The Metapolis event is almost upon us

This is today

The new site has been redesigned to pull users and developers into the Zilliqa ecosystem. Big things are brewing for Zilliqa. #zilliqa #blockchain #ecosystem #developers #investors #fintech #crypto

My holiday message to the #Zilliqa community...

A lot more coming on the #metaverse front from #Zilliqa!

More exciting things are coming!..

Some updates on what we have been up to at Zilliqa lately

In case you've missed this

In the bear market, we must find the courage to buidl linkedin.com/posts/activity-… #Zilliqa

The Zilliqa December newsletter is out and it’s packed with exciting updates

Very glad to be partnering with a global top 10 esports player -- @teamrrqofficial, we’re going to do awesome things together!

I'm thrilled to be joining Eclipse Labs as the CTO. Eclipse occupies a unique position, poised to harness the groundbreaking research emanating from the Ethereum community and blend it with the pragmatic strengths of Solana.

Thanks to the @dba_crypto folks for having us present our vision behind the performance thesis at the Research day in NYC a little while back. Link in the first comment.

We're growing the team at Zilliqa--please apply and encourage your friends to apply

Really great to see the positive community sentiment around some of our recent hires!

Earlier today at the @EBlockchainCon I brought up the challenges and opportunities in #web3. These included preferences for certain programming languages, to strong and consistent NFT trading volumes. We'll be monitoring these trends closely at @zilliqa!

The Research team I have created and lead is no longer part  of Matter labs. It’s one of the most capable and productive teams working on rollup-related problems and blockchain-related research, more broadly. matter-labs.io/research/

The Tezos Foundation recently cancelled a fellowship awarded to my PhD student Daniel Perez, no doubt in connection to his recent work "Revisiting Transactional Statistics of High-scalability Blockchain" that was published at IMC last month.

At @gamescom now and the name of our game has been announced — WEB3WAR! This marks the beginning of our focused play for the gaming space, and we want you to be part of it! Join the WEB3WAR Discord channel to get all the alpha here! discord.gg/web3war

More work on decentralization is coming up

At @Zilliqa, #Web3 and #blockchain gaming continues to be a key area of focus. We see huge potential in this arena over the coming years and the data backs this up. Read our latest research report, “Web3 Gaming in 2022 and Beyond,” to find out more: blog.zilliqa.com/web3-gaming…

Our early work on Mechanism Design for ZK-Rollup Prover Markets is now public; please attend a talk at ZKSummit today arxiv.org/abs/2404.06495

This year I’m turning 50. No, no, it’s certainly not my age — I literally have decades to go until then. It’s my h-index, the most widely used index of academic productivity, that crossed 50 this month: scholar.google.com/citations…

Another very busy week for us at Eclipse Labs, with numerous exciting developments happening behind the scenes. Our chain derivation work is approaching production—a significant milestone as we progress toward meeting Stage-1 rollup requirements from @l2beat. This, along with fraud proofs and our push for decentralized governance, will be crucial for our next development phase. We’ll be sharing updates related to fraud proofs shortly. Additionally, we’re making excellent progress with performance improvements in the validator, particularly in understanding unnecessary contention and increasing parallelism in the validator. As we are expanding our performance team, we find ourselves in daily discussions with exceptional talent — engineers and researchers who bring diverse expertise in networking, operating systems, databases, GPUs, and FPGAs. This broad range of technical knowledge will be invaluable as we continue to build our infrastructure. These efforts are positioning Eclipse for substantial growth and progress we outlined in our roadmap, and on our road towards GigaCompute.

Welcome, RRQ! #Zilliqa

And thanks to the wonderful colleagues at Brave for several productive years together.

thank you :-)

I am very excited to announce that the Eclipse Performance Thesis we've been working on for a little while is finally out! This is where we dig into GSVM and GigaCompute. Please RT for visibility.

