences and insights from Devcon in Thailand (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 launched 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 does not require participation at all. Although qualified applicants can get a part of the bonus, those who have not passed the application can also follow the study and discussion. It has a kind of flavor of "cramming" open classes on university campuses. This is how I "mixed" in.
Okay, without further ado, let me share a few thoughts:
1) EPF’s core contributors all seem to be quite “young”, not necessarily in terms of age. Perhaps it is because of their long-term focus on code, programming and some open source contributions that 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 "quick success and instant benefit". Without this pure energy, playing MEME, chasing Ponzi and any short-term interests may lead to deviation;
2) The Crypto industry can enable many people to change their fate, 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 circle and obtain potential short-term and long-term returns such as work 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's free, collaborative and communicative decentralized talent "cultivation" method is very cool. The Ethereum Foundation provides some members with Mentors, who will share technology and answer questions with them from time to time. But in fact, the foundation does not care It is impossible for the mentor to take care of everyone's real output. This kind of decentralized organizational governance and collaborative learning group is more like an interest-driven Crypto talent "incubator";
4) MEME's wealth effect is very important for attracting users outside the circle and introducing talents. What surprised me after talking about it was that most people entered the circle either during the 2017 ICO wave or the 21-year zoo MEME coin wave. A technical expert admitted that his potential for code development was actually related to a previous loss in MEME. After experiencing sudden wealth and sudden losses, he did not want to leave the market, so he focused on doing code to prove his personal value. One thought makes you a devil, one thought makes you a Buddha. Whether you are suitable for playing MEME, whether you can control your inner greed and gambling nature, I am afraid that only those who have experienced it will understand.
5) Autonomous learning and driving force in Crypto The field is too important. Although developers generally seem to be dull, not good at speaking, and even some of them do their own thing, they all have their own value scales. They have their own judgment criteria and principles for what time to invest, what to do, and who to worship. 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, there will be some people who go astray and fall behind, but those who can stick to it are really extraordinary.
Bangkok is a very interesting city. During the day, the sound of motorcycles can be heard from time to time, revealing personality and vitality, while at night it is full of lights, wine, and women. This sense of contrast is like the current complex Crypto industry. Different roads lead to different scenery.
This experience can be said to have no direct relationship with the conference, but after contacting the members of EPF, I can clearly feel the powerful backup innovation power of Ethereum and the "geek spirit" that drives 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 (II): 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 all of them. But I have been to the "ZK field". After running around, I feel that I have been poisoned by ZK and I am very addicted to it.
-Dream back to the ICO moment: Onchain anything ——>Prove anything.
I remember that when ICO was launched 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 The whole process of traceability chain, upstream and downstream supply chain transaction financing on the chain, etc. Although, it was later proved that not all scenarios can be put on the chain, nor do they all need to be put on the chain. However, the narrative paradigm of Onchain anything has made the bull market prosperous in 2017.
After running these major ZK special events, I also had a similar feeling. ZK is setting off a grand narrative of "Prove anything".
The real value of ZK lies in the separation of off-chain computing and on-chain verification, so that off-chain computing can play the ultimate computing performance, and the on-chain storage and execution costs can be minimized. ZK Tech serves as a "trusted bridge" to connect everything.
Looking back at the past two cycles, they 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" in the future.
At the same time, the innovative exploration of Prove Anything is also quietly ignited. Verifiable computing games, identity authentication, DeFi/RWA, privacy transactions, voting governance, AI model verification, IoT device trusted proof, enterprise-level supply chain privacy assurance, and other application scenarios involving both off-chain and on-chain will be covered.
-AVS economic consensus system is very important to ZK.
At the Proof Summit, I saw many new projects, such as: AltLayer wants to make 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 wants to 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 venue, I was verified that the improvements that altlayer wants to make for OP Fraud Proof need to be based on AVS, and the unified proof service layer consensus that Lagrange wants to make needs to rely on AVS.
The "secure consensus" that can be commercially packaged and output by AVS will help ZK quickly build a number of middleware protocol service networks, and help a series of rapidly emerging ZK infrastructures and existing pure chain VM environments to achieve connectivity.
Needless to say, everyone can also feel that there are too many emerging ZK forces active upstream and downstream of this AVS active verification service system initiated by Eigenlayer. Although it seems to be in its early stages now, let the bullets fly for a while.
-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. I was really excited to attend this event because of my spiritual pilgrimage to the world’s Internet giants.
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 with blockchain.
In my opinion, ZK+TEE is the left and right guardians of the verifiable computing era. ZK is responsible for computing proofs and verifying information transmission, while TEE provides a trusted execution environment and data privacy.
For example, Aztec's dark pool, Fabric's innovative VPU hardware 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, TEE will definitely lend a helping hand as ZK becomes popular;
-zkVM provides major infrastructure for the popularization of ZK Tech
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. What I mean by disorderly is not 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 innovations that Risc-V virtual machines are making from Vitalik Buterin's article. Here I saw ZKM engineers systematically explaining zkMIPS, a general-purpose zkVM that simplifies the ZK development process, which reduces the time and complexity of developing custom ZK circuits and provides a standardized platform for ZK application development.
Different from Risc-V's more hardware-oriented processor architecture, zkMIPS's software-oriented streamlined instruction subset can greatly optimize the scenarios required to generate zero-knowledge proofs.
zkVM is very popular in the context of modular narratives. Many people know that zkVM is more promising than zkEVM. Its core logic is that the future ZK will definitely break away from the original pure chain connection paradigm.
Therefore, zkVM, which can connect all AltVMs, can make Ethereum, Bitcoin, etc. a unified settlement layer for the entire chain environment, and can build a unified liquidity layer across technical architecture restrictions, is really important.
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, which will be a continuous hot spot for many years to come.
That’s all.
Finally, let’s 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.
Put this sentence in the current blockchain development environment where “modularization, chain abstraction, zkVM” are being dismembered and reconstructed, and you will definitely understand what is being promoted and clamored behind this sentence.