The original definition of the Weil pairing from Weil's 1940 prison note.

Congrats to Ulrich, Luke, and Suyash (great cryptographers from StarkWare and Aztec) who are joining Shielded Labs to work on post-quantum research for Zcash! They're just the latest in a string of high-caliber folks joining Zcash over the past year. LFG!

zk.money is back. In 2021, zk.money brought private transactions to Ethereum: 75,000+ wallets and $100M in volume. Today it relaunches on the fully decentralized Aztec Network. Claim your tag now 👇

Nice tool for provably human blog posts blog.danromik.com/on-provabl…

LaBinius: Lattice-based Polynomial Commitment Scheme over a Binary Field. Excited to present LaBinius, my recent work with @gregor_seiler. We show how to instantiate an Ajtai commitment over extremely efficient cyclotomic power-of-three rings and then connect it with a polynomial opening mod 2, so that R/2R is a binary field. Such a PCS is bridged with SOTA frontends, including Flock and Binius, to obtain end-to-end proofs of standard hashes with throughput of tens of thousands per second. osdnk.me/blog/labinius

first chess website that I like - chessreps.come , it's just drill baby drill

STOC call for papers is out. Deadline is November 2. acm-stoc.org/stoc2027/stoc20… New rules for the AI era: limited submissions, public posting and a required video. Is it a coincidence that the camera-ready deadline is April Fools Day?

1/ Today we're releasing Lattice Jolt: a post-quantum version of the Jolt zkVM, built on lattices instead of elliptic curves. It's _faster_ than curve-based Jolt and has the shortest proofs of any post-quantum zkVM — under 100 KB. Post: a16zcrypto.com/posts/article…

Great interview.

When LLMs rapidly discover new math results, will we need a multitude of human mathematicians to make sense of the results? Or will it be considered unimportant to have humans understand the results as long as they are formally verified in Lean? This question is on my mind since seeing the new techniques coming up in the better.codes autoresearch project. For the first time I see indisputably interesting novel techniques in a question I cared about being LLM generated.

The autoresearch on the proximity gaps conjecture is the closest to home example for me that math has changed better.codes/

I've heard of math PhD students losing motivation because AI is solving everything. This is nonsense. If I look at my PhD field - computational complexity theory - the big questions are all just as open as they've been for decades. We barely know anything. We can't prove things that seem trivial and obvious at first glance: As one example, we can't prove that a poly time algorithm can't always be simulated in logarithmic space! Like in the metaphore with two men running away from a bear - it's easier today to have an edge over your competitors. People are so distracted, and most people don't even think that's a problem because they believe AI can do their thinking for them better than they can, so why go to the trouble of focusing? Carve a chunk of the day where you're doing things old school - just you a pen and paper and maybe a book. No internet access for a continuous chunk of time. I'm solving (trying :) ) exercises from silverman EC book at the moment. PPl who will preserve the ability to think humans used to have till fairly recently will have a huge advantage - like the ppl who invested in crypto in early 2010's. That's at least my (contrarian? obvious?) opinion.

Oh my goodness… eprint.iacr.org/2026/1630

New Founder video just dropped! @Zac_Aztec shares his thoughts on how to get out of the current crypto season using encrypted ultrasound money and privacy.

seven months ago I asked for this. today it's real. dark forest on aztec, a strategy game where the fog of war is enforced by the chain itself. go claim a planet

To oversimplify, some of the "hype" around formal verification I don't fully get. If the theorems are a bunch of equations (I think 2700 of them in Zcash Ironwood) how much easier is it to see that theorems capture the desired behavior versus doing it directly on the circuit code? The fact that no additional bugs were discovered during FV process, is a potential yellow flag.

Base has migrated its SP1 proof verification to PLONK. PLONK's universal setup eliminates the need for a new trusted setup ceremony with every prover upgrade, reducing the trust surface for the $7.4 billion in Base deposits secured by Succinct.