Congratulation to the Brave research team and our academic collaborators for having our paper "Improving Web Content Blocking With Event-Loop-Turn Granularity JavaScript Signatures" will be appearing at S&P 2021 @pes10k @kapravel @QuanChe44392259 @brave

Interested in creating privacy-preserving tools for millions worldwide? We are looking to expand the team at @Brave Research in privacy, reliability, security, and systems. Please get in touch with me. For our research see brave.com/research.

It’s surprising how me how popular TEEs are becoming, in part due to the valiant efforts of @socrates1024; I am sharing this work from a while back and just recently written up on applying TEEs to consensus arxiv.org/abs/2408.14099

Another major and exciting performance milestone after speeding up ed25519 — this time, we have authenticated state updates at close to 50M per second, just in time for @EthCC

We are delighted to be sharing the first of a number of performance results we have planned — this one showing that our sigverify implementation can sustain close to 10M TPS

I am personally really excited to see the tremendous progress from our friends at RiscZero. The OP Kailua numbers they cite are very encouraging, and this reported reduction in prooving times gets us significantly closer to blurring the boundary between validity and optimistic rollups, as well as realizing the vision of real-time proving. We're planning to publicize our own numbers for the SVM shortly.

Sharing the analysis we did related to the SVM and Agave validator

Research and crypto teams at Brave have developed the STAR protocol: providing a novel way of ensuring k-anonymity in data collection that emphasizes minimal trust, higher performance, and deployment simplicity, over current approaches arxiv.org/abs/2109.10074 @alxdavids @pes10k

I wanted to share some thoughts about #Devcon2024 -- a week after the event ended, while some of the specific talks and conversations are starting to fade, the massive amount of creative output and experimentation around the Ethereum ecosystem is simply difficult to forget. The rollup space is exploding in terms of the sheer number of projects, and if the estimates of @l2beat are right, there will be dozens more deploying within months. The competition is likely to be stiff, at the level of both compliance with the rollup stages L2beat is clearly set to enforce, but also with attractiveness for dApp builders, ecosystem partners, and of course, end-users. This of course is spurned not only by L2beat but the extreme transparency that comes from data companies like @Dune and @flipsidecrypto, a culture of secure audits, and the keen interest in Ethereum from hundreds of academic researchers. As approaches related to chain abstraction and shared liquidity become more commonly deployed, the expectation will grow even higher, in terms of both performance, security, and robustness — multiple approaches to fraud proofs on the optimistic side and close to a dozen companies building zkVMs or zkVMs are evidence of that. Being poised between the powerful ecosystems of Ethereum and Solana gives Eclipse some key advantages, both in terms of execution, but also in terms of the ability to draw in users from either ecosystem, looking for the best of both worlds. Some of the Rust-focused events at Devcon also highlighted the strength of that community and the value of bringing them to blockchain. The speed with which innovation becomes commoditized in blockchain can only probably be compared to that of generative AI. For instance, there will be expectations to support parallel execution, along with UX-enhancing features such as account and chain abstraction, wallet strategies that rely on SSO or biometrics, etc. We at Eclipse are poised to meet that challenge. Last but not least, a few words about the controversial Beam chain announcement from @drakefjustin of the @ethereum as well. While some predictably complain about how long the timelines are, I am personally quite excited about a zkVM effectively being enshrined at the consensus layer. While this might not be good news for some ZK vendors, this move eventually would open up further possibilities for hybridizing optimistic and ZK-based approaches, beyond, say, applying ZK in the challenge protocol within fraud proofs.

We've put some of the gory details of our authenticated database work on ArXiV: "AlDBaran: Towards Blazingly Fast State Commitments for Blockchains" arxiv.org/abs/2508.10493

Excited to share our latest work — details in the thread; TL;DR is that there is a surprising number of implementation bugs in ZK systems

Finally, if you missed our big announcement from September, get caught up with this from @DecryptMedia. Next year, @Zilliqa will be releasing its own game console, combining our game hub, a hardware wallet and the ability to mine ZIL!

Brave is actively looking for strong Ph.D.-level summer interns, in Europe and US, with a focus on data privacy, security, performance, reliability, and blockchain-related tech. Please see brave.com/careers/?gh_jid=89… for details. DM with questions.

Sharing some of the recent work we did on multidimensional fees

We are revealing our plans to secure Eclipse with the help of fraud proofs -- we have selected ZK fraud proofs and will adapt Kailua to the SVM. This hybrid approach for Eclipse creates opportunities to reduce L1 finality times and possibly even transition to a full validity rollup one day, if ZK proof production becomes affordable enough. This pushes us closer to achieving the stage 1 L2 status—stay tuned for upcoming details on our implementation plans.

This is a pretty low blow from Tezos and one that signifies zero commitment to open and objective academic research – something that other academic researchers should be aware of.

Our paper "SpeedReader: Reader Mode Made Fast and Private" about how to build a fast reader mode will be appearing at WWW 2019 @pes10k @brave

1/10) 🚀 As we push significant updates to our platform docs (docs.eclipse.xyz/) and gear up for the next stage of development, I wanted to reflect on what's ahead for @EclipseLabs! #EclipseLabs #L2

Brave Research | Brave Browser — the Brave research page is now up — please follow this for our latest research output brave.com/research

@danhper is one of the most productive PhD students working on topics related to blockchain and DeFi, with multiple top-tier papers to his name, and, as such, I would like to invite other companies working in this area to fund him--it's not a huge sum to support a PhD student.

We have updated our study of cross-rollup MEV. These opportunities persist, on average, for 10 to 20 blocks. Arbitrage in Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism ranges between 0.03% and 0.05% of the trading volume, while in ZKsync it fluctuates around 0.25%. See arxiv.org/abs/2406.02172

Our paper "New: The Anatomy of a Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Scheme" will appear at Usenix Security 2019 doc.ic.ac.uk/~livshits/paper…

This work is based on our research papers from years ago! It’s really great to see these ideas materializing are Brave.

Our recent work on making circuit development more secure and performant is now out on ArXiV arxiv.org/abs/2405.12115

We are looking for an ML researcher excited about designing and implementing privacy-preserving machine learning techniques at Brave #research #ml #privacy #privateml #openmined brave.com/jobs/?gh_jid=90228…

Brave is actively looking for strong *summer interns* at both the undergraduate and Ph.D. level, in Europe and US, with a focus on security, privacy, performance, reliability, and blockchain-related tech. Please see brave.com/jobs/ for details. Message me with questions.

We have updated our earlier paper analyzing historical aidrops. An analysis of 6 major airdrops reveals a consistent pattern of recipients quickly selling their tokens, suggesting airdrops often can fail to sustain long-term engagement. See arxiv.org/abs/2312.02752 for the numbers

Very excited to see these developments from the folks at Celestia. @Labs_Eclipse is currently the largest namespace (celenium.io/namespaces) that Celestia has, so we are also very keen to be able to benefit from the growth in throughput and blog sizes

Read more about why verification of ZK verifiers is essential eprint.iacr.org/2024/768 @zkproof @ZKNewsletter

And, as a reminder -- we're already receiving a lot of interest, but more is always welcome -- please apply job-boards.greenhouse.io/ecl…

Our recent work that tries to better connect sequencing -- in this case, TimeBoost, and its effects on MEV is now public on ArXiV; tagging a great team consisting of @kakia1989; @robin_ethz; Maria Ines Silva; @EdFelten

Many thanks to the fine folks at Three sigma for highlighting our plans

Some new exciting results on the Brave Research page brave.com/research

Ditto, @andyyy

We are looking for more research engineers, researchers or experienced engineers to help us deliver the best Web3.0 experience in Brave. Enjoy working on protocols and have some experience with Web3 APIs? Please DM me.

Our paper "PERCIVAL: Making In-Browser Perceptual Ad Blocking Practical with Deep Learning" will appear at the Usenix ATC 2020 conference; stay @brave

We at Brave are looking for accomplished researchers in machine learning, security, and performance — please reach out directly — no recruiters, please #machinelearning #security #performance

Please apply:

Our recent work on understanding and refining factors that determine ZK rollup pricing is now on ArXiV arxiv.org/abs/2410.13277. Feedback from prover markets and hardware makers is welcome. @l2beat @gevulot_network @fermah_xyz @Ingo_zk

This is huge!

A very cool analysis of what was happening on @zksync this past weekend with inscriptions

Our paper “ Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Vulnerable Does Not Imply Exploited” willl# appear at the Usenix Security Symposium 2021 and our paper “Revisiting Transactional Statistics of High-scalability Blockchain” will appear at IMC. Congratulations to the students involved!

While I'm no longer at Eclipse Labs, I wanted to reflect on some of the remarkable work recently accomplished. Much of our focus was on achieving technical superiority, particularly on the performance front—made possible by the freedom of L2 innovation 🧵

We're searching for outstanding protocol engineers to join our team. As we grow, we're seeking individuals who bring technical excellence, innovative thinking, and deep experience to our mission. Direct applications only, please - no recruiters - link in the first comment.

We are actively looking for a browser performance researcher to join Brave research

Some of our of work on privacy-preserving ML at Brave is being unveiled today: a practical federated recommender system for implicit data under local differential privacy arxiv.org/abs/2105.03941

Not a paper of mine, but I wanted to highlight it anyway; this comes for a great group at Yale University and concerns some super-timely and exciting topics of application-specific MEV redistribution techniques. Link: arxiv.org/abs/2410.18434

The post from Vitalik about the possibility of switching to RISC-V to the EVM is certainly interesting. I will only highlight two opinions that are, I think fairly representative.

Joint us at Brave London next Tuesday for this exciting meetup @brave @openminedorg

The Rust developer community is vast, numbering in the millions globally. Yet only a small fraction of these talented engineers are currently working within the blockchain space. Attracting more of these Rust developers to @EclipseFND presents one of our biggest opportunities to enable vibrant, long-term growth for our ecosystem. Fortunately, this push is well-aligned with the growing popularity and adoption of the Rust programming language. We are poised to capitalize on this momentum and onboard some of the most capable developers. By making Eclipse an attractive destination for Rust developers, we can harness their expertise to drive technical innovation, build robust infrastructure, and ultimately, accelerate the global relevance of our technology. Tapping into this deep well of Rust talent will be a key strategic priority as we work to expand the reach and capabilities of our ecosystem. The opportunity before us is clear. With Rust’s rising popularity and the currently underserved blockchain segment of its developer community, we are uniquely positioned to bring these highly capable engineers into the fold. Seizing this chance will be instrumental in shaping Eclipse’s long-term trajectory and fortifying our position as a leader in the decentralized technology space.

It’s not just the client: Having a high-performance DA is of supreme importance. Sharing some thoughts on the current DA providers and looking forward to even more high-performance options developing over time.

zkTLS represents a promising avenue for ZK technology to achieve widespread adoption. The innovation in this space is particularly exciting, with notable developments from teams like @reclaimprotocol -- whom I had an engaging conversation with at Devcon — and Brave's recent work on TLS 1.3 zero-knowledge-based attestation (link below). These advancements suggest that zkTLS could be a transformative approach to enhancing privacy and security in network communications. The potential of zkTLS lies in its ability to provide cryptographic proof of certain network interactions without revealing sensitive details, which could revolutionize how we approach online privacy and data verification. By enabling secure, verifiable communications without compromising confidential information, this technology could bridge critical gaps in current internet communication protocols.

Solana SPL vs. Ethereum ERC-20 standards

We would be delighted to have more teams participating in our RFC&C event! CC: @JoelKatz @jedmccaleb @Stan_Kladko @IOHK_Charles brave.com/themis-rfcc/

While some keep arguing about the pros and cons, why not combine the best of both? #ecllpseFND

CC: @ UniswapProtocol @compoundfinance @CurveFinance @chainlink @AaveAave @Algorand @solana

This presentation by the Hardhat team illuminates crucial differences between L2s and Ethereum mainnet that extend far beyond just pre-compiles and gas variations. Developers often encounter subtle incompatibilities post-deployment due to these nuanced distinctions. The comparative analysis of opcode behavior across chains, accessible at evmdiff.com/features?feature…, offers particularly valuable insights. Furthermore, relying solely on L1 tools for L2 development creates a deceptive sense of security. While passing unit tests remains necessary, it's insufficient for ensuring L2 compatibility. The Ethereum Development Runtime addresses this challenge by enabling precise L2 behavior simulation, offering tool builders a robust foundation. EDR effectively tackles a significant form of rollup fragmentation within the EVM ecosystem, filling a critical gap in the development toolkit.

Our work on wallet privacy issues in Web 3.0 and DeFi is now on Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2109.06836

More on Solana fee markets

The advantages of ZK-based fraud proofs are clear and they're becoming a much more common choice now with the help of @RiscZero's Kailua. To summarize what we earlier talked about in a blog post some months back, eclipselabs.io/blogs/fraud-p…, the core advantage of ZK fraud proofs lies in their ability to streamline dispute resolution and enhance rollup flexibility. This is evident in three key areas:

Among many other elements of the ecosystem, the speed of RPC access and support for high-integrity components, such as light clients is key. Of course, this is not easy in a GigaScale context of Eclipse.

Digging more into L2 data, our recent research shows that AMM liquidity pools on Ethereum are oversubscribed, underperforming pools on L2s—and even staking ETH. Please see the ArXiV link for more arxiv.org/abs/2410.10324.

This talk by @shemnon from EthDenver last year gives a comprehensive look at the parallelism options, beyond the usual dichotomy of declarative parallelism of Solana and the optimisic approach of Block-STM used by Aptos and OCC used by Monad. One of the observations is that ahead-of-time access lists - both the way they’re proposed in Ethereum (TALs) and the way they’re supported in Solana can be a mixed blessing, with the burden of declaration passed onto the developer with somewhat mixed performance results compared to optimistic approaches. The idea of delta writes is probably appropriate for contexts other than just transfers, which is a nice way to increase transaction commutativity and to reduce the de-facto contention.

This week we are sharing more details related to fast state commitment computation

that's not how grants work

We are also considering a cross-company research foundation where the broader community can benefit, with multiple parities, such as rollups and foundations supporting it.

Presenting this Wednesday at the Ethereum London meetup ⁦@ethereum⁩ ⁦@imperialcollege⁩ ⁦@brave⁩ meetup.com/ethereum/events/2…

Despite originating during Ethereum's Proof-of-Work era, RainBlock remains a seminal paper whose core innovations continue to influence blockchain architecture today. Some of its most enduring contributions are moving I/O operations away from the critical path, sharding the state, and its sophisticated prefetching mechanisms that minimize direct storage access. RainBlock achieves impressive results, demonstrating a remarkable 20-fold improvement in throughput. While the paper covers extensive ground, these particular optimizations stand out for their continued relevance to modern blockchain systems.

Thanks, @BrendanEich — it’s been an honor to work with you all!

We are actively looking for Chromium engineers to work with us at Brave - please DM

This is a nice summary of the work we did with @nethermind on verifying ZK verifiers. In zero-knowledge systems, the verifier plays a critical role in validating proofs generated by the prover. However, this pivotal component carries immense responsibility: a single flaw can potentially compromise the entire system's security and integrity. The core challenge lies in verifying the verifier itself—ensuring its own correctness and reliability. Rigorous approaches like formal verification and comprehensive auditing become essential, providing a methodical way to confirm that the verifier's code functions precisely as intended, without vulnerabilities or unexpected behaviors.