ZK HACK IV - Puzzle F1 Recap

Transcript

today we are here for our second session of ZK hack 4 uh this is a multi-week event running from January 16th to February 6th so as mentioned we're in session two before we jump into the event itself though we're going to be uh I'll just share like a little bit about the Zeki Haack project for anyone who missed last week's session so this is the overall view of all of the things happening around ZK hack we have two sort of hubs the website and the Discord server you can see a lot of things here you might be familiar with the ZK whiteboard sessions or study groups events like this or the ZK mesh newsletter um all of them can be

found basically if you go to the website or to the Discord so the website is zack. deev I really recommend having this or at least the event page loaded especially if you want to do the puzzle because it's over there that we publish the puzzle when it goes live all right uh you should also join the Discord if you're not there already we say this every time I'm assuming you all are but we're going to be sharing um all of the links in the chat and just remember use the sessions chat for this yes here's the website as well as mentioned if you want to do one of the puzzles you should have this sort of pre-loaded like it's we're announcing the new puzzle in an hour and a half but like yeah you should still have it ready

so let me share a little bit about ZK hack 4 and ZK hack online events in general so what we're doing our weekly workshops we meet every Tuesday to learn about a new ZK tool or last week we did the ZK jargon decoder between our Tuesday sessions we are actually doing this puzzle hacking competition we saw a ton of people doing that and it was so great to actually um to to see all the activity we're very excited to share the winner ERS there were a lot of submissions this time around I think more than we've ever had on a first puzzle so we're really really excited about that and we're going to be sharing a little bit about the prizes in this intro just a reminder on February 6th so in two weeks there is a ZK job fair

which is a great opportunity to find your new job your next job with top teams working in ZK so I'll share a little bit about that in a minute so people are always asking where are the videos are there videos yes there are videos uh I have a podcast as well called the zero knowledge podcast and we have a YouTube channel all the ZK hack videos will be over there we take about a day to turn them over but don't worry we're always on it and we'll like I guess if you subscribe you actually get you get it published you'll like be notified when it's published if you want to know it first so I want to share a little bit about the schedule for today um we're about to share the puzzle F1 winners that's what coming up right

after this then we have the risk zero team doing their get rusty with risk zero Workshop build your ZK rust application so you want to stick around for that I already saw some questions in the event chat save any questions for the risk zero team for when they come on stage because they're going to be looking for it and I think there's a few members of the team here too who can help out so yeah that's today at the end of the session so like it's 655 UTC so really at the end of it we are announcing puzzle F2 and we're going to be sharing that publishing it on the website at that time and that's when the second puzzle competition kicks off just so you know it really does help to do all three if you want to rank on the

leaderboard so if you've already done the first be sure to stay tuned for the second um next week we have the polygon session polygon Labs is presenting provable State changes I think we have a link to that and I think it would be great if you're interested in it that you already signed up the way this platform works unfortunately you can't sign up for all of them like at once so you have to individually sign up but we've just shared the link so that should help you out and yeah next week we actually share the results of this puzzle competition that's starting today so I think I can invite Andrea to the stage because we're gonna be sharing a little bit of a look back at how this puzzle uh went in terms of solution

and so I'm just inviting hopefully the correct one to the stage just to note to everyone in the audience that blue button at the top that says share Audio and Video Only click that if you plan on being on the stage that's really just for the speakers hey how's it going yeah I'm I'm a good one I think uh yeah okay so I guess my task is to give like a one two minute overview of what was the goal of the first puzzle um to give like a a conceptually what was the solution and later we are

going to share all these nice writeups that we got Solutions so um whoever didn't solve it and I was very happy to see that a lot of people were trying um we are still like encouraging everyone to um see what it is how it worked reach if you have more questions or if you have any Mis understandings um so okay uh this first puzzle was like the classic uh double spend problem which I think whoever started ZK is kind of the first problems that they uh are approached with with these nulf fires and everything um so the idea was to

like create another nullifier and like uh to be able to double spend uh your funds which in general is not nice to do and you should not be able to do it um so we wanted to make it um like from a few pieces like that you need to uh learn something about elliptic curves something about hashing something about this uh zcash like schins so uh there were like two tricks so first trick was to understand different with like twisted and like normal curves and how you negate points there so the idea was that if you negate the point you have

the same x coordinate so you can have oh oops you fed up keep going Andrea no PR if you negate the point uh you're like still able to uh create the same public key and it's not possible when curve is Twisted so uh here we chose a curve which is not Twisted so you were able to do that but that was not enough so another like uh concept is to doing this um Cycles on curves where you have like a this

matching fields and we used like M&T curves so when you were performing this negation of Point um you should have been careful in which field you're doing that and then later casting to mn4 so I think conceptually I gave what were like the two main tricks like uh so that you can negate point and preserve X and that you need to be careful how are you negate like in in which field you're Computing stuff um and I guess uh in a couple of minutes or hours you're all going to be able to see all the right up

