Equilibrium Labs

This first of its kind report by Hannes Huitula from Equilibrium Labs is mapping the Web3 confidential computing landscape, and featuring @sodabubblelabs' #gcEVM! The thesis is: 'All roads lead to MPC,' as various cryptographic techniques (ZK, FHE, GC, SS) ultimately converge into MPC protocols. https://lnkd.in/dzG4Bp9D

🚄 Equilibrium Labs Infra Bulletin #32 covers Exploiting Sharded Blockchains, Privacy Infrastructure Endgame, State of AA, and more... Let's dive in! 🤿 Highlight of the week 🔍 Blockchains that leverage state sharding have higher risk of MEV and censorship, as completing a transaction can involve block proposers in many distinct shards. To counter this, Nil proposes ShardDAG; A DAG architecture that links shard blocks to each other and provides an enforceable order in which each shard must process cross-shard transactions. Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest 💡 - Do All Roads Lead To MPC? Exploring The End-Game For Privacy Infrastructure - The State of Account Abstraction - Espresso Open Sources HotShot Consensus Protocol - Some Steps Toward Rollup Interoperability - Near Chain Signatures Launch on Mainnet Personal Recommendations From Our Team 🤌 📚 Tecnofeudalism - Yanis Varoufakis 🎧 Crown - Elsa 💡 The Surveilled Society: Who is watching you and how Link to newsletter in the comments - thanks for reading! 🙏

Do All Roads Lead To MPC? 🚧 Our latest research piece argues that if the desirable end-state is programmable privacy infrastructure that can handle shared private state without any single point of failure, then the trust assumptions of all approaches boil down to those of MPC 🔍 We also explore the maturity of MPC and its trust assumptions, highlight alternative approaches, compare tradeoffs, and provide an industry overview. https://lnkd.in/d-ytEVDc

🚄 Equilibrium Labs Infra Bulletin #30 covers Obol's release of Charon V1, Geographical decentralization of Ethereum, Reth 1.0, and more… Let's dive in! 🤿 Highlight of the week 🔍 Obol released a production-ready version of their DVT middleware, Charon. Distributed validator technology (DVT) enables multiple nodes to collaborate on running an Ethereum validator ("multi-sig for validation"). Charon is the middleware client that sits between the validating client and its connected beacon node, enabling existing Ethereum validator clients to operate together as part of a DV cluster. Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest 💡 - Research on the geographical decentralization of Ethereum Nodes - Research on MegaETH and their design choices - Paradigm releases Reth 1.0 - Vitalik's recent post around pre-confirmations - ZK FM podcast episode on programmable privacy - Demo of Starkware's new Stwo prover (1,000x improvement) Personal Recommendations From Our Team 🤌 📚 Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott 🎧 Bleeding Me Dry - Alicia Creti 💡 Faces Made Of Living Skin Make Robots Smile Link to newsletter in the comments - thanks for reading! 🙏

🚄 Equilibrium Labs Infra Bulletin #30 covers Obol's release of Charon V1, Geographical decentralization of Ethereum, Reth 1.0, and more… Let's dive in! 🤿 Highlight of the week 🔍 Obol released a production-ready version of their DVT middleware, Charon. Distributed validator technology (DVT) enables multiple nodes to collaborate on running an Ethereum validator ("multi-sig for validation"). Charon is the middleware client that sits between the validating client and its connected beacon node, enabling existing Ethereum validator clients to operate together as part of a DV cluster. Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest 💡 - Research on the geographical decentralization of Ethereum Nodes - Research on MegaETH and their design choices - Paradigm releases Reth 1.0 - Vitalik's recent post around pre-confirmations - ZK FM podcast episode on programmable privacy - Demo of Starkware's new Stwo prover (1,000x improvement) Personal Recommendations From Our Team 🤌 📚 Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott 🎧 Bleeding Me Dry - Alicia Creti 💡 Faces Made Of Living Skin Make Robots Smile Link to newsletter in the comments - thanks for reading! 🙏

🚄 Equilibrium Labs Infra Bulletin #29 covers Pre-confirmations, RiscZero's zkVM 1.0, Privacy in Blockchains, and more… Let's dive in! 🤿 Highlight of the week 🔍 Preconfirmations are promises (but not guarantees) of future execution or inclusion. They aim to increase the user experience in cases where final execution might take longer. There are many ways to implement them though in blockchains and each one inhibits tradeoffs. The article by Longhash offers a comprehensive overview of the current space. Research, Articles & Other Things of Interest 💡 - Privacy in blockchains - what, why, how - Can blockchains and ZK help humanity survive? - RISC Zero launched their production-ready zkVM and published performance benchmarks. -  Tradeoffs with zkVM design Personal Recommendations From Our Team 🤌 📚 Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties - Tom O’Neill 🎧 Harpists have 7 pedals - one for each note 💡 Joining an "AI" startup Link to the newsletter in the comments - thanks for reading! 🙏

What do actually mean when we talk about privacy in blockchains and why is it difficult to achieve? 🔐 "Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world" - A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto Most people would agree that some privacy is valuable, yet most blockchains today are fully transparent. This reveals a lot of sensitive information and hinders wider adoption. We spent the last couple of months getting to the core of this problem and part 1 of our privacy series covers the "what, why, and how". In addition, we present a framework that can be used to evaluate current solutions and what tradeoffs they make. Part 2 will go deeper into the different options to achieve privacy guarantees, how they compare to each other, what tradeoffs they make, and more. Stay tuned... https://lnkd.in/dVFzxK94

ANNOUNCING: EQUILIBRIUM VENTURES (EQV) - An Engineering-first Venture Firm 🎉 I'm stoked to share this: We've launched our first venture fund, Equilibrium Ventures (EQV), supported by 70+ sr engineers who have helped build core infrastructure for major blockchains, including Starknet, Ethereum, Solana, Aptos, Polygon, Celestia, zkSync, Aleo, Polkadot, Ripple, and Algorand. Huge congrats to m honkasalo, Henrik Sundvik, and Chris(Topher) A. for making this happen. tl;dr this fund 🔬 conducts deep technical DD in blockchain infra and cryptography, and 🏗 actually helps founders build. Curious to know more? Check out the comments for our recent features 👇