And it's a wrap!
What a great week we all had at the Antalpha hacker house for EthDenver, focused on ZKML projects. Out of 60+ applicants, 9 hackers were selected to form different teams and participate in the hackathon.
During these 2 weeks, many events and technical meetings were organized with top-quality teams, including:
Scroll is a zkEVM-based zkRollup on Ethereum that enables native compatibility for existing Ethereum applications and tools.
Aztec is developing a next-generation encrypted blockchain secured by Ethereum, and Noir is Aztec's Rust-based privacy programming language, enabling the development of zero-knowledge circuits.
EZKL is a library and command-line tool for doing inference for deep learning models and other computational graphs in a zk-snark.
Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3.
Holonym is a zero-knowledge privacy protocol.
Alchemy Pay bridges fiat and crypto global economies through its real-world payment network and direct access to Web3 services via its Ramp Solution.
Demo Day
Additionally, a great demo day was organized to present the projects that have been built during or by past hackers of Antalpha Hacker Houses.
Kakarot presented by @Danilo
Kakarot is an Ethereum Virtual Machine written in Cairo. It means it can be deployed on StarkNet, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, and run an EVM byte-code program.
Hence, Kakarot can be used to run Ethereum smart contracts on StarkNet. Kakarot is the super saiyan ZK-EVM.
Hunter Z Hunter presented by @Danilo & @LanceDavis
A scavenger hunt game enabled by transforming an image recognition machine learning model into a zero-knowledge circuit using EZKL. User search for an object that has been per-stored snap a picture of an item to generate a proof. If the proof verifier ( By the AI model on chain ) prize money is directly sent to your wallet. One of the first occurrences of high computation AI on chain. The future is now open
Git3
A web3 decentralized implementation of Git. Enabling any user to store their code on chain using a CLI interface.
Web3 MQ
Fastest Social Layer1 & Messaging Network. Open source, Encrypted, Web3 Native. SwapChat is our cross-platform chat dApp based on Web3MQ protocol.
Atomiclinks by @chmilevfa
Quickly link web3 contracts to web2 apps and build simple workflows or powerful campaigns and products. For web3 marketers, operators, engineers.
zkLottery
The fairest fully on-chain lottery that ensures all participants have equal winning opportunities. It further protects privacy of participants and winners powered by ZKP technology.
Owlando
Owlando is a Progressive UGC Metaverse 3D Social Metaverse Built By Users.
BTS
During these weeks, some interesting and exciting things happened, but one story in particular shook the house. Our goal was to transform a machine learning image recognition model into a zero-knowledge circuit, which would enable us to put AI on-chain through optimization. However, our first verifier was **5mb and 109,000 lines of solidity!** This was a problem, as the limited size for an Ethereum smart contract is 24kb, so we had a lot of optimization to do.
We first started by fine-tuning the parameters. This involved learning how Halo2 lookup tables work and making changes from there. We increased our KZG commitment size to 2^26, compared to starting with 2^17. This was because we needed a larger proof commitment to decrease the size of our verifier. We then set the maximum number of rotations to 512 so that the number of rows would be smaller. Our biggest obstacle was the quantization process to define neural networks as zero knowledge proofs. This technology is still new, and we plan on contributing further.
But we made it! After days and sleepless nights of trial and error, we managed to reduce the verifier size to under 24kb, enabling us to deploy our Artificial Intelligence verifier on-chain. It was a rough ride, but in the end, we were filled with joy, smiles, and a sense of accomplishment for a job well done.
We finished the week by participating in the ETH Denver hackathon in the Infrastructure course. Unfortunately our project was not selected in the last 15 finalists but we know that the work that we had done was great, that we would come back stronger and that we just had opened the doors to the future of blockchain and artificial intelligence technology.
During the last two weeks, we have seen the creation of many beautiful things, such as projects, opportunities, and potential companies. We have also formed friendships that I hope will last a lifetime. Many hackers have already planned to attend the next Antalpha hacker houses to hack together again. This hacker house will be remembered and is the kick-start for the bright future of ZKML. Let's build!
Excited by what you just read and want to be part of the next one?!
Whats Next?
Two new hacker houses are being prepared in Thailand 🇹🇭 and Japan 🇯🇵, you can find all the relevant informations here:
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Link for Chang Mai, Thailand 🇹🇭 08th April 2023 - 29th April 2023 (3 Weeks)
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Link for Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵 09th April 2023 - 17th April 2023 (1.5 Week)
Thanks to the support and contributions of each and every member of this house and obviously Antalpha and their great team that made sure that the hackers had an amazing time!
Come join us, hope to see you in the next one and let’s build! 😉
Written by: @phklive - Paul-Henry Kajfasz