Solutions again uh ping me Kobi Nico whoever in Discord will gladly assist you even if you haven't understand from this because there were a lot of Concepts and for new people it can be cool cool thank you Andrea thank you so much destion yeah um yeah hope that you like the puzzle and let's see the the winners yeah all right we're gonna so Gaylord you popped up there um sorry we I I was like join and then we didn't realize you'd you'd come right in um but uh some of you may know Gaylord for he's been on stage with me at the ZK hack

Istanbul um part of the team at ZK hack and we're going to be doing the prize winning announcement now for the week so just a quick note in the past we did the payouts right away every week this time around we're actually going to be holding this until the end and then do payouts for the weekly prizes and the overall prizes so just just so you know that um just a reminder too like ZK validator another like a company that I also am the co-founder of with Kobe and a few other people uh we are uh we are the prize partners for this so it's zkv who's actually gonna be um paying the prizes for the for the for the ZK hack for so this is what you get if you make

it into the top three or you have the write up and we wanted to do a little drum roll because we have our winners yes you ready Gaylord yes it was very close uh yeah 45 verifi submission so thanks and congrats to all the participants but yeah let's go with the with the top three okay at the third place at third place we have NEOS Ledger congratulations very is that's your name yeah as you can see the the score is already very high so for those used to that is based on the time of submission so yeah we actually have the closest difference between the number

one and number two in zik hack history so yeah let's go and check out number two all right number two was Dei prian congratulations and that's yeah very very fast to uh crack the problem so well done both number one and number two cracked it in less than one hour but with one minute and 27 seconds of advance and Tei prian we have our grand winner for puzzle one drum roll zelic congratulations go congratulations PR amazing all the top five cracked very very fast so yeah as you can see it's less than two minutes

of difference so yeah you gotta be fast to be the winner and very importantly and that's going to be useful to kind of resonate with what Andrea was was saying uh we've had a very very nice write up about the puzzle so that's going to get you a price as well two in this case it's one of our top three who actually cleaned this one up too although we did have a lot like a lot of really good ones but we are trying to just gauge on on quality and again I mean guys you're gonna see it the write up is really amazing so I hope it will in addition to all the comments by Andrea I hope he it will help you understand what the puzzle was all about and actually I'm gonna do it

right away I'm just publishing the leaderboard on the website now yes someone asked just quickly someone asked in the chat how do we G this so this is very much about like the speed of submission and a correctness in the answer so there were a lot like there were actually more submissions than the 45 that we have there but if it was wrong you didn't make it onto the leaderboard and so yeah it's not just about getting something and it has to be right and these folks got it this time so thank you everyone who who did the puzzle this week congrats to all the participants again 45 submission is actually a lot so congrats and see you guys next week see you soon thanks Gaylord I think I can ah perfect okay we're gonna finish off our

intro so that we can get started with our Workshop um just a reminder that there will be more gifts for the finale just a hint there is this open SE nft collection there's only two left for sale the other ones are actually going out to the winners so these ones are not for sale those are those are the ones that people can win but um those will be going to the top three winners overall but yeah if you're curious about that and if if you want to grab one you can I want to say big thank you to all of the partners for ZK hack risk zero polygon Labs the ZK podcast is a media partner geometry research who built the puzzles and ZK validator who's doing the prizes we also have our amazing Community sponsors Lambda class Aztec trapdoor

Tech nil Foundation puzzle online Aptos and starware want to say thank you to everyone who came together to help us make this ZK hack 4 event um you'll be seeing a lot of these folks at the job Fair on our finale on our kind of Afterparty final day the job fair just to remind you it's on gather. toown it's this really cool interactive world where you have an avatar we'll be sharing more with links and everything as we get closer to the date but mark your calendars if you're looking for a job or if you just want to come hang out and meet people it's a very kind of cool way to get to know people in a virtual space it's a little bit less intense than jumping on a you know 10 to 15 minute call with someone because you can kind of just like walk

over to their Avatar have the videos pop up say a few words and then meet someone new um we do already have a great batch of jobs over in the jobs board this we're kind of like collecting all of the jobs from teams in the leadup for the job fair but you're you know welcome to already have a peak over there also if you're a team looking to hire you can post yourself as well um that's actually it's it's open to posting I want to say big thank you to the to the ZK hack not podcast the ZK hack team uh Kobe Hector Rachel Gaylord and myself we put this together this time around uh I think you see us all in the chats and maybe on the last day we'll come up and say a few words but

yeah thanks everyone who put